John Adams’s Memory of Appointing Gen. Washington

After his Presidency and again about twenty years later, John Adams wrote out his memories of how the Second Continental Congress chose George Washington to lead its army on 15 June 1775. Because these recollections came from such an important member of the Congress, and because they were published early, they’re the basis of most dramatic descriptions of that event.

Adams is our source for the statement that he first put forward Washington’s name, that chairman John Hancock showed “Mortification and resentment” at not being named himself, and that Washington “from his Usual Modesty darted into the Library Room.” Adams described long arguments in the Congress, with both New Englanders and Virginians opposing Washington.

Because the Congress refrained from keeping records on such a sensitive topic as forming an army to oppose the king’s governors and troops, it’s impossible to show that events happened differently. But the record that exists makes Adams’s account less likely.

Many of John Adams’s Revolutionary recollections put him at the center of the action, bravely standing up to unreasonable opposition. That’s how he liked to see himself. And sometimes contemporaneous evidence indicates that opposition wasn’t quite so numerous or loud as Adams described.

Adams remembered certain members of the Congress as being opposed to Washington, such as Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Edmund Pendleton of Virginia. Yet there’s no evidence for their opposition or disappointment at how things turned out. In fact, that same week Pendleton was helping Washington to draft a will and wrote most of the new commander’s acceptance speech.

Among Washington biographers, Douglas Southall Freeman suggested that Washington asked as a friend Pendleton to play devil’s advocate against his appointment. John Ferling theorized he invited Pendleton to draft the speech in order to co-opt a former opponent. I think the simplest explanation is that Adams’s memory was mistaken, and Pendleton supported Washington’s appointment like almost everyone else at the Congress, particularly the Virginians.

In writing my report on Washington in Cambridge, I was convinced by Paul K. Longmore’s hypothesis in The Invention of George Washington that the long arguments Adams remembered actually occurred in the following couple of days, and the biggest sticking-point was whether to hire Charles Lee as a subordinate general. On 18 June 1775 Adams told Elbridge Gerry:

I have never, in all my lifetime, suffered more anxiety than in the conduct of this business. The choice of officers, and their pay, have given me great distress. Lee and [Horatio] Gates are officers of such great experience and confessed abilities, that I thought their advice, in a council of officers, might be of great advantage to us; but the natural prejudices, and virtuous attachment of our countrymen to their own officers, made me apprehensive of difficulties. But considering the earnest desire of General Washington to have the assistance of these officers, the extreme attachment of many of our best friends in the southern colonies to them, the reputation they would give to our arms in Europe, and especially with the ministerial generals and army in Boston, as well as the real American merit of them both, I could not withhold my vote from either.

The official vote on Washington’s appointment was unanimous. The vote to hire Lee at a rank below Artemas Ward’s and the vote to make Gates a general were not. But Washington’s “earnest desire” for those veterans’ aid carried the day.

TOMORROW: Washington’s journey to his Cambridge headquarters.