A Year With George Washington
February 5th, 1777 – General Washington writes to John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, from his headquarters at Morristown, New Jersey.
When one reads the contents of the letter, one cannot help but be struck by the sheer magnitude of the daily travails with which Washington must wrestle. In this one missive, he addresses no less than a dozen monumental challenges directly impacting his army and his ability to prosecute the war.
Washington begins the letter by addressing a petition forwarded to him regarding the appointment of a French businessman, Christophe Pèllissiers, to the post of Principal Engineer at Fort Ticonderoga. Monsieur Pèllissiers, in addition to the post, wishes to be promoted and be granted a “Company of Pioneers” to aid him in his endeavors. Washington, unfamiliar with the Frenchman and starved for personnel, adopts a more deliberate, more equitable approach to forming a Corps of Engineers.
In the next paragraph, Washington informs Hancock of his neglecting to mention the appointment of Captain Nathaniel Gist of Virginia to the command of a regiment to be raised in southern Virginia and the Carolinas. Roughly the same age as Washington, Gist had served with him in the French and Indian War and was the son of Washington’s good friend Christopher Gist.
All Americans should be eternally grateful to the elder Gist, as he saved the life of young George Washington, not once but twice. Christopher Gist was a frontiersman who served as a guide to Washington on his mission to deliver a demand from Virginia’s Royal Governor Dinwiddie that the French vacate the Ohio Country.
Washington informs Hancock that he has directed Gist, who, like his father, is frontier-savvy, to raise two companies of Cherokee Indians, owing to their being excellent scouts. The calculating coldness of war is revealed in his secondary reasoning as he states that they could be used as hostages if the need arises to “secure the good behavior of their nation.”
The letter continues with Washington addressing such diverse and complicated concerns of militia integration into the main army, the murder of an American officer, foraging for supplies, troop movements, a smallpox epidemic, and the plan to inoculate new recruits in advance of their deployment into the main army, cowardice in the face of the enemy by a field commander, his ongoing correspondence with British Commander-in-Chief Sir William Howe related to the treatment of American prisoners of war and the fate of captured General Charles Lee, and his belief in the efficacy of requiring Oaths of Allegience from the populace to firm up their resolve and thus hamper the enemy. Just contemplating the list of problems Washington faced is exhausting.
Each of these things, if addressed singly, is Herculean in scope, but to have to grapple with them all at once while short on food, supplies, and beset with disgruntled officers and politicians bent on his removal, makes one question how one man could endure so much at one time.
The answer is that one man could, in fact, bear the numerous burdens above – if his name was George Washington.
