Robert Middlekauff - Washingtons Revolution: The Making of Americas First Leader

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2015 by Robert Middlekauff

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Middlekauff, Robert.
Washingtons revolution : the making of Americas first leader / Robert Middlekauff.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-101-87423-3 (hardcover) 978-1-101-87424-0 (eBook)
1. Washington, George, 17321799. 2. GeneralsUnited
StatesBiography. 3. United StatesHistoryRevolution,
17751783Biography. 4. United StatesHistoryRevolution,
17751783Campaigns. I. Title.
E 312.25. M 54 2015 973.34092dc23 [ B ] 2014020087

Front-of-jacket image: Washington Crossing the Delaware River, 25th December 1776 (detail) by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 1851. Copy of an original painted in 1848. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, U.S.A. / Bridgeman Images
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
Maps by Mapping Specialists

v3.1

Ancients and Axioms:
Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England

Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies

The Glorious Cause:
The American Revolution, 17631789

The Mathers:
Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 15961728

For my son, Sam; my daughter, Holly;
And my grandchildren, Ben Katz, Haley Katz, and Cole Katz

This book might have been entitled Washington and the Revolution, for it deals with both the man and the Revolution. But since Washingtons part was so critical to the way the Revolution was fought, I have given it a title that emphasizes his enormous importance to its course and outcome. There was no one on the British side who played a comparable role. The king and his chief minister, Lord North, were political figures who gave much of their time in the years of the war to other matters; and their military leaders in AmericaAdmiral Lord Richard Howe and his brother General William Howe, along with Henry Clinton and Guy Carleton, generals who commanded the army in America, all men of high professional standardsdid not impress peers or their enemies in America and France as genuine leaders. In any case, they sought to preserve an empire; Washington overturned it, in a struggle with immeasurable implications for the world ever since.

To tell Washingtons story, I have resorted to both history and biography, with the assumption that the two fields reinforce each other. The life Washington led before and through the Revolution requires a careful look at historical circumstances of several sorts, and the ways his action affected the history of this period are matters that cannot be understood without knowledge of his life. He felt the underlying conditions of his time and his life and responded to them in a struggle that affected the Revolution deeply. Washington was always a self-conscious man. He grew during the revolutionary years, but he never lost his self-awareness. Like many Americans of the time, he began as a provincial and became a nationalist, without however shedding all of his provincial skin. A Virginian when he took over the Continental Army, he found himself transformed into an American by the demands of many British measures before 1775. By the middle years of the war, he, an American, had become something more. As the war had changed, so had he; and as he changed, so also did the war and his conception of it. How he mastered himself and the Revolutionary War provides the focus of this book.

PART ONE

Virginian

The Young Washingtons World

Long before George Washingtons death, Americans began writing about him in terms resembling the descriptions the New England Puritans had used to describe God. The Puritans never claimed ultimate insight into Gods essenceGod, no matter how thoroughly studied, no matter how lovingly worshipped, remained unknown and unknowable. He could be approached, in a manner of speaking, by listing his attributeshis power and justice, for examplebut the list could never be more than a beginning, certainly not a full understanding. George Washington, a mere man, was called godlike while still alivemeaning that he had been chosen by Providence to do great things; he was the being created to take the leading role, indeed the essential part, in leading his country out of the British Empire and into the new world of republics.

The world in which he was bornthe British colony of Virginiawas hardly one of republics. On the surface, at the time of Washingtons birth, Virginia appeared to conform to the understanding of many in Parliament of what a royal colony should be. The Crown appointed the governor, who almost always was of high social standing in England, and there was a bicameral legislature composed of a Governors Council, appointed by the Crown, and a House of Burgesses, a lower chamber, elected by and from property owners. There was also a general court, the councilors sitting in a judicial capacity. The republican element in this structure, if indeed it could be called that, was the House of Burgesses.

At the time of Washingtons boyhood, the Virginia gentry increasingly controlled the government and much else in the colony. Since the late seventeenth century, the Crown and its local agent, the governor, had struggled to maintain royal authority. They did not exactly lose the struggle, but as the years passed they had to concede that their power had slipped gradually into the hands of men who considered themselves an elite, a group that had amassed land and slaves and in the process set the tone of society.