A bust of George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon. Photo: The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty
The Making of the (First) President
How a conservative planter became the ‘indispensable man’ in revolution and war.
George Washington, for many Americans,
remains locked in Gilbert Stuart’s austere portrait, an image to be
venerated, but at a remove. The past decade alone has seen a cottage
industry of Washingtonia attempting to transform a man of marble into a
creature of flesh. “Washington’s Revolution,” by Robert Middlekauff, is
part of this enterprise—a project to which he brings considerable
credentials as a Bancroft Prize-winner who has written acclaimed works
on colonial intellectual history and the American Revolution. And his
contribution is a worthy one.
The conceit of Mr. Middlekauff’s book is to recount the American Revolution as it was experienced by Washington himself. This necessarily leaves out a good deal of the picture. For a panoramic view of the war, we must go elsewhere. A good place to start would be Mr. Middlekauff’s outstanding “The Glorious Cause” (1982). Nor is this biography a complete life, like Ron Chernow ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Washington: A Life” (2010). Rather, it ends with Washington’s retirement from military service after the British withdrawal. Mr. Middlekauff has something different in mind.
Knopf, 358 pages, $30
The conceit of Mr. Middlekauff’s book is to recount the American Revolution as it was experienced by Washington himself. This necessarily leaves out a good deal of the picture. For a panoramic view of the war, we must go elsewhere. A good place to start would be Mr. Middlekauff’s outstanding “The Glorious Cause” (1982). Nor is this biography a complete life, like Ron Chernow ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Washington: A Life” (2010). Rather, it ends with Washington’s retirement from military service after the British withdrawal. Mr. Middlekauff has something different in mind.
Washington’s Revolution
By Robert MiddlekauffKnopf, 358 pages, $30
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The conceit of Mr. Middlekauff’s book is to recount the American Revolution as it was experienced by Washington himself. This necessarily leaves out a good deal of the picture. For a panoramic view of the war, we must go elsewhere. A good place to start would be Mr. Middlekauff’s outstanding “The Glorious Cause” (1982). Nor is this biography a complete life, like Ron Chernow ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Washington: A Life” (2010). Rather, it ends with Washington’s retirement from military service after the British withdrawal. Mr. Middlekauff has something different in mind.
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While we may have read some of this material previously, it is in the nuances, the telling details and the subtle shadings where Mr. Middlekauff excels. As he relates, in a straightforward chronological account composing the first section of the book, Washington came from a cadet branch of the Virginia patrician class. The death of his father in 1743, when he was 11, put Washington on the margins of this society. It left him an outsider with just enough access to gain admission.
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There is something touching about a callow Washington turning to a book of deportment, “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” to learn lessons in manners that would stand him in good stead with his betters. Young Washington mastered the social graces expected of a patrician: dancing, fencing, riding. More important, he had a helpful patron, his older half-brother, Lawrence, who married into the powerful Fairfax clan.
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Three seminal events occurred at this time that were to anticipate his tenure as commander of the Continental Army. He was defeated by the French in an ill-considered clash at Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania, but he was resolute in defeat and learned from his mistakes. A year later, he fought bravely under Gen. Edward Braddock in the British debacle against a force of French and Indians near Fort Duquesne but saw that British regulars could be beaten. He had won Braddock’s respect, but, given the innate British disdain for colonials, Washington could not gain a commission in the Royal Army, a rebuff that instilled a lifelong resentment against the British. Their failure to make Washington an officer in their military would cost England an empire.
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Mr. Middlekauff paints anew the familiar scenes of Washington’s war: Washington’s driving the British from Boston in 1775, his humiliating defeat in New York, his retreat across the Hudson and through New Jersey while being pursued by the British, his turning the tables on the enemy at Trenton and Princeton, and the inconclusive warfare of the next several years, with Washington losing more battles than he won but keeping the army intact until a reversal of fortune and the final victory over Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
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As Mr. Middlekauff reminds us, the odds against Washington were overwhelming. He led a recombinant army that flourished in the spring and faded in the winter. Its ranks were riddled with Thomas Paine’s sunshine soldiers and summer patriots, who could not altogether be blamed for their defections because they were ill-paid, ill-clad, ill-fed and poorly armed.
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In attempting to forge a Continental Army, Washington had to compete with state militias that offered better terms to their recruits. His appeals for more support from the feckless Continental Congress fell on deaf ears. The travails of Valley Forge were only a dramatic symbol of the suffering and disarray that affected his ragged troops throughout the war.
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And yet he prevailed. It is here that Mr. Middlekauff comes to the fore, demonstrating Washington’s qualities of toughness, adaptability and endurance. Also audacity, stunning the British and Hessians at Trenton and Princeton with his back to the wall. As Mr. Middlekauff writes: “Washington’s strike at Trenton and Princeton revealed a side of his character not often seen: a willingness to take chances. He had allowed a part of his fierce energy to come out, and the consequences were especially pleasing to him, not simply because his daring paid off, but also because he had thrust himself into the heart of the fighting.” His crossing of the Delaware in December 1776 was as much a political stroke as a military one, since it heartened a dispirited patriot cause and marred British hopes for a quick victory.
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His men adored him; they also respected him and feared his wrath. He lost battles but fought a war of maneuver that ultimately unnerved and wore down the enemy. He was willing to cede ground to keep his forces in the field. He was a skillful manager, holding the army together to enable it to fight another day. He showed amazing forbearance in overlooking the slights of rival generals and second-guessing politicians. And when France entered the war on the American side, he demonstrated diplomatic skill in mobilizing a joint force to trap Cornwallis.
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The American Revolution took more than eight years and was a near-run thing till almost the end. Washington was there for the duration. It was only by sheer will that he outlasted the formidable power of the British Empire. To be sure, he was fortunate in his foes: dilatory British generals who won battles but failed to forcefully pursue and crush a wounded enemy. And he was lucky in battle, appearing almost invincible to the bullets whizzing around him.
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Imposing in stature, Washington faced down mutinies of sergeants in Pennsylvania and officers in Newburgh, N.Y., both over the lack of pay and pensions. It was at Newburgh in March 1783, as the war wound down, where his mastery of the grand gesture was manifested to dramatic effect. Mr. Middlekauff’s rendition is compelling: Washington “feared that if the army moved against the Congress, the Revolution and the new nation might be lost.” In assuring his officers that they would receive just compensation, Washington presented a letter from a congressman. But he had difficulty reading the text, causing him to stumble over the words. “He then stopped and pulled his spectacles from his pocket, saying as he did so, ‘Gentleman, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.’ ” He left his men in tears. The mutiny was over.
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The trajectory from an ambitious young Washington’s studying “The Rules of Civility” to the weary warrior at Newburgh urging his officers to listen to their better angels provides the substance of Mr. Middlekauff’s book. In between we are treated to Washington’s travails, sometimes too often. The space might have been better used to inform the reader of what was going on in the rest of the war, outside Washington’s orbit.
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This being said, Mr. Middlekauff has provided a valuable one-volume account of Washington’s ascendancy. His triumph over the British was a feat that probably no one else could have achieved. Without his inspired leadership, the Declaration of Independence might have been little more than a piece of paper. Mr. Middlekauff concludes by reminding us that the greatest thing Washington accomplished was what he didn’t do. At war’s end in 1783, he handed his commission back to Congress and went home. Washington chose the role of Cincinnatus over Caesar. His insistence on civil supremacy over the military during the war carried through to the peace, providing the cornerstone for the future democratic republic, the glorious cause for which he had fought.
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—Mr. Schwartz formerly supervised the book pages of Newsday and was an editor in the culture section of the New York Times.
