Letters to the Editor

We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are reading our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that letters be kept under 500 words.

To the Editor:

Given my regard for his own work on the Revolutionary War, I'm sorry that John Shy does not like my book, The Road to Valley Forge (JMH 68 [April 2005] 549–51). Part of the problem may be the silly subtitle, How Washington Built the Army That Won the Revoution, which was foisted on me by my publisher. The book is really about Washington's development as field commander and commander in chief, thus my original title, "George Washington and the Road to Valley Forge."

I won't go into all of our disagreements, but when I wrote that "Washington evolved from a mistake-prone backwoods soldier to a wiser commander in chief of a regular army that in turn developed from rabble into the makings of a professional force" (xi), I by no means implied, in Professor Shy's words, "that previous historians have missed this vital point." I'm puzzled that he would make such an inference.

Shy also criticizes me for not contrasting the sucess of the partisan war in New Jersey in 1777 with failure of the Rebel partisan effort in the Philadelphia region in 1778. I was not, as Shy wrote, "at a loss to explain this," I decided to leave it for another book I have planned on partisan activity throughout the country, in favor of examining for the general reader and nonspecialists of the Revolution (1) the supply problem, (2) the so-called Conway Cabal and Washington's reaction to it, and (3) Wayne Bodle's claim in his excellent (yes, here Shy and I agree) book, Valley Forge Winter, that "the army never did enough fighting in the north after June 1778 to test Steuben's efforts on the battlefield," thus "the long term-dynamics of the war may have deprived the army of a chance to prove its mettle in conventional combat situations" (Bodle, 13, 250).

I disagree with Bodle and offered as evidence actions ignored by both Bodle and Shy: the major engagements fought by the Maryland and Delaware Lines in the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781, drawing special attention to Daniel Morgan's tactical masterpiece, the Battle of Cowpens (17 January 1781), in which the Continentals manuevered in a by-the-book manner that was not seen prior to Steuben's reforms and played a major role in the great victory. Yet Shy claims that "he [Buchanan] does not argue his case from the evidence, but instead attacks the . . . book by Wayne Bodle." I maintain that my evidence trumps Bodle's. As for attacking Bodle's book, since when does respectfully taking issue with another historian rate as attacking? In fact, I used the words, "I respectfully disagree" (306). If revisionism is the name of the game, as an eminent historian of the Revolution once told me, then revising the revionists must also be part of the game.

Shy makes much of a quotation I used by Colonel William Douglas of 6th Connecticut, who wrote to his wife, "we are new but Shall be old in time as well as they" (147), and then states that in his (Shy's) judgement, Douglas "had it just right." I would agree to a point, for as I explain in the book the army that marched into Valley Forge was a tough, seasoned force. But by the testimony of its own officers "Only one thing in the Army has been uniform, our way of marching, all having adopted the files used by Indians" (304). It had yet to learn how to enter a battlefield in tight formation, manuever quickly from column to line and back again, and how to leave a battlefield in a compact manner. That is one of the things Steuben taught them, and that is what the army in...