While Washington is remembered as a man of action on the battlefield, he spent an enormous amount of his time at a desk reading and writing-tens of thousands of letters, orders, reports, maps and military manuals over the course of the war.

In January 1783, the war-weary general, now age fifty, quietly ordered a set of glasses to aid his dimming eyesight. But the stresses and privations of the long war took their toll on his overall health-aging him beyond the eight chronological years he was away from home. With the exception of a bout with quinsy, a throat inflammation, that laid him low for ten days at Morristown in 1777, and the beginnings of miserable dental problems that would plague him for the rest of his life, Washington seems to have been spared serious illness during this period. There is remarkably little in the surviving records about the state of the commander-in-chief’s health during the war.

Washington was extremely protective of his public image, and he fiercely guarded his privacy. Just the year before, Silas Deane, a delegate to the Continental Congress, remarked in a letter to his wife that Colonel Washington retained “a very young Look, & an easy Soldierlike Air & gesture,” despite a military career that stretched all the way back to 1753. Countless contemporary descriptions of him emphasize his height and strength, and his majestic and commanding presence, especially on horseback. When George Washington accepted his appointment as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in June of 1775, he was forty-three years old and in the prime of life and health.

This private moment takes on striking historical significance when viewed in the context of the events that unfolded in the last months of the Revolutionary War. The address leaf, with part of the red wax seal still intact, from George Washington’s letter to “David Rittenhouse Esq., Philadelphia.”įrom his headquarters at Newburgh, New York, on February 16, 1783, George Washington took time from his military duties to write a personal letter to David Rittenhouse thanking the Philadelphia inventor and instrument maker for a set of eyeglasses he had recently received.

A Careful Revolution by David Hall