Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader

ALSO BY ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF

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

Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies

The Glorious Cause:
The American Revolution, 1763–1789

The Mathers:
Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728

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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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Middlekauff, Robert.
Washington’s revolution : the making of America’s 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, 1732–1799. 2. Generals—United
States—Biography. 3. United States—History—Revolution,
1775–1783—Biography. 4. United States—History—Revolution,
1775–1783—Campaigns. I. Title.
E312.25.M54 2015    973.3′4092—dc23    [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

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

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Preface

ONE
Virginian

Prologue: The Young Washington’s World

1 Young Washington

2 The Making of a Soldier

3 From Planter to Patriot

TWO
American

4 Boston

5 New York

6 The Philadelphia Campaign

7 Valley Forge

THREE
Citizen of the World

8 Citizen of the World

9 Weary but Resolute

10 Mutiny and Rallying the French

11 Yorktown

12 The War’s End

Epilogue: Return to Virginia

Acknowledgments

Notes

A Note on the Sources

Illustration Credits

A Note About the Author

Illustrations

Preface

This book might have been entitled
Washington and the Revolution
, for it deals with both the man and the Revolution. But since Washington’s 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 America—Admiral 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 standards—did 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 Washington’s 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