George Washington

August 5, 2013
Upon meeting George Washington, Abigail Adams remarked to her husband, John, that “the gentleman and the soldier look agreeably blended” in him. Seizing upon this observation, biographer Brumwell (Paths of Glory) offers an intense portrait of a military leader whose habits of leadership combined a thirst for victory with the deep emphasis on discipline and order that Washington had observed in the British army. In exhausting detail, Brumwell wearily traces the well-known story of Washington from his childhood and youth, his work as a surveyor, his love for Sally Fairfax, his marriage to Martha Custis, and his decision to settle down as a gentleman planter in 1759. Brumwell then covers Washington’s military exploits in the Indian Wars on the Monongahela, his elevation to commander of the Continental Army, and his successful exploits and leadership in the War of Independence. Since Washington often fought on the frontlines, he witnessed the horrors of war firsthand and years after his military career had ended, he turned his back on the “rage of conquest” he witnessed in various European conflicts. Brumwell’s often tedious book portrays Washington as he grew from a “feisty young frontier officer” to “the tough 40-something commander of the Continental Army” who wished to be remembered most for his military exploits and leadership.

August 1, 2013
America's "pugnacious fighting man," as dashingly portrayed by English historian Brumwell (Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe, 2008, etc.). The author concentrates on Washington's martial experience during the 1750s alongside Gen. Edward Braddock and other British fighting the French. During this time, he honed his noble reputation as a patriot leader. Denied a gentleman's education by the untimely death of his Virginia planter father in 1743, young George applied his mathematical talents to learning the trade of land surveying for a lucrative career, as well as a chance to apply his fascination with the wilds of the North American interior. With the encroaching French into Virginia territory in the 1750s, Washington volunteered his services as emissary in the "escalating imperial rivalry," publishing a journal of his arduous journey into Ohio Country in 1754, bringing him fame at age 22. From colonel of the Virginia Regiment to aide-de-camp for Braddock, Washington cut his military teeth on the British military hierarchy, adopting an exemplary code of order and discipline that he would later apply to his ragged American recruits. Enduring French and Indian "terror tactics" and debilitating dysentery, he made a name as an intrepid and adaptive leader (for example, he clothed his men "after the Indian fashion" for one campaign), while revealing already by 1757 in his letters a sense of resentment against what he perceived as "a deliberate policy of discrimination against colonials." The hard reality of fighting in frontier warfare dispelled notions of old-world gallantry and created the hardened soldier Washington became rather more characteristically than the gentleman farmer he fashioned himself (and was often portrayed) later on. Brumwell's subsequent tracking of Washington through the battles of the Revolutionary War seem almost anticlimactic in comparison to the dynamic early annals of this heroic man. The First Father waves from his high horse with this felicitous new assessment of his derring-do.

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