Rebel in Chief
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Rebel in Chief 1776 By David McCullough Simon & Schuster. 386 pp. $32.00. General George Washington: A Military Life By Edward G. Lengel Random. 450 pp. $29.95. The Unknown...
...McCullough, following justly applauded works dealing with 19th- and 20th-century America, turned to the Revolutionary Era and won his second Pulitzer Prize acclaiming John Adams...
...We also learn that Washington allowed his soldiers to plunder local areas when they were without food or clothing...
...Displaced by Lincoln after the Civil War, he became little more than a Gilbert Stuart portrait...
...In his first command on a large-scale field of battle, he and his general officers had not only failed...
...Mining a mountain of diaries, military assessments and biographical studies, he shows how Washington, despite a shortage of troops, equipment and medical support, maintained his optimism, devotion to duty and high purpose, staying the course that would lead to victory...
...He deeply resented that a man of his wealth and position did not have the rights of any Englishman, and many Americans took the same dangerous path because they knew Washington was on it...
...While providing a fresh view of the struggle for independence, McCullough skillfully inserts brief, telling information about many of Washington's principal subordinates and leading British opponents...
...His summation: "In the autumn of 1780, as America-her finances ruined, her Army mutinous, and much of her land occupiedtrembled on the verge of collapse, Arnold looked very much like a visionary, or perhaps like a rat with the sense to abandon a sinking ship...
...For instance, in his account the Protestant Great Awakening of the 1750s "not only dissolved deference to religious and political authority but led to the belief that it was the duty of God-fearing people to oppose corrupt governors and their henchmen...
...Military history is rarely such a pleasure to read...
...In a different way, so has Gary B. Nash, who takes a revisionist stance and places the Father of His Country outside the center of the picture...
...His high-toned words are striking: "The distress has in some instances prompted the men to commit depredations on the property of the inhabitants," and though "at any other period [such behavior] would be punished with exemplary severity, [it] can now only be lamented as the effect of an unfortunate necessity...
...they had been made to look like fools...
...Washington, he finds, was not "a creative military thinker" and this often resulted in poor judgments...
...The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America By Gary B.Nash Viking...
...The Indians, too, had high hopes and supporters who appreciated how they had been mistreated...
...And when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia completed their brief discussion of the new Executive office they established, they agreed unanimously that His Excellency and the Presidency were a perfect fit...
...Lengel is illuminating, too, in a page on Washington's feelings about the betrayal the great cause suffered at the hands of Benedict Arnold...
...Moreover, Nash holds, widespread antislavery sentiment combined with anti-imperial feelings to bolster the populace's lust for freedom: "African Americans had reached a crossroads during the Revolution, with one large contingent casting their lot with the British and the others hoping against hope that white Americans would honor their founding principles by making all people free and equal...
...Recognizing that the new nation needed a hero-an "infallible divinity"-and found one in the Virginian, the author proceeds to paint Washington as less than admirable in the eyes of many who were closest to him...
...The texture of American history is not smooth, Nash contends, and his fruitful research will fascinate anyone with traditional impressions of the colonial world...
...fortunately, his fellow generals frustrated the impulse...
...His Excellency, as the general preferred to be called, was not close to his troops and did not tolerate-if he could prevent it-intimacy between his officers and their command...
...Neither encrusted with psychological language nor weighed down by comparisons with other generals, Lengel's evaluation is gripping...
...544 pp...
...He made a treacherous but lucky gamble on Christmas Eve in 1776, confronting the Hessians, who were not nearly as drunk as they are portrayed in our history books...
...Although he admires Washington's performance at the helm, McCullough is not blind to his shortcomings...
...Now David McCullough and the military historian Edward G. Lengel have been enticed by the subject...
...He was, McCullough concludes, quoting the faithful General Nathaniel Greene, "the deliverer of his own country...
...27.95...
...IN His incisive The Unknown American Revolution, revisionist historian Gary B. Nash, professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, offers no salute to George Washington as the signal figure in the achievement of independence...
...An example: "Boston having no theater, Faneuil Hall, sacred to Boston patriots as 'the cradle of liberty,' was converted on [British] General [Sir William] Howe's wish into a 'very elegant playhouse' for amateur productions of Shakespeare and original farces, with officers and favored Loyalists taking parts...
...When the Redcoats invaded Boston, he was eager to attack them...
...Lengel's account of the War's final encounter leaves us wondering what the outcome of the Warand Washington's fate-would have been if the French Navy under Admiral DeGrasse had not shown up at Yorktown in 1781 instead of New York, where Washington had wanted to send it...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of history emeritus, Columbia...
...None of the authors, however, unravels why Washington chose the risky road of rebellion over the more comfortable route of loyalism...
...Women, another group denied legal rights and a role in politics, similarly dreamed ofbetter lives...
...Nash's insights about the recruits he calls America's "unacknowledged radicals" form the backbone of his book...
...The author, a professor of history at the University of Virginia and one of the editors of the new edition of The Papers of George Washington, draws from many documents that have only lately become available...
...This country has never again faced as genteel a uniformed adversary...
...The Battle of Brooklyn is termed "a fiasco": "Washington had proven indecisive and inept...
...Most recruits, he says, "were overwhelmingly from the lower layers of society and were mainly enlisted to bear arms so that the mythic citizensoldier could avoid military service and stay at home...
...Yet ultimately the Revolution was sustained by Washington's "unrelentingperseverance...
...Charles Lee, his third-rank general, labeled the chief "a bladder of emptiness and pride...
...Recently, though, he has been revivified through the splendid efforts of several biographers...
...history, even as the standards for measuring public figures constantly shifted, George Washington remained at the top of the list of national giants...
...Last winter Joseph X Ellis gave us His Excellency (see NL, November/December 2004...
...In the scintillating 1776, he brings us back to the first year of the Revolutionary War...
...The volume brims with unexpected details elucidating the War's beginnings...
...and a hypocrite in public life...
...Edward Lengel's General George Washington elaborates on his entire "less than perfect" military career...
...editor, "The Presidents: A Reference History" IN the early period of U.S...
...These three works ought to find wide audiences, for the celebrated struggle between our George and their George has never been matched in our history...
...Howe, incidentally, urgently tried to end the insurrection by negotiations...
...Thomas Paine, literary genius of the Revolution and author of Common Sense, stamped Washington "treacherous in private friendship...
...Nash argues that the elite, upper-class character of the Minutemen, the heroic figures of the Revolution's early days, was not replicated in the Army that went on to win the War...
...Instead, he singles out what he perceives to be a rich spirit of democracy simmering throughout colonial American society and coalescing as the ideology of the new nation...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
