Washington's Quiet Work

The Atlantic

4 days ago

In August 1775, nothing particularly dramatic was happening among the roughly 14,000 soldiers of the Continental Army besieging the British army in Boston. Indeed, nothing particularly dramatic happened for the next six months. And then, in March 1776, the British suddenly evacuated Boston. Which is why the months of apparent calm deserve a close look.
The semiquincentennial of American independence has begun: The anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill are behind us; the reenactment of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys' storming Fort Ticonderoga was a smashing success. Other big moments await, culminating, no doubt, in a big party on July 4, 2026. One hopes and expects that there will be plenty of hoopla, because that is the American way.
But 250 years ago today, the real and unspectacular work of American independence was under way. The Continental Army, created in June of 1775, had warily welcomed its new leader, George Washington, without much fuss. A slaveholding Virginia gentleman and loosely religious Anglican was going to lead an army that was mainly made up of New Englanders—including both psalm-singing, Bible-quoting descendants of the Puritans and dissenting freethinkers. For his part, Washington was appalled at what he saw: militia units that elected their own officers and called them by their first names, free Black men carrying weapons, money-grubbing Yankees (as opposed to land-grubbing Virginia gentry), and general squalor. 'They are an exceeding dirty and nasty people,' he told his cousin Lund Washington.
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What happened that summer outside Boston was of monumental importance. If this was to be an American army and not just an assembly of colonial militias, then Washington would have to be the first American general, and not just a provincial. He would have to create a system out of chaos, and hold together a force against a dangerous enemy. Although slightly outnumbered and bottled up in Boston, which connected to the mainland by only the narrowest of peninsulas, the British army was tough, cohesive, professional, and eager to avenge its unexpected defeats and Pyrrhic victories.
Washington did the work in many ways—by organizing the army in divisions and brigades, inspecting the troops, regularizing discipline, hammering home the importance of digging latrines, and quarantining soldiers who had smallpox. It helped that he looked the part of a military leader: tall, well turned out, graceful, and the best horseman in the colonies, by most accounts. No less important, he was able to transcend his aversion to those strange New Englanders.
Two men utterly unlike his social set in Virginia quickly became his most trusted subordinates: Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, a Quaker with a talent for organization, and a tubby Boston bookstore owner, Henry Knox, who became the chief of artillery. The former was eventually made quartermaster of the army and then commander of the southern army, where he displayed a flair for field command. The latter brought 59 heavy-artillery pieces from Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga to the army outside of Boston in the dead of winter, before developing the artillery arm into the equal of its British opponent.
Washington quickly realized that his most talented military leader was a third New Englander, the Connecticut merchant Benedict Arnold, who, until he committed treason, was the best field commander on either side of the conflict. In the autumn of 1775, Washington sent him off on a daring march through the Maine wilderness that very nearly wrested Quebec from British control.
The commander in chief needed a headquarters guard—what we today call a personal security detail—and so in March 1776, the army created a unit known as the life guard. Washington selected men from each army unit, which meant that the life guard's personnel skewed in favor of New Englanders; as its first commander, he chose a Massachusetts man, Caleb Gibbs, who lasted until 1780. He chose southerners, too, for crucial positions, and not all of them gentlemen—Daniel Morgan of Virginia, for example, was a roughneck leader of riflemen who formed an elite corps. The point was clear: This was an American army, and talented men, no matter their background, could win their leader's trust and rise up the ranks.
Washington remains in some ways the most remote of America's national heroes; he is more distant from us than Abraham Lincoln because of his greater austerity and reserve. He mastered his volcanic temper; prudently handled both his subordinates and his superiors; and knew the value of dignity and a certain distance in exercising command. He was brave but not particularly gifted as a tactical leader, and he was prone to devising overly aggressive and complicated plans, but these did not matter as much as the larger leadership qualities that he had brought with him to Boston. Small wonder that many years later, men who were his intellectual superiors—Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams—worked for him. His story shows why character and good judgment are far more important in a leader than mere intelligence.
Despite wonderful writing about Washington in recent books, including Ron Chernow's 2010 biography and the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the history of the Revolution, Americans do not value him as we once did. The fault lies across the political spectrum. For some (think of the 1619 Project), the fundamental sin of slavery overwhelms every aspect of biography. Washington controlled several hundred enslaved people on his Mount Vernon estate; he often treated them badly, and as of 1775, he felt no shame about that.
Being a plantation owner was part of his identity, but not all of it, and more important: Like some of the other Founders, he became uneasy about reconciling the ideals of the Revolution with the practice of holding men and women as chattel—which is why he manumitted all of his slaves in his will.
At a deeper level, this view of American history cannot help but crush patriotic pride in what remains, in retrospect, an astounding achievement. The Revolution culminated not in despotism but in a new political order based on liberty and self-government, built on ideals that, described with exceptional eloquence by another slaveholder, Jefferson, eventually blew up the evil institution on which their way of life rested.
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A different form of relentless present-mindedness afflicts the current administration, which seeks to purge national parks and museums of references to the darker sides of American history, beginning with slavery but also including the slaughter and dispossession of American Indians, and various forms of discrimination and persecution thereafter. In everything from signage to artwork, the Trump administration reaches for pabulum and kitsch, a false and unidimensional depiction of the American past.
As for academic historians, although some exemplary ones are at work—including Gordon Wood and David Hackett Fischer—the contemporary trend is to shun great individuals in favor of subaltern history. There is not much place for a commanding general in a pantheon composed of people overlooked by previous generations.
That summer and fall in Cambridge and the other towns surrounding Boston, George Washington's work made a difference. It reminds us that American independence was won by dramatic deeds, to be sure, but also by mastering—slowly and painfully—the undramatic things, such as insisting on rank insignia and saluting, managing gunpowder production, and digging latrines properly. It reminds us that there is such a thing as individual greatness, and that it can make all the difference. And particularly in an age of self-righteous scorn, we would do well to recall how Washington's lifelong struggles with himself—his prejudices, his emotions, his upbringing and background—contributed to final victory. We can still profit by the example.