General George's Genius.

• Author: Palmer, Dave R.
• Position: BY THE BOOK - General George Washington

THE EARLIEST BOOKS tended to glorify the Revolution and the men who fought it, especially George Washington. Parson Weems' biography is the epitome of this tradition. A beguiling storyteller, if not a reliably accurate one, Weems presented a star-spangled collage of contrived images pasted on a Fourth of July poster: a chopped cherry tree; a dollar skimmed across a broad river; omnipotent frontiersmen; embattled farmers; freezing huts at Valley Forge; laden boats wallowing amid ice flows in the Delaware River; a determined trio of ragged bandsmen. The message was of the inevitable triumph of good over evil. Other writers did better--John Marshall and Washington Irving come to mind--but, as a role, histories published during the 19th century and into the 20th continued to portray Washington and the war in a stoutly heroic mode. They gave the American commander in chief high marks as a general, likening his strategy to that of Fabius, the renowned ancient Roman general who defeated the invading Carthaginians, under Hannibal, by refusing battle and eventually wearing them down.

A dramatic change to that picture emerged in the opening decades of the 20th century as a good number of historians rebelled against conventional wisdom--revisionists who painted Washington and the war in quite different colors. Bleakness replaced glory in descriptions of military campaigns. Washington, they wrote, made amateurish mistakes and simply was lucky. He owed his eventual success more to the blunders of the British than his own abilities. He clearly was a stumblebum general.

Around the middle of the 20th century, historians generally seemed to tire of

the military side of the war and Washington's performance as a soldier. They turned to long-neglected topics of the revolutionary era such as the political and societal. That shift resulted in better balance to the overall depiction of the era, but mostly it left unchallenged the thinking of many that, militarily, Americans had been more fortunate than capable.

Consider the evaluations of American strategy of several representative scholars of the war. John Alden, writing in the late 1960s: "The Americans had only to keep the field until Britain should tire of the struggle." Douglas Southal Freeman: "Washington's strategy had to be patiently defensive." From an edited volume published in 1965: "The plan of the Americans was the simple defensive--to oppose the British as best they could at every point, and to hold...