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  • Founding Fighters: The Battlefield Leaders Who Made American Independence
  • John Buchanan
Founding Fighters: The Battlefield Leaders Who Made American Independence. By Alan C. Cate. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2006. ISBN 0-275-98707-8. Notes. Essay on sources. Index. Pp. xiv, 249. $49.95.

Alan Cate joins the parade of writers celebrating the nation's founders, always a welcome antidote to those writers obsessed with trashing dead white males and insisting on judging the past by present standards. In this case we have crisply written capsule biographies, in order of presentation and groupings, of Richard Montgomery, Charles Lee, and Horatio Gates; Henry Knox and Nathanael Greene; Benedict Arnold and John Paul Jones; Andrew Pickens, Thomas Sumter, and Francis Marion; Ethan Allen, George [End Page 522] Rogers Clark, and Daniel Morgan; and Henry Lee and Anthony Wayne. With the exception of Ethan Allen, who was something of a blowhard, the cast as far as it goes is generally well chosen, although I do miss the sterling John Glover of Massachusetts, and that splendid regimental commander, John Eager Howard of Maryland. John Sullivan of New Hampshire is also missing. He was a bumbler, but George Washington trusted him and gave him important commands. And where is Lafayette? He was far more important than the gallant Richard Montgomery, who was killed too early in the war to make an impact. In combat Lafayette was as brave as the bravest, and his campaign in Virginia prior to Yorktown was, with the exception of the near disaster at Green Spring, a model of prudent generalship. That said, his choices allow Cate to cover all of the major theaters and actions.

Cate "explicitly recognizes the decisive role that military victory played in creating the United States" (p. viii), and there can be no argument with that. He then goes on to describe his cast of characters as "hard-fighting warriors" (p. viii) who displayed "personal courage, professional skill, and ability to lead others in battle" (p. ix). Yet there is one glaring exception. Horatio Gates had to be included, of course, but he never displayed personal courage on the battlefield and probably lacked it, never in a long career in both the British and American armies led troops in battle, and his professional skill was limited to administration and organization, at which he was quite good.

The author repeats two not uncommon misconceptions, the first when he states that George Washington "viewed Nathanael Greene as his 'logical successor'" (pp. 96–97). That may be true, but there is no hard evidence to support it, and writers should stop stating it as fact. One can speculate on this matter, but that is all. The author also maintains that George Rogers Clark "conquered half a continent" (p. xiii), but this is dubious at best. Clark's feat was incredibly daring and an excellent example of human endurance, but his expedition was not even mentioned at the Paris Peace Conference, and the attitude of Great Britain toward the vast territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was best expressed by one of its negotiators when he described it as "not worth a cavil."

There are no major errors, but there are several minor errors that add up to annoyance and tend to spoil the effect of a generally well done book. Cate states that "Daniel Boone may have been a cousin or an uncle" (p. 183) of Daniel Morgan, but the two men were in no way related. This is one of those tales that once committed to the printed page takes on a life of its own. The Boone-Morgan fiction probably owes its first appearance to Boone's mother, Sarah Morgan, who had a brother named Daniel, and that may be all that was needed for some writer in the past to leap to an erroneous conclusion and thus lead other writers astray. The author also follows the penchant of many American writers to assign aristocracy to characters who were not aristocrats. Charles Lee was of the British gentry, not a member of an "aristocratic family" (p. ix). Nor was the American, Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, Jr., an aristocrat. America has never had...

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