It was about this time that Washington had the satisfaction of being joined by his wife. There had been a suggestion that her residence on the Potomac was not safe, but even before the naval raids Washington had begun to suggest her joining him. She arrived on the 11th of December, and resided until the end of the siege with him at his headquarters in the old house still standing on Brattle Street, Cambridge. The house has had an interesting history, having been built by the Tory Vassalls, occupied by the Marblehead regiment, by Washington, by Dr. Andrew Craigie, surgeon at Bunker Hill, by Jared Sparks, Edward Everett, Noah Webster, and by the poet Longfellow, whose family still owns it. The quarters were for Washington central and pleasant; they gave him his last taste of home life for years.
Washington's Headquarters
Yet we are not to imagine him at any time free of difficulties. With December began his troubles with the Connecticut troops, whose enlistment had expired. In spite of previous promises to remain until their places were filled, and against orders to leave their weapons, many of the Connecticut men tried to slip away, guns and all. Washington frequently speaks of them in his letters of the first half of December. In securing their return he was well aided by the officers, and by the aged but still energetic Governor Trumbull, who heard of the actions of his men with "grief, surprise, and indignation." Trumbull called the assembly of Connecticut together to consider the situation, but action was forestalled by the people of the different towns. The hint that the soldiers had best return voluntarily, lest they be sent back with a feathered adornment that nature had not provided, was sufficient to hurry most of them back to their service.
No sooner had this matter been smoothed over, than Washington had to meet the general situation, when on the first of January most of the enlistments would expire. For some weeks he had been anxiously watching the returns of the enlistments, and the figures frequently plunged him into depression. On the 28th of November, finding that but thirty-five hundred men had enlisted, he wrote: "Such a dearth of public spirit, such stock-jobbing, and such fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of one kind or another, in this great change of military arrangement, I never saw before, and pray God's mercy I may never be witness to again." A week later he found himself under obligations to give furlough to fifteen hundred men a week, in order to satisfy them. To fill their places and those of the Connecticut troops, he called on Massachusetts and New Hampshire for five thousand militia. By the middle of December scarcely six thousand men had enlisted, and on Christmas Day only eight thousand five hundred. On New Year's Day his army, which was to have been at least twenty thousand men, was not quite half that number.
Under such circumstances many a weaker man would have thrown up his office or abandoned his post. Washington stuck to his task. If Howe would but remain inactive, the laggard country would in time retrieve itself. As a matter of fact, many of the soldiers, after a brief period of liberty, returned of their own accord to the standard. We find at least one case in the diary of David How, which, in addition to revealing his actions, gives a glimpse of the camp at the end of the year, when many of the men were going away, and the others were joining their new regiments.
"This Day," writes How on the 30th of December, "we paraded and had our guns took from us By the Major to prise them.
"31. This Day we have been In an uprore about packun our Things up In order to go home a Monday morning as Soon as we Can.
"Jan 1. We have ben all Day a pecking up our Things For to go home.