The Power of the Herd. Linda Kohanov
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and enjoying the fruits of victory, including, eventually, his own freedom. Revolutionary War veterans visiting Mount Vernon often stopped by to reminisce with Lee, who was, in later years, disabled by a serious knee injury and fitted with a brace. While the formerly spirited, athletic man dealt with the physical and emotional pain through increasing alcoholism, his contribution was never forgotten. Washington’s will provided him a stipend of thirty dollars a year and the option of remaining at Mount Vernon if he chose. Billy Lee lived the rest of his life as a free man on his former master’s lush estate.
Washington’s expanded view of human dignity and potential did not weaken his resolve to get the job done, however. High-born dilettantes who entered the war to make a name for themselves were given several chances to prove their worthiness — and unceremoniously relieved if they showed up lacking. This, of course, made Washington a controversial character at times, costing him considerable popularity among certain members of the upper classes. Still, he had no qualms about dismissing General Charles Lee (who had friends in high places and an inflated sense of his own importance) after the Monmouth Court House incident. Further acts of insubordination led to Lee’s court-martial — and a certain amount of trouble for Washington to enforce it. Still, he managed to amass and train a multiracial, multicultural force of soldiers with the sheer nerve to achieve the impossible. Long before he ever took office, America’s first president demonstrated, daily, the practical benefits of equality. It’s doubtful he would have won the high-stakes War of Independence without such a radical sense of it.
Policy of Humanity
Of all the miraculous feats Washington performed during the war, surviving it was certainly one of them (considering his willingness to plunge headlong into the thick of battle, let alone lead such a seemingly lost cause to begin with). Even so, his ability to inspire others to transcend justified, deeply ingrained human impulses stands out as his greatest achievement. Hoping to quash any signs of rebellion, British soldiers had been systematically traumatizing the entire country, creating opportunities for the more sadistic members of their ranks to exercise their darkest instincts. King George’s edict to provide “no quarter” to American troops must have been hard for some of his own men to stomach, however: Regulars and mercenaries were severely punished if they showed mercy to surrendering revolutionaries. Most colonial soldiers were killed on the spot as a result, though some were tortured, starved, and mistreated aboard prison ships.
Washington’s troops, then, had good reason to exact revenge when the opportunity arose. Yet with the first major American victory came a wholly unexpected demand they do the exact opposite. Washington not only spared the lives of a thousand Hessians captured during the Battle of Trenton, he literally marched them toward the promise of a new life. “Treat them with humanity,” he wrote in orders handed down to all his officers, “and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren. . . . Provide everything necessary for them on the road.”
Through this extraordinary, thoroughly unprecedented move, Washington instilled tremendous self-control, and more than a hint of compassion, in his men. As James Parrish Hodges observed in Beyond the Cherry Tree: The Leadership Wisdom of George Washington, his reasons were both practical and idealistic. By introducing what John Adams later called a “policy of humanity,” Washington was protecting his own soldiers, hoping the British might reciprocate in future altercations, if only to trade colonial troops for valued officers. He also correctly assumed that some of the Hessians might desert their cruel taskmasters and join the American cause. To encourage them, he “marched the prisoners through the German villages in Pennsylvania so they could see how prosperous their former countrymen were.” Over time, Congress officially recognized the respectful treatment of enemy combatants as a strategic advantage that also exemplified the goals of the American Revolution.
“We were fighting for the rights of ordinary people,” Hodges emphasized. By showing mercy when the British insisted on giving no quarter to his own troops, Washington set an example for the world, manifesting a new dream, a new way of being. The experience of the ideal profoundly affected his very first prisoners of war. Hodges reports that “about 40 percent of the Hessians stayed outright or went back to Germany, got their families, and came back over.” As a result, Washington’s eloquence of action demonstrated what Abraham Lincoln later so eloquently described in words: “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.”
British leaders eventually conceded the negative effects of their own institutionalized cruelty. In 1778, Colonel Charles Stuart wrote to his father, the Earl of Bute: “Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observed in a 2005 Los Angeles Times editorial:
In the end, our founding fathers not only protected our national values, they defeated a militarily superior enemy. Indeed, it was their disciplined adherence to those values that helped them win a hopeless struggle against the best soldiers in Europe.
In accordance with this proud American tradition, President Lincoln instituted the first formal code of conduct for the humane treatment of prisoners of war in 1863. Lincoln’s order forbade any form of torture or cruelty, and it became the model for the 1929 Geneva Convention. Dwight Eisenhower made a point to guarantee exemplary treatment to German POWs in World War II, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered application of the Geneva Convention during the Korean War, even though the U.S. was not yet a signatory. In the Vietnam War, the United States extended the convention’s protection to Viet Cong prisoners even though the law did not technically require it.
The very fact that Kennedy had to write an article opposing torture in the twenty-first century shows how easy it is for people to slide back into old habits. But if scenes of American soldiers waterboarding suspected terrorists and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners would have saddened Washington, recent acts of corporate greed would have inflamed his legendary temper. After all, when you consider that Washington fought the entire Revolutionary War as a volunteer — and I mean he literally did not collect a salary during the eight years he dodged artillery fire on horseback and begged for funds to feed and clothe his soldiers — well, you begin to understand how rarely the entrepreneurs and politicians who most profited from his efforts have bothered to follow his example.
And it is here, curiously enough, that Washington’s long and varied career offers yet another revolutionary example, one of hope that people can actively change their ways despite aggressive personality traits and egregious past transgressions. In this respect, his horses may have provided the ultimate nonverbal education in the counterintuitive benefits of nonpredatory power.
George Washington’s mother was an enigma: a true maverick, a pistol, a tough cookie, an inconvenient woman. Though well schooled in the genteel social graces demanded of a wealthy officer’s daughter, she also knew how to shoot a gun, manage a boat, and, most exceptional for a woman of her era, train a horse.
An accomplished rider in her teens, Mary Ball dodged marriage until the ripe old age of twenty-three, when she became the second wife of a successful Virginia tobacco planter, sheriff, and politician. During Augustine Washington’s frequent business trips, she proved capable of running one of his extensive properties, a seven-hundred-acre operation near Fredericksburg later known as Ferry Farm. Unlike most plantation wives, she refused to hire an overseer to help her. So when Augustine died in 1743, he left his wife in charge — until their eleven-year-old son, George, came of age to claim his inheritance or Mary found a new husband, whichever came first. Augustine’s will specified that his widow would remain custodian of the farm until she remarried; at that point the man of the house would take over, as was customary in the 1700s. Many biographers believe she rebuffed all subsequent suitors to maintain her position.
By her midthirties, Mary Ball