“From the moment he had taken command of the American forces in July 1775, he had been greeted with a torrent of adulation.”

By David A Bell

IN THE FALL of 1776, it looked as if the United States of America would not survive to its first birthday.

Just a few months before, during the intoxicating, independence-declaring days of early July, the military situation had seemed favourable. The recently formed Continental Army had forced the British to withdraw from Boston, leaving nearly all the new nation free of enemy occupation.

But then, in August, the inexperienced Continentals faced seasoned British regulars for the first time in a large-scale battle in Brooklyn. The American commanders first mistook the British attack there for a feint and failed to commit sufficient troops. They then let the British outflank them, and a large number of the American soldiers panicked and ran as soon as the first shots rang out. The result was a calamitous defeat. The Americans retreated across the East River to Manhattan and then, over the next weeks and months, retreated farther: across the Hudson to New Jersey, then across the Delaware to Pennsylvania. The British occupied New York, the strategically located second-largest American city, taking thousands of American prisoners as they did so.

As other soldiers reached the end of their enlistments or simply gave up and left for home, the American forces dwindled to just 10 per cent of their summertime strength. Already in late September the American commander-in-chief told a cousin, “I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.”

By late November, a British lieutenant was boasting to a Boston loyalist, “Their army is broken all to pieces . . . I think one may venture to pronounce that it is well nigh over with them.”

In December, Thomas Paine put out the first issue of The American Crisis, which opened with the famous words “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Devotees of Shakespeare—a category that included most of the American leadership at the time—might well have thought back to Henry V’s description of his army on the eve of Agincourt: “Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide.”

In these desperate circumstances, some on the American side were quick to blame the men in charge of military operations. John Adams, who chaired the committee of the Continental Congress overseeing the army, bitterly quipped to his wife in October that “in general, our generals were out-generalled.”

From within the top ranks of the armed forces, the sharpest criticisms landed on the carefully powdered head of one man in particular. Five days after the last American troops fled across the Hudson to Fort Lee in November, Adjutant General Joseph Reed wrote to General Charles Lee, portraying their commander in chief in scathing terms: “Oh! [. . .]—an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an army.”

Lee replied that he shared this opinion and then in December put an even harsher appraisal into a letter to General Horatio Gates: “Entre nous,” he wrote, “a certain great man is most damnably deficient . . . Unless something which I do not expect turns up we are lost.”

One might assume that these accusatory sentiments were widely shared. Few societies have much tolerance for military failure, and just within the previous 20 years a British admiral and a French general had both earned death sentences for the unpardonable crimes of losing major engagements. General Lee might reasonably have expected himself to float upward on a tide of public anger that would simultaneously engulf the man apparently responsible for the American reverses: George Washington.

Instead, something remarkable took place. Despite the scale and severity of the reverses, Washington’s reputation in the general public suffered no harm—to the contrary, it flourished. From the moment he had taken command of the American forces in July 1775, he had been greeted with a torrent of adulation. Ships were named for him and his wife—at least 15 by the end of 1776—and so were six towns, starting with Washington, Massachusetts. Children were given his name, while thousands of copies of printed portraits circulated. His face even appeared on handkerchiefs widely advertised in the newspapers. Harvard gave Washington an honorary degree, and when he arrived in New York in the spring of 1776, more people turned out to see him than had ever gathered together in the city. Poets and songwriters competed to sound his praises. Already in 1775 Jonathan Mitchell Sewall had composed verses, to be sung to the tune of The British Grenadiers, whose chorus ended with praise for “glorious Washington,” “conquering Washington,” “great Washington,” even “God-like Washington.” Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved African-American poet, hailed Washington with words that would make him distinctly uneasy, by seeming to promise him a monarchy:

“Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side, Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.

A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.”

In mid-1776, a New Jersey family rewrote the anthem “God Save the King” with the words “God Save great Washington . . . God damn the King!”

The works praising Washington enjoyed great popularity, and the calamities of 1776 did nothing to stem the flood. The desperate autumn of that year saw the publication of yet more adoring poetry, expressions of support, portraits, and a play called The Fall of British Tyranny, which featured Washington as a lead character. Written by a well-to-do Philadelphian named John Leacock and performed at various times during the next decade, the play contrasted heroic, masculine Americans to effete and ineffectual British officers and ended with Washington solemnly proclaiming, “I have drawn my sword, and never will I sheathe it, till America is free, or I’m no more.”

Even as the defeated and depleted Continental Army withdrew across New Jersey, American newspapers do not seem to have published a single line of serious criticism of Washington—certainly nothing to compare with the complaints privately voiced by Adams, Reed, and Lee. No other general in the army received anything like this degree of attention and praise.

Then American fortunes recovered, and the waves of praise became a tsunami.

At the start of the winter, Washington carried out his famous crossing of the Delaware River, and in a surprise Christmas-Day attack the Continental Army overcame a garrison of Hessian mercenaries in Trenton. Nine days later he defeated a divided British force at Princeton. Within days, newspapers across the country were hailing the glorious victories and delivering hyperbolic paeans to (as one anonymous Philadelphia poet put it) “the immortal Washington” who could “rise a hero, and . . . tower a God.” A Virginian author proudly compared Washington favorably to the greatest heroes of the Roman Republic and named him the “deliverer and guardian genius” of America. A member of Congress, in a private letter, called him “the greatest man on earth.” By mid-February, the delegate and poet Francis Hopkinson could write:

“The title of Excellency is applied [to Washington] with the greatest propriety . . . If there are spots in his character they are like the spots in the sun; only discernable by the magnifying powers of a telescope. Had he lived in the days of idolatry, he had been worshipped as a god. One age cannot do justice to his merit.”

At first glance, much of this praise seems to belong to an earlier, religious era of charisma. Continuities from this earlier era certainly existed—not surprisingly, given the strength of Protestant belief in colonies initially settled in many cases by fervent religious refugees, and following the first Great Awakening. But the language itself suggests the limits to these continuities. When authors described Washington as a “god” or “savior,” they, of course, were not speaking literally. It would have been blasphemous to do so. They saw his status as analogous to, rather than actually, divine. Acolytes of Oliver Cromwell in mid-17th-century England rarely described their idol in such terms, although they had believed quite literally in his divine mission. And praise for Washington as a classical hero reborn was just as common.

Washington would not always remain on top of Olympus, venerated like an idol. During the years of his presidency and the birth of a party politics that could rival or even exceed that of our own day in its viciousness, squawks of criticism threatened to drown out the hallelujahs, de- spite Washington’s extraordinary reputation. But for many years after 1776, the chorus of praise would continue to swell. After Washington’s retirement from the presidency in 1797 and his death in 1799, it would become deafening. But the basic pattern was already set in 1776—and this fact is somewhat puzzling.

David A. Bell is the author of Men on Horseback: The  Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, from which the above article is excerpted. The Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University, he is the author of several other books, including The First Total War and Shadows of Revolution.