For all the favorable assessments, Washington, as a newcomer from Virginia, confronted pervasive Yankee suspicions, and he, in turn, was inwardly revolted by the alien world he surveyed daily in Cambridge. With little tolerance for error and scant patience for disorder, he was surrounded by an unruly, vociferous mass of men who didn’t take well to orders. At this point, he never dreamed that these shabby men would someday show prodigious courage or that he would grow to love them. Soon he squawked to his brother Sam that he had “found a numerous army of provincials under very little command, discipline, or order.”¹⁰ Two months later, a shrill note entering his letter, he protested to John Hancock that “licentious-ness and every kind of disorder triumphantly reign.”¹¹ Two people seemed to coexist inside George Washington’s breast. One was the political militant who mouthed republican slogans; this Washington thought his troops would fight better if motivated by patriotic ideals. The other, schooled in the British military system, believed devoutly in top-down discipline and rank as necessary to a well-run army. This Washington was also the Virginia planter who felt little in common with the scruffy plebeians around him.

Washington expressed dismay that many New England militias elected their own officers, choosing farmers, artisans, or storekeepers. It bothered him that egalitarian officers fraternized with their men, joined them in line for food, and even gave them shaves. In disbelief, he wrote to one Virginian that the Massachusetts officers “are nearly of the same kidney with the privates.”¹² To Patrick Henry, Washington worried aloud about “the soldier and officer being too nearly on a level. Discipline and subordination add life and vigor to military movements.”¹³ In part, Washington had an old-fashioned faith in military hierarchy as likely to produce the most efficient army. He often evinced a partiality for wellborn officers, as if he wanted to transfer the hierarchy of civilian life intact into the army. As he once observed about choosing officers, “The first rule . . . is to determine whether the candidate is truly a gentleman, whether he has a genuine sense of honor and a reputation to risk.”¹⁴ At one point, while arguing for better pay for officers, Washington warned John Hancock that only such a move would “induce gentlemen and men of character to engage and till the bulk of your officers are composed of such persons . . . you have little to expect of them.”¹⁵ However much Washington theoretically preferred having his social peers as fellow officers, however, he would compile an outstanding record of advancing officers who lacked such pedigrees.

During his first month in Cambridge, to differentiate the army’s upper echelons, Washington ordered field officers to sport red or pink cockades in their hats, captains yellow or buff, and subordinate officers green. It upset Washington when sentinels stopped generals because they didn’t recognize them. He decreed a light blue sash for himself, a pink one for major and brigadier generals, and a green one for his aides-de-camp. It says much about Washington’s evolution during the war that he emphasized these distinctions much less as the war progressed. “His uniform is exactly like that of his soldiers,” a French officer noted four years later. “Formerly, on solemn occasions, that is to say on days of battle, he wore a large blue sash, but he has given up that unrepublican distinction.”¹⁶

Even as he introduced distinctions between officers and their men, he struggled to obliterate differences among the states to forge a national army. When he arrived in Cambridge, there was no army as such, only a mosaic of New England militias, wearing a medley of homemade hats, shoes, and other clothing. A fervent nationalist, Washington wanted to eliminate regiments based on geography at a time when militias were identified with states—a visionary suggestion that was promptly rejected. As he later wrote, “In the early stages of this war, I used every means in my power to destroy all kind of state distinctions and labored to have every part and parcel of the army considered as continental.”¹⁷ Because of a shortage of wool, once imported from Great Britain, Washington planned to issue ten thousand linen hunting shirts, such as those used in the French and Indian War, creating a makeshift national uniform. But there wasn’t enough tow cloth, and he had to settle for the motley array of costumes worn by state militias. Washington also argued futilely that the Congress should appoint officers instead of provisional governments. This proposal was vetoed since it clashed with republican ideology, which romanticized militias as superior to standing armies, a dilemma that was to bedevil him throughout the war.

Nobody would have found the camp’s vile sanitary conditions more repellent than did the fastidious Washington. The open latrines emitted a potent stench, and it was a challenge to coax soldiers into using them. One orderly book complained that they left “excrement about the fields perniciously.”¹⁸ Having experienced firsthand the epidemics that can decimate armies, Washington urged officers to keep their men clean, tend their latrines, and forbid fishing in freshwater ponds, “as there may be danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.”¹⁹ Washington must also have recoiled at the queer collection of improvised tents. Of these outlandish dwellings, the Reverend William Emerson said, “Some are made of boards, some of sail-cloth, and some partly of one and partly of the other. Others are made of stone and turf and others again of birch and other brush . . . others are curiously wrought with doors and windows done with wreaths . . . in the manner of a basket.”²⁰ The troops lacked running water, and their filthy, tattered appearance excited disgust among onlookers, causing Loyalist Benjamin Thompson to say that Washington’s army was “the most wretchedly clothed, and as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier.”²¹ Some men were half naked, their clothing having been slashed at Bunker Hill. Small wonder that Washington groaned that his life was “one continued round of annoyance and fatigue.”²²

Maintaining unity among the men proved a perpetual struggle. In late July the New England troops were startled by the arrival of a rustic contingent of Virginia riflemen, led by Captain Daniel Morgan, who had trudged six hundred miles to join the fray. The rifles they carried were longer than muskets and could be fired with far more accuracy, but they took longer to load in combat. Army cook Israel Trask remembered how soldiers from Marblehead, Massachusetts, outfitted in round jackets and fishermen’s trousers, derided the Virginians with their fringed linen shirts, leggings, and tomahawks. Months later, on a snowy day, as the Virginians toured Harvard College, the Marblehead soldiers began to taunt and toss snowballs at them. Before too long, said Trask,

a fierce struggle commenced with biting and gouging on the one part, and knockdown on the other part with as much apparent fury as the most deadly enemy could create. Reinforced by their friends, in less than five minutes, more than a thousand combatants were on the field, struggling for the mastery. At this juncture General Washington made his appearance, whether by accident or design I never knew. I only saw him and his colored servant [Billy Lee], both mounted. With the spring of a deer, he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee, with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternately shaking and talking to them. In this position the eye of the belligerents caught sight of the general. Its effect on them was instantaneous flight at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict. Less than fifteen minutes time had elapsed from the commencement of the row before the general and his two criminals were the only occupants of the field of action. Here bloodshed, imprisonment, trials by court-martial were happily prevented and hostile feelings between the different corps of the army extinguished by the physical and mental energies timely exerted by one individual.²³