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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
 
    Virginian

Prologue
The Young Washington’s World
     
     
    Long before George Washington’s death, Americans began writing about him in terms resembling the descriptions the New England Puritans had used to describe God. The Puritans never claimed ultimate insight into God’s essence—God, no matter how thoroughly studied, no matter how lovingly worshipped, remained unknown and unknowable. He could be approached, in a manner of speaking, by listing his attributes—his power and justice, for example—but the list could never be more than a beginning, certainly not a full understanding. George Washington, a mere man, was called godlike while still alive—meaning that he had been chosen by Providence to do great things; he was the being created to take the leading role, indeed the essential part, in leading his country out of the British Empire and into the new world of republics. 1
    The world in which he was born—the British colony of Virginia—was hardly one of republics. On the surface, at the time of Washington’s birth, Virginia appeared to conform to the understanding of many in Parliament of what a royal colony should be. The Crown appointed the governor, who almost always was of high social standing in England, and there was a bicameral legislature composed of a Governor’s Council, appointed by the Crown, and a House of Burgesses, a lower chamber, elected by and from property owners. There was also a general court, the councilors sitting in a judicial capacity. The republican element in this structure, if indeed it could be called that, was the House of Burgesses.
    At the time of Washington’s boyhood, the Virginia gentry increasingly controlled the government and much else in the colony. Since the late seventeenth century, the Crown and its local agent, the governor, had