And so, as the year approached its end, Washington was faced with the necessity of recruiting his army anew. Most of the common soldiers felt that they had done their stint: let others take their places. And efforts to reorganize the haphazardly raised regiments into a force more uniform and efficient disarranged the officer corps. Although no man’s commission was as old as a year, and the differences might be no more than a day—or even a few minutes—officers got into the most acrimonious hassles concerning which had the right to a higher rank because he was the senior. “Such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue,” Washington cried out, “such stock-jobbing and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages … such a dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen.” If only he could justify it “to posterity and my conscience,” Washington would, he explained, abandon settled America to the British and inhabit the wilderness in a wigwam.
On New Year’s Eve so many of the troops went home that all the blockading defenses could not be manned. Although Washington did his best to cover up, the weakness was too widespread to escape the eyes of spies. It seemed certain that the British would attack. He arranged with his officers on what hills far behind the lines the fleeing remnant of his army would reassemble. But the British did not attack. They hoped the rebels would realize how ridiculous they seemed and give up. When Washington celebrated the dawn of 1776 by raising the newly designed American flag, some Britons assumed that it was a flag of surrender.
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