Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Stackpole Books, and author Douglas M. Branson for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.
Our educational system in the United States is far from perfect. In elementary school, we rarely get too deep into events of the past, preferring to teach history as something like a fairy tale. Even in my Advanced Placement history classes in high school, I never remember covering what a mess the Revolutionary War really was. Washington’s Lieutenants was certainly eye-opening for me.
Never before had I heard about the Conway Cabal, an effort of several generals to try to replace George Washington as the leader of the Continental Army. I’d learned about Valley Forge, but from the perspective of how tough the soldiers must have been to survive the winter there, rather than the fact that the Army’s Quartermaster, Thomas Mifflin, was responsible for the suffering and may have been diverting supplies away from them for his own profit. Yet this man is still celebrated all over his native Pennsylvania.
One General was such a womanizer that he was dismissed from service. That had to be pretty awful back then, as the standards were much more in favor of men when it came to these types of accusations. Another was a heavy drinker and even led men into battle while drunk, or at least attempted to.
Not all of Washington’s Generals were awful. Clergyman-turned-soldier Peter Muhlenberg was a steadfast soldier, leading men into battle at Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Yorktown. Hugh Mercer, Nathaneal Greene, and Benjamin Lincoln also served with distinction.
Branson also addresses problems with career advancement that often had more to do with favoritism by Congress rather than actual abilities. More than once, Washington had to take the time to write to another general who had been passed over and encourage him to stay the course when they were ready to quit the Army. All of these are things I never knew before. Was Army service in the Revolutionary War difficult? Yes. Losing the war meant that these men would be seen as traitors rather than the heroes we celebrate today. At the same time, many of those who rose through the ranks didn’t really help the cause.
At 264 pages, Washington’s Lieutenants isn’t a long book at all, and about a third of that is taken up by Branson citing his sources. He has done extensive research, including some other books I’ve read in the past. He also cites Chernow’s biography of Washington, which has been on my “to read” list for quite some time, so I think I need to read that soon. I do recommend Washington’s Lieutenants to gain a bit of a different perspective on what happened during the Revolutionary War from what we’ve been taught in school. It’s very eye-opening.
Share this:
Categories: Book Reviews
U.S. public schools aren’t good at teaching history. It’s obvious that domestic politics play a huge role in what kids are taught, especially at the critical stage between third and 12th grade. Conservatives, especially, get prickly over how America’s story is presented; the American Revolution is usually presented as “plucky American colonists defy a tyrannical monarchy over ‘taxation without representation,’ while leaving out the inconvenient fact that (a) KIng George III was not a bumbling tyrant with an autocratic bent; (b) Britain went to war with France in part because Virginians led by a 22-year-old George Washington ambushed a small party of French Canadians while on a mission to claim land in the “Ohio Country” for Virginia; (c) Britain had legitimate reasons for taxing the colonies as a result of said war with France; (d) and the Revolution wasn’t an antiseptic, mostly political break with the Mother Country punctuated by a handful of battles between those plucky Patriots and the “evil” redcoats. It was a messy, bloody, and cruel civil war that, like the American Civil War of the 1860s, split families apart and often pitted childhood best friends against each other.
I thank my mom for encouraging me to read on my own as a kid. I read quite a few books about the American Revolution that were not school textbooks or “taught” in class, so luckily I knew about the dysfunction in Washington’s high command (including the Conway Cabal) by the time I was in fifth grade. It’s ironic, in a way, that public schools contain, in the history section of their libraries, the very information that most right-wing (and even the more extreme left-wingers) don’t want kids to have.