Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader

Washington had demonstrated throughout the war his commitment to civilian supremacy in the American republic. His convictions about the relationship of the army to Congress remained firm and clear, never wavering in the face of appeals that he take matters into his own hands and, in effect, exercise the powers of a king or dictator. Such action on his part, or the army’s, would be giving up the meaning of the Revolution, a surrender he would not accede to, as he explained to his officers at Newburgh. He made his belief in civilian control even clearer virtually every day, in the way he dealt with Congress. There was no question of yielding power to them—he had never claimed such power; he was the servant of the American people and of Congress, nothing less and nothing more.
 
All the time that he served as commander of the Continental Army, he was in fact also the leader of the Revolution. His unspoken and undefined responsibilities in this role transcended those of his assignment as commander in chief, and he became, as the war developed, a symbol of the freedom the young republic embodied. He was the political leader of the Revolution, though he drafted no legislation and signed no laws. But if he failed, it was widely understood, the Revolution failed.
 
For Washington, more than any American leader in or out of Congress, by his actions and example, held together the political structure that constituted the United States. Several of his officers came to proclaim this fact through their insistence that the army was the Revolution and Washington its leader. It was the institution—despite its failures and, at times, its weakness—that held together, demonstrating to the enemy that American independence possessed a reality that could not be crushed. Had Washington not persevered in the service of the cause he called “glorious,” the Revolution would have given way to slow collapse. None of the Americans around him in the army, the Congress, or the states commanded the moral force he embodied. Success in maintaining the American effort would not have been achieved without him.
 
He succeeded in large part because he understood that the Revolution represented a rare opportunity—something quite new, in fact—to lead a people in defense of principles long honored in conceptions of liberty, stifled or suppressed elsewhere in the world. He did not fully sense the possibilities, or the range, of political liberty when the war began in 1775; nor did anyone else in or out of Congress. The war itself called out his best efforts and stiffened his resolve to honor the ideals proclaimed in the great state papers issued in the early years of resistance, culminating in the Declaration of Independence.
 
In assessing his performance in conventional military terms—his thought on strategy, his tactical capabilities and action, and his administrative record throughout the war—the basic comparison has to be with his British enemy. Washington’s strategic sense proved to be of a very high order. He saw early on that, because of the disparity in military strength, the wisest course for his army lay in fighting a war of attrition. Such a war would not yield outright military defeat of the British, but, pursued with care, it held promise of wearing them out until they were willing to accept American independence. If the likelihood of defeating the British army on the battlefield was slim, or nonexistent, the Americans still had to fight—attrition did not mean avoidance of the enemy.
 
Washington knew much about the British army: It was not large, but its level of competence had been high for many years. Its leaders in the 1770s and after were not brilliant, but Gage, the Howe brothers, Clinton, and Cornwallis were able professionals. British regiments were better than competent; their men and field-grade officers were skillful. Perhaps the greatest advantage the British had was their navy. Washington assumed from the beginning of the war that naval power—not just the weight of shipboard guns, but the capacity for moving and supplying troops—was of great importance. He faced a European country of surpassing naval experience and power.
 
In contrast to the British military, the Americans had to summon an army from nothing, and putting it together had to be done repeatedly. Had knowledge existed of how to create an army from nothing, the American task still would have been daunting, for the will to give up old allegiances to provinces and to adopt fresh ways of dealing with the world as it existed was not strong. Washington supplied much that was missing in political will and in insight. But the underlying circumstances of the new nation, divided and uncertain of how to proceed, and fearful of a standing or professional army, dogged his action through- out the entire war. He, with the unreliable assistance of the states, created an army, only to see it dissolve, many times. He responded by pulling it together again and again, including not just its regiments of infantry but its logistical services as well. He began as commander with an army outside Boston that was little more than a collection of town and county militias. There were virtually no structure, procedures, regulations, or army-wide logistical and other organizations in support. A body of officers experienced in military organization and in combat was also lacking. The creation of an army while conducting military operations had few precedents and had to be done during a siege and, later, under the most pressing kinds of fighting.
 
Despite the persistence of the underlying circumstances of a weak central authority, he fought his way through using what was available to hold off superior forces in almost every battle. Only at Yorktown did he go into battle with a favorable hand. When his army’s prospects were at their bleakest, as in December 1776, he seized control at Trenton and Princeton—not because his army was stronger, but because he had imagination and daring. He also demonstrated that he knew how to run a battle and in the process to inspire an army and a nation. His and his army’s fortunes had desperate moments after these brilliant attacks, but they sustained Washington’s vision and his hold on the Revolution. Whatever the course of the military conflict, he insisted on a policy of attrition, and his strategy under all sorts of circumstances remained steady.
 
That the American conception of civil supremacy remained firm even when the army seemed the only reliable institution in the war— and its commander the center of authority—owed more to Washing- ton, a general, than to anything else. War, he knew, could dissolve the claims of the civilian world to ultimate authority. Such claims in America were hardly more than a wish in the dark days of the war. Washington made the claims a reality. His thought indeed amounted to a form of constitutionalism. Here, on this matter of the people and the army, he insisted that the people’s voice should be loudest.
 
Washington’s imagination—his conception of what freedom meant in a free nation—is sometimes overlooked in the certitude of his physical bravery. He was a general, after all; he fought and he overcame enormous obstacles. But he also possessed a grand imagination, a vision of his new country. That vision, often a daring instrument, set him apart and made him the great leader of the Revolution.

Excerpted from Washington's Revolution by Robert Middlekauff. Copyright © 2015 by Robert Middlekauff. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.