Cassandra Good: Did George Washington “have a couple of things in his past”?

Washington began using deception soon after he took command of the Continental Army in 1775. After a summer of skirmishes around Boston, rebel gunpowder was nearly gone; Washington’s soldiers had enough only for nine bullets per man. To hide this potentially fatal weakness from the British while he scrambled to get supplies, Washington ordered that fake gunpowder casks be filled with sand and shipped to depots where they would be spotted by British spies. He also ordered a secret paramilitary mission to seize gunpowder stores in Bermuda that failed only because another secret rebel mission had gotten there first but nobody bothered to tell Washington. Throughout the war, Washington wrote reports inflating his troop strength that were designed to fall into the hands of traitors within his own ranks or agents hiding among the British. During the brutal winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge, with his troops starving, freezing, and dwindling in number, Washington penned fake documents that referred to phantom infantry and cavalry regiments to convince British General Sir William Howe that the rebels were too strong to attack. It worked. Had Howe known the truth and pressed his advantage, the Continental Army might not have survived the winter.

Washington’s deceptions even involved French bread. On August 19, 1781, he confided in his diary, “French bakery to veil our real movements and create apprehensions for Staten Island.” Because French bread was a major source of food for the troops, Washington bet that stationing French bake ovens in New Jersey would help convince British General Sir Henry Clinton that French and American forces were planning to remain in the New York area and attack Staten Island when in fact they were marching south, to attack Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The deception was convincing, and it helped win the war. Washington was able to muster superior forces and slow British reinforcements, leading to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Washington wrote later that victory depended on fooling even his own troops. “Nor were less pains taken to deceive our own Army,” he wrote to Noah Webster in 1788, “for I had always conceived, when the imposition did not completely take place at home, it could never sufficiently succeed abroad.”

Meanwhile, in Paris, Benjamin Franklin secured pivotal French support for the war through a combination of diplomacy and duplicity. Wearing homespun clothes and a coonskin cap, Franklin carefully cultivated his image as a virtuous and simple countryman seeking independence from the domineering British—a ploy that capitalized on French views of the British and made him wildly popular in French social circles. At the same time, Franklin waged a covert propaganda campaign from his Paris basement, where he set up a printing press and wrote articles designed to sway opinion across Europe. A printer by trade, Franklin even imported European paper and type to make his documents look more authentic.