The winter of 1777-78 that the Continental Army spent at Valley Forge was one of privation and misery amid the constant drilling that would prove vital to the troops' success against the British when warm weather arrived. The Valley Forge winter was also one of seemingly nonstop political gamesmanship by the army's leader, George Washington, according to historian John Ferling.
Aware that a movement was under way to convince Congress to remove him as commander, Washington worked feverishly behind the scenes to undercut his rivals, Mr. Ferling says. One of Washington's main detractors was a brigadier general named Thomas Conway, who happened to be a friend of the Marquis de Lafayette, a devoted Washington loyalist. "The American commander," Mr. Ferling writes, "played the young officer like a virtuoso," complaining to the Frenchman about Conway's "dirty Arts and low intrigues." Lafayette obediently threw Conway "to the wolves," we're told, denouncing the plotter to Congress.
Thanks to enlisting Lafayette's support and taking other counteroffensive measures, Washington of course succeeded in holding onto his job. When he wasn't playing military politics at Valley Forge, he was co-opting visiting politicians. Reform of the struggling Continental Army was in the air in Congress, which sent a delegation to Washington's Pennsylvania encampment. The wily general housed the delegation in a "capacious stone residence that served as headquarters for the quartermasters, a place where he could be assured that every need of his visitors would be tended," Mr. Ferling says.
Washington was ready for them: He had already polled his officers for ideas about military reform and incorporated their suggestions into a 38-page document handwritten by Alexander Hamilton. Washington presented the plan to the committee members, effectively pre-empting any overhaul they might have been contemplating and laying the groundwork for the more organized and disciplined army that would defeat the British. The maneuver was just one of countless such examples of "the hidden political genius of an American icon" explored by Mr. Ferling in "The Ascent of George Washington."
The Ascent of George Washington
By John Ferling
Bloomsbury, 438 pages, $30
You have to hand it to Mr. Ferling. So much has already been written about Washington—by so many scholars from so many angles—that there really isn't much left to be said. Having already written a Washington biography called "The First of Men," Mr. Ferling now claims to pull back the curtain to reveal the not-so-little man behind the pious, patriotic drapery. He has many valuable things to say, though he carries his premise several bridges too far, re-branding the supposedly modest, apolitical Father of Our Country as "a man on the make," who was "mad for glory" and whose "overweening ambition was visible from an early age."
This sounds a lot more like Sammy Glick in a periwig than good old George. Intemperate language mars Mr. Ferling's often impressive text, as does his too frequent reliance on speculation about Washington's thinking. In a typical paragraph we encounter "he had to have believed," "Washington may have missed" and "he had to know." Mr. Ferling also occasionally overreaches himself with labored historical analogies, comparing the French and Indian War with World War II, and the political ferment of the early republic with "the civil rights revolution and counterculture and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s." Yes, Valley Forge, meet Woodstock.
On the whole, however, Mr. Ferling's writing is fluent and informed, and if he diminishes the mythic Washington on the one hand, he builds up the pragmatic Washington on the other as "a highly political individual, one of the very best politicians in American history. George Washington was so good at politics that he alone of all America's public officials in the past two centuries succeeded in convincing others that he was not a politician."
This overstates the case—and the author, who is old enough to remember the Eisenhower years, when another soldier-president achieved similar supra-partisan status, should know it—but he has a point. Far from being a naïve idealist, George Washington was a skilled, practical and determined leader of men. He was driven by ambition, yes, but an ambition to earn fame and glory through honorable accomplishments. At times it is hard to tell whether Mr. Ferling approves or disapproves of this sort of honorable ambition, as when he describes a young Washington "driven to learn what led to success . . . once he discovered the secrets of achievement, he endlessly attempted to improve himself, courted patrons, endured incredible hardships, unblinkingly faced danger and took incalculable risks, both physically and financially."
Washington, he says, was what people sometimes refer to as a born leader, though "in reality Washington was not born this way. He had taken what nature had given him"—a robust native intelligence, a strong will and a commanding physical presence—"and through observation, self-scrutiny, thoughtfulness, perseverance, and industry reached a point that others saw him as a potential leader." Quite an attainment for a relatively poor, untraveled and totally self-educated younger son of a minor planter, although Mr. Ferling thinks that lucky timing had a lot to do with it.
Washington, he notes, was "precisely the right age for every epic event of the second half of the eighteenth century." But so were countless other people born in 1732, only to live and die in obscurity. Consider the crop of egomaniacal liberators and revolutionary heroes-turned-caudillos who soon afterward made a mess of Latin America—not to mention Napoleon Bonaparte, whose infatuation with his own destiny led to European tyranny and slaughter on an epic scale—and the conclusion is inescapable. Revolutionary-era America was lucky to have George Washington, not the other way around.
Mr. Bakshian, who served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes frequently on history, politics and gastronomy.
No comments:
Post a Comment