Washington [53]
During this humiliating period, Washington often felt helpless in dealing with his men. Despite being threatened with punishment, more than a quarter of new recruits deserted, and Washington’s personal grievances fueled his rage at them. When a thousand lashes didn’t stop the desertions, he upped the penalty to a draconian fifteen hundred lashes. The historian Fred Anderson has estimated that Washington administered an average of six hundred lashes in each flogging, putting him on a par with his most severe British counterparts.43 With icy determination, he even constructed a gibbet tall enough to instill terror in anybody contemplating desertion. “I have a gallows near 40 feet high erected (which has terrified the rest exceedingly) and I am determined . . . to hang two or three on it as an example to others,” he informed one officer.44
That summer Washington decided to hang fourteen men for desertion. Fortunately, even as a young man he never acted heedlessly, and he gave way to second thoughts. Knowing his own nature, he let his temper cool. In the end, he pardoned twelve of the men—they had been kept “in a dark room, closely ironed”—and executed only two repeat offenders. “Your honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them,” Washington told Dinwiddie. “It conveyed much terror to others and it was for example[’s] sake we did it.”45 It should be noted that, while Washington didn’t balk at naked terror, he had already warned that recidivists would be hanged.
Throughout the summer Washington grew quarrelsome in correspondence with Dinwiddie, believing that his former patron was now hostile to him and opposed the regular commission he pursued. Indeed, Dinwiddie’s letters were often carping and demeaning in tone. The young officer felt at the mercy of an incompetent governor, who for his part felt powerless in dealing with Lord Loudoun and arbitrary instructions from London. The experience gave Washington new insight into the problem of being ruled by people overseas who were ignorant of local conditions.
He ventilated his dismay to his admirer, Speaker Robinson: “I am convinced it would give pleasure to the governor to hear that I was involved in trouble, however undeservedly.”46 Dinwiddie must have heard that Washington was talking behind his back, because he scolded him that September. “My conduct to yo[u] from the beginning was always friendly, but you know I had g[rea]t reason to suspect yo[u] of ingratitude, which, I’m convinced, your own conscience and reflection must allow I had reason to be angry. But this I endeavor to forget.”47 The reason that Dinwiddie endeavored to forget was that he was now ailing and had decided to return to England. Washington responded to his accusation with hot-tempered indignation: “I do not know that I ever gave your Honor cause to suspect me of ingratitude, a crime I detest, and would most carefully avoid.”48 In the younger man’s view, he was merely guilty of speaking openly about policy errors imposed by the governor. The correspondence with Dinwiddie degenerated into petty bickering. When Washington asked for a leave of absence to visit Williamsburg, Dinwiddie scoffed that he had already been indulged with too many leaves. Washington returned a stinging retort: “It was not to enjoy a party of pleasure I wanted [a] leave of absence.”49 Washington lost his other principal backer that September when Colonel Fairfax died and he made the melancholy journey to Belvoir to attend the funeral.
DOUBTLESS DISTURBING HIM that fall was a recurrence of the “bloody flux,” or dysentery, which had started around midsummer. The symptoms stole upon Washington so gradually that he functioned more or less