This Glorious Struggle: George Washington’s Revolutionary War Letters (review)

Few people know the Washington Papers as well as Edward Lengel, and he may well know the Great Virginian’s Revolutionary War correspondence and ancillary material better than anyone. Lengel displayed his knowledge to superb effect with the publication two years ago of General George Washington: A Military Life. He has now put us in his debt once again by selecting Washington’s most important letters and general orders written during the war, with informative head notes preceding almost every document.

Here is the great man himself. Yes, he was a great man, warts and all, for the war could not have been won without him. He was also a good man, a decent man of high character. The attention given to Washington and his fellow Founders in recent years by historians like Lengel, Don Higginbotham, Joseph Ellis, Paul Longmore, Jr., Richard Brookshire, and others has gone far, at least among cultured lay readers, to counter the drumbeat of kneejerk criticism by many historians because Washington and his fellow Founders failed to surmount the class and gender prejudices of their age, and especially failed to do what could not be done if the Union was to be preserved during the critical founding period: ether abolish slavery or set it on the firm road to extinction.

The book begins with Washington’s 16 June 1775 address to Congress accepting appointment as commander in chief, which includes those well known words, “I do not think my self equal to the Command I am honoured with,” (p. 4), and ends with his 23 December 1783 resignation address to Congress: “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of Action . . . and take my leave of all the employments of public life” (p. 289). Between those two momentous events there is so much one wants to quote, but space allows but few examples.

At a time when parochialism was rampant in America, Washington the staunch nationalist appears in his first General Order to the Army, on 4 July 1775, referring to the “Troops of the United Provinces of North America, and it is hoped that all Distinctions of colonies will be laid aside,” (p. 9) a plea he would repeat almost two months later when he learned of the provincial “Jealousies” (p. 54) and irritations causing conflict among the troops. His tactical and operational judgements, however, were not always on the mark. He sent Benedict Arnold’s expeditionary force off to conquer Canada by way of the Maine wilderness, a “Rout . . . too inconsiderable to make an objection,” (p. 17) he wrote to Philip Schuyler. But it turned out to be a nightmarish trek. Given his contempt for the New England militia, who would fight behind cover but not “March boldly up to a work -- or stand exposed in a plain,” (p. 37) how could he have proposed an infantry assault against the British army in Boston that could only have ended in a catastrophe on the iced-over harbor? The latter is early evidence, despite his brilliant Fabian phase in New Jersey in 1777, that he was at heart a fighting general who always longed to take the offensive, sometimes foolishly.

Not known as a gifted writer, he nevertheless was capable on occasion of a neat turn of phrase. Early in the war, he though his troop commanders with few exceptions “not worth the bread they eat,” (p. 74), and by the summer of 1777 noted that his command was “abundantly perplexed by the different tempers I have to do with” (p. 105). During the siege of Boston he rejected for various and good reasons inoculation of the troops to prevent smallpox, but by the winter of 1777 the danger that the pox might destroy the army prompted him to order the treatment for all soldiers and recruits who had not contracted it, “That the Army be kept as clean as possible...