George Washington: Gentleman Warrior – Stephen Brumwell, 2012 ★★

Same Old George

Some write straightforward biographies of George Washington; others thesis-driven ruminations about his deeper meaning or presumed psychological makeup. Then there is Stephen Brumwell, who splits the difference and still misses the mark.

While George Washington: Gentleman Warrior does have a thesis, it's hardly original or revealing. That Washington was a product of his times, a social striver with a strong sense of honor and a focus on proving his self-worth in battle, isn't much of a leap from the established picture.

Perhaps recognizing this, Brumwell uses his thesis less as a springboard than backdrop for a conventional account of Washington's career, albeit one focused entirely on his time as a soldier. Hence the subtitle. If you want Washington the president or hemp farmer, go elsewhere.

"My inclinations are strongly bent on arms," Washington wrote to a governor's aide in November, 1754, a year after his first taste of battle in the Allegheny Mountains. That becomes the motif of his life as Brumwell explains it.

Brumwell's book is best in the early going, when he lays out Washington's days as a soldier of the King, leading an expedition into the borderland between French- and British-occupied North America. Washington was a bit of a callow fellow, short-sighted and opportunistic. His first blooding, an attack on French soldiers, had a disastrous result when Washington's Native American allies butchered the French leader after he had surrendered. Later, it was claimed the Frenchman had been on a diplomatic mission, which would cause Washington much embarrassment.

Brumwell not only tells this part of the story well, he spends enough time on it to explore why it was Washington emerged from the French and Indian War with both a positive reputation and real command ability. In short, he proved a flexible man who learned from his mistakes.

While recovering from a fever, a young Colonel Washington found himself in command of British troops on July 9, 1755 when a French ambush along the Monongahela River felled the commanding general. As Stephen Bramwell notes, his cool management of the withdrawal impressed those with him. Image from www.mountvernon.org.

Washington's pre-Revolutionary War period covers nearly half the book, and offers some useful insights along with a somewhat muddled chronology. I had no idea why Washington's first major battle, defending a strongpoint of his own construction called "Fort Necessity," was such an abject failure, but I did enjoy Bramwell's account of the battle and its aftermath.

A key problem with Gentleman Warrior is that once it moves to the much more well-charted terrain of Washington's time commanding the Continental Army against his former king, from 1775 to 1783, the book becomes less interesting. Bramwell presents examples of Washington's personal bravery under fire, and his "Fabian" command style of giving ground by not digging in (like he had at Fort Necessity) would prove the right strategy for winning the war without winning all the battles.

But this is not original information, or presented in a compelling manner. In fact, the Revolutionary material, long as it runs, feels like an afterthought. Worse, it really loses the central character as it focuses on battles he had no part in or such concerns as the employment of African-American soldiers, which seems like material better suited for other books. We get some primary-source observations on Washington from those who fought with him, but the anecdotes provided are not that striking and seem fuzzy from the decades that had passed before their telling.

Washington is a hard figure to write a book about. He wasn't the most outspoken person, and his admirable refusal to transfer his battlefield success into self-serving tyranny means he isn't going to grab you the way Napoleon might. You need either fresh insights, or a strikingly new angle. Bramwell doesn't have either, at least not after he leaves the French and Indian War period. The result is a been-there, done-that experience for all but the first-time Washington reader, and that reader will want a portrait that focuses on more than his military career.