Robert Middlekauff, the distinguished historian of colonial and early America, has already written about the American Revolution in his 1982 book “The Glorious Cause,” the first volume of the Oxford History of the United States. Now he turns to the war’s most famous figure. George Washington was commander in chief of the American Army for almost the whole of the war (1775-83). He served at a time when there was no executive branch of government, only a one-house Congress to guide him. He had direct command of the war’s central theater, from coastal New England to Philadelphia, and he was in at the death at Yorktown. The title of Middlekauff’s new book thus has two meanings: “Washington’s Revolution” is a story of the war from one man’s point of view, as well as an account of a conflict that was that man’s to win or lose.
Middlekauff has a biographer’s understanding of his subject. “Two qualities,” he writes, “seem decisive in Washington’s character. . . . They were his will and his judgment.” Washington was energetic, commanding and relentless; once he set his mind to anything, he saw it through. At the same time, he was capable of great self-restraint, rarely giving way to impulses that might prove reckless. Washington’s complementary character traits did not fire off and on, like strobe lights, but worked together to achieve what Middlekauff calls “a prevailing steadiness.”
Washington’s apprenticeship was the French and Indian War (1754-63), a clash of superpowers in the wilds of Appalachia. Here he had his first experiences of battle and of politics, trying to coax supplies from distracted or reluctant officials. Here he first developed his characteristic attitudes toward the men who would serve under him. Washington was a demanding leader, who hated slovenliness and indiscipline; he wrote of troops who misbehaved as “vagrants,” “miscreants” and “hooping, hallooing Gentlemen-Soldiers.” At the same time he became realistic enough to understand that men needed proper equipment and at least the prospect of pay if they were to fight. After the Continental Congress tapped him to lead America’s fight for independence, he showed that he could motivate his men by appealing to their higher feelings too, addressing them as “freemen, contending in the most righteous cause.”
Middlekauff replays all of Washington’s Revolutionary War battles, both glorious victories like Trenton and Princeton, and defeats caused, in part, by Washington’s own errors: He lost the Battle of Long Island because of a failure to protect his left flank, and the Battle of Germantown because his plan for a multipronged attack was too complicated. Not all important battles were fought by big battalions: Middlekauff shows how pinprick raids that Washington ordered, like Anthony Wayne’s on Stony Point, N.Y., and Henry Lee’s on Paulus Hook, N.J., kept the enemy off balance.
One theme running through the book like a bass line is the administrative work that consumed Washington between engagements. Middlekauff reminds readers who have grown up under the aegis of a military-industrial complex that the infant United States had no military when the Revolution began. Local militias could rally in emergencies. But men from different states had not fought or worked together; there were no mechanisms for provisions and supplies. In a reprise of his French and Indian War experience, but on a vaster scale, Washington had to cajole Congress and state governments to give him men, and to keep them shod, clothed, fed and armed. Since enlistments tended to be short, his army was constantly melting away and re-forming.
Some of the glitches in the American war effort are almost comic. Middlekauff speculates that James Mease, a Pennsylvania merchant who was appointed clothier general in 1776, was colorblind: “How else are we to explain that one of the regiments was given red uniforms?” Administration was serious business though — not only for the needs Washington was obliged to meet, but for the manner in which he met them. When he dealt with governors or congressmen he begged, importuned and repeated himself; at times he had to give civilian politicians beginners’ courses in military affairs. But he always deferred to the elected officeholders whom he regarded, with republican propriety, as his superiors. After analyzing one of Washington’s letters to John Hancock, president of Congress, Middlekauff comments: “There is in this letter a fusion of tact and determination — no talking down to Congress, or its president, but a thoughtful explanation of how things should work in an army.” If the poet/intellectuals of the Revolution — George Mason, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson — expressed how government should function in free societies, it was Washington who made sure that the American government did so. “His thought,” Middlekauff writes, “indeed amounted to a form of constitutionalism.”
In 1781 the near-miraculous Yorktown campaign — a convergence of armies and navies on Cornwallis’s isolated force — all but ended the war. France, which had become our ally in 1778, deserves the lion’s share of the credit for that victory: French money, French ships and French siege tactics won the day. But even in this multinational operation Washington’s role was vital: He showed General Rochambeau how to get his troops from Rhode Island to Virginia and kept Admiral de Grasse focused on the mission at hand.
Middlekauff has written about Washington’s war rather as Washington himself might have, had he been a historian: carefully, thoroughly, with an eye for detail and a grasp, at all times, of the important points.
WASHINGTON’S REVOLUTION
The Making of America’s First Leader
By Robert Middlekauff
Illustrated. 358 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
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