Washington [310]
In late August Congress summoned Washington to its temporary home in Princeton, New Jersey. The legislature had temporarily been banished there after mutinous troops from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, brandishing weapons, had stormed into Philadelphia and demanded back pay. Washington briefly postponed the trip to Princeton because Martha was “exceedingly unwell” and he didn’t wish to leave her behind.39 When they finally made the journey, they resided at a farmhouse in Rocky Hill, a few miles outside Princeton, where Washington planned to stay until the definitive peace treaty arrived.
This restful time for Washington peeled away layers of tension built up during the stressful war years. One day he threw a dinner for Congress in a grand trophy of the war, a capacious tent captured from the British, and his guests delighted in his newfound calm. “The general’s front is uncommonly open and pleasant,” said David Howell of Rhode Island. “The contracted, pensive phiz [face], betokening deep thought and much care . . . is done away, and a pleasant smile and sparkling vivacity of wit and humor succeeds.”40 This dinner afforded rare vignettes of Washington succumbing to a merry mood. When the president of Congress regretted that Robert Morris had his hands full, Washington retorted, “I wish he had his pockets full.”41
Congress needed to discuss with Washington military arrangements for the postwar period. Doubtless with Yorktown in mind, when only the French possessed the requisite skills for a siege, he endorsed the creation of a military academy to train engineers as well as artillery officers. Following up on his “Circular to State Governments,” he outlined plans for a “national militia” made up of individual state units guided by consistent national standards. And worried that the United States would be vulnerable if it disarmed too quickly, he favored a peacetime army of 2,631 men. Most of all, he approved the creation of a navy that could repel European intruders. Washington also sounded out Henry Knox on whether Knox might take the post of secretary at war, showing that, despite his professions of retreating from public life, Washington was still prepared to intervene directly in the country’s future affairs.
During his stay at Rocky Hill, Washington learned that Thomas Paine was in the neighborhood and invited him for a chat with a gracious note. Paine was a difficult man, even something of a malcontent, and although Congress had offered him a job as official historian of the American Revolution, he preferred to chide it for “continued neglect” of his services.42 Congress decided that individual states should reward him instead, and Washington agreed to lobby friends in the Virginia legislature on his behalf. “That his Common Sense and many of his Crisis [essays] were well timed and had a happy effect upon the public mind, none, I believe . . . will deny,” Washington wrote. “Does not common justice then point to some compensation?” 43 Although Paine eventually received a large honorarium from Congress and ample property from New York, he continued to nurse grievances about his treatment and would later lash out at his erstwhile hero.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Cincinnatus
THE PEACE NEGOTIATIONS IN PARIS were hampered by an array of baffling issues, not the least of which was the contentious question of fishing rights off the Newfoundland coast. As John Adams recalled wearily, the sessions droned on in “a constant scuffle morning, noon, and night about cod and haddock on the Grand Bank, deerskins on the Ohio, and pine trees at Penobscot, and what were worse than all the [Loyalist] refugees.”1 Although the final treaty was signed on September 3, 1783, the news was delayed for two months by transatlantic travel, and Washington didn’t find out indisputably that the war had ceased until November 1. To his horror, Congress promptly adjourned without making adequate provision for the peacetime army or overdue pay for his long-suffering men.
A virtuoso of farewell messages, Washington disseminated