Lindsay Chervinsky: What can we learn about leadership in the Revolutionary War?
Welcome to Leadership and Legacy, Conversations at the George Washington
Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, director of the library.
In this podcast series, we talk with experts about leadership and history,
how studying these stories helps us understand our current moment,
and how we can apply lessons from leaders in the past to our own lives.
In the Washington Post, George Will wrote that Rick Atkinson is the finest
military historian, alive or dead.
He is certainly among the most accomplished.
He has written about the nation's biggest wars from the Revolution,
to World War II, to Vietnam.
He has studied conflict from the archives and from the battlefield,
written about generals alive and dead, from afar and beside them.
These experiences offer a rare insight into military
leadership across the centuries.
Despite earning all the accolades, Rick remains incredibly kind.
He has retained his sense of humor even when writing about the cruelest
aspects of war, and he still values the importance of writing well,
which is a gift to his readers.
He was kind enough to join us to record an episode about his latest book, the
Fate of the Day, on launch day, to talk about Revolutionary War leadership, George
Washington, and what we can learn when we compare generals from different eras.
I learned so much about strategic planning, long-term vision,
and the importance of will.
I hope you do too.
Here's our conversation.
So I feel like we could do an entire series on leadership with you
because you've written about so many incredible leaders over the course
of history and some of our most momentous moments in American history.
But you're a very busy man, so we appreciate your time,
especially on publication day.
Let's perhaps start though with, you have written about all these
other people, contemporary military leaders, World War II military
leaders, and Revolutionary war leaders.
What draws you to these people?
How do you pick them?
Rick Atkinson: I think I pick the wars rather than the leaders
to start with, but obviously all wars have leaders, good and bad.
So that's an inescapable part of the joy of writing about war 'cause it's
ultimately about character, like life.
I've written about five different American wars, eight books, and most of them have
been more recent, but now I'm back in the 18th century with the American Revolution.
So I feel like I have lived with a number of leaders for a long time,
including contemporary leaders.
I went to Iraq in 2003 with the 101st Airborne, and I lived elbow to
elbow with, uh, Major General David Petraeus for two months, watching him
in combat for the first time, taking the storied 101st Airborne into Iraq.
So that opportunity allowed me to see, and I've seen other American generals in
combat elsewhere, it allows me to kind of triangulate and see what they do in
approaching leadership in a contemporary format compared to historical figures.
So having written about Vietnam, for example, or particularly the
Revolution, or especially World War II.
I spent 15 years writing about World War II, the American role
in the liberation of Europe.
And so I spent 15 years living, metaphorically, with Dwight
Eisenhower and George Patton and Omar Bradley, and a bunch of other
famous and not so famous names.
So to me, they're all endlessly fascinating because the stress of
combat is unlike any stress that any human has ever experienced.
And the character of these individuals is revealed by the stress of combat.
And watching that play out historically or contemporaneously
is a privilege as a historian or as a journalist as I was at one time.
And some of them have some things in common.
Some of them have very little in common.
Their successes and their failures all derive ultimately, in my estimation,
from some aspect of character.
So that's part of what I do as a writer.
Lindsay Chervinsky: I wanna dig more into the character piece, but I think you're
probably one of the few people writing about the Revolution who has actually
witnessed combat leadership firsthand.
I've only written about dead guys, so I certainly have not had that privilege.
And so I'm wondering what that firsthand experience, how does that allow you to see
when you're looking at 18th century source material and we can't ask them questions?
How do you think that firsthand experience changes your perspective or your ability
to understand what they're going through or- or what you're seeing on the page?
Rick Atkinson: I think one of the things, for example, in watching Petraeus,
and I've seen others who are perhaps not as celebrated as he is among 21st
Century American generals, but watching Dave Petraeus work on the mystical
bond between leader and led, that's a fundamental part of leadership.
We see it with George Washington beginning in 1775 in the Revolution, we see it
with other American Army leaders during the Revolution, but this trust that you
have to build as the leader, the sense that the led must have, that you are not
throwing their lives away, that you are sharing the hardship with them, that you
understand the sacrifice that they are making on behalf of your common cause.
That's a pretty profound thing, and if you can't do it, you're not gonna succeed as
a military leader, so that's one thing.
Some of it is minutia, watching the issue of sleep discipline, for
example, as they call it in the army.
If you don't get enough sleep, and it's very hard to get enough sleep in -- when
you're in a war, you tend to be prone to making serious errors of judgment.
And the leaders who can force themselves one way or another, whether it's, you
know, they have a certain regimen or contemporaneously, they're using Ambien
or whatever it takes to make sure they get enough sleep, to make sound judgments,
to be available 18 hours a day is something that's, you know, universal.
So there are aspects of leadership that are 21st century aspects that would
be entirely familiar to Thucydides, entirely familiar to Washington and his
contemporaries, entirely familiar to Civil War generals, Vietnam generals, and so on.
And it's little things and big things.
And collectively they amount to success or failure as a general or general officer.
Lindsay Chervinsky: So let's dig into character.
You, you mentioned that most leadership qualities go back to that.
And I imagine the good qualities go back to that and, and the bad qualities do too.
So as we're looking across the scope of many centuries, you know, in this
book Fate of the Day, which is your second volume in the Revolutionary War
trilogy, there are a lot of bayonets.
There are probably fewer bayonets in Iraq in the 21st century.
So there are aspects of war that are quite different.
What elements of character do you think are required for good military leadership?
Rick Atkinson: Well, Lindsay, I, I think there are several things, and I put
at the top of the list or close to the top of the list is just simply will.
The will to prevail, the will to dominate your opponent, the will to
power through whatever difficulties are besetting you and there are difficulties
every day, in every way, in every war.
And those who've got the tenacity and the capacity to impose their
will on the battlefield, on their forces, tend to be successful and
those who can't are not successful.
I would say that the ability to communicate is vital.
So somebody like Eisenhower, whom we often think of as syntax mangling, mumbling
president is actually extraordinarily articulate, both in writing and orally.
At one point, Churchill, who knows something about articulation says
good generals are usually not as precise in articulation as
he is, speaking of Eisenhower.
Washington is the same way.
Washington, you usually rarely leave Washington's presence without a pretty
clear idea of what the boss wants.
And if you read his correspondence and his orders as I have for volume,
after volume, after volume of the Washington Papers, you see that he's
got the capacity to convey what it is that he wants, the commander's intent.
Or if he's writing to political figures, his political masters,
he's got the capacity to be quite clear about his needs, his
ambitions, so that's another thing.
I think communication is extraordinary and communicating to the troops
is perhaps even more important than any other aspect of it.
The troops have to know that the commander is there.
Commander has to be able to convey his understanding of their difficulties,
his understanding of their needs, his understanding of the danger that
they're facing, and he has to convey the notion that he's sharing it with them,
he's sharing the hardship with them.
So I think those are all facets of successful leadership through the ages.
Again, you know, you go back and read Homer and you can say, well, okay,
does Agamemnon have this capacity?
Does Odysseus have this capacity?
But you know, there's something universal about it.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.
And what about flaws?
Rick Atkinson: Well, you know, I think if you look at generals who- first of
all, from a military standpoint, don't have the traits of a great captain.
And by great captain we mean somebody who sees the battlefield spatially and
temporally in a pretty unique way.
It's a rare thing.
So Napoleon, he sees the battlefield unfolding temporally over hours, or
days, or weeks, and he sees it spatially.
He understands the placement of large forces and where the enemy is likely
to come, where the weaknesses are of his forces and the opposing forces.
So if you've got those capacities that, uh, you've got a big leg up
on anybody, and it's pretty rare.
And I would say, you know, that Eisenhower and Washington are not great captains.
They don't have this capacity.
Washington makes a lot of tactical mistakes.
He is not a natural great captain, and neither was Eisenhower.
You know, to their credit, I think they recognize that
they've got bigger roles to play.
In both cases, their capacity for strategic thinking, for seeing the
big arrows on the map, for being political generals, and they are
the two best political generals this country has ever produced.
And by that I mean their ability to speak truth to power, to their
political masters, to pull the levers that are necessary to get those
political masters to provide them with what they need, for combat success.
And in both cases, the acknowledgement that they have political masters.
Um, in the 18th century, it's a very fraught issue whether or not Washington
will become a Cromwell and Washington is at pains right from the beginning, right
from when he takes over command of the Continental Army to assure Congress, state
governors, committees of safety, anybody who will listen that he is not going to
turn into a Cromwell, that he doesn't have aspirations to be a military dictator,
that in fact he is subservient to them.
This is, first of all, it's a priceless gift that he has given us 250 years
later, but it also signals that he is prepared to do the bidding of these
political masters and Eisenhower has, is not the same fraught concern that
Eisenhower is gonna turn into a Cromwell, partly because of the tradition that
Washington has established long before.
But Eisenhower knows how to play the political masters at home, whether
it's George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the Army, President
Roosevelt, Congress, or whatever.
So these traits are important, and if you don't do it right, if you
can't do it right, if you're one of innumerable Lincoln generals in
the Civil War, you're gonna fail.
And they do fail.
So if you lack the basics, battlefield brio, you're gonna fail.
You're not gonna be able to lead men in the dark of night the way, uh, a
good battlefield commander has to.
So, you know, the list of those who fail is probably longer than
the list of those who succeed.
And the list of traits that cause you to fail is certainly longer than the list
of traits that cause you to succeed.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Atkinson's latest book, the Fate of the Day
is the second volume of a planned trilogy about the American Revolution
and brings the war to 1780.
It's the follow-up to his award-winning The British Are
Coming, which ended in 1777.
The American Revolution was long and complicated, and historians
love to debate periodization.
So I was eager to hear what Atkinson's thought process was
in choosing to divide it up.
Absolutely.
So let's dig into this volume a little bit.
When we think about the Revolutionary War, because it is such a long conflict and,
and it requires three volumes, I'm curious how you thought about segmenting it.
How did you choose where to start a volume, where to end a volume?
What was this chronological scope you were thinking of?
Rick Atkinson: I've got eight years of war to cover, and I knew that I had to
give enough background information to set up the conflict initially, but I
didn't wanna start with the Stamp Act.
I don't want to, I'm not litigating the 10 years that
lead up to Lexington and Concord.
I am a military historian and I'm writing primarily about what
happens on the battlefield and things that are related to battle.
So, um, you know, I start volume one, essentially, I started in England, in
fact, so that we have an understanding that our eventual opponent, where they're
coming from, where George III is coming from, and Parliament with the creation
of the first British Empire and their determination to preserve that against
these insurrectionists in America.
And so the book unspools.
Chapter one begins on the eve of Lexington and Concord, and off we go.
Looking at how to cleave them, I sometimes think that I'm trying to be a
jeweler, as if I really understand what I'm talking about, but jewelers look at
the facets of a stone that you're cutting.
A diamond, or a ruby, or an emerald, and you're trying to find the facets so
that it cleaves cleanly and naturally.
And I'm looking for that in the narrative that I'm writing about.
With volume one, it is pretty simple, I think.
Things are going very badly for the home team for much of the first couple years
of the war, and then Washington makes a diving catch by his extraordinary,
desperate attack on Christmas night, 1776, and crossing the Delaware and
attacking the Hessian garrison at Trenton.
And then doing it again, and he doubles down, which is one of the most remarkable
parts of his generalship at this point, and attacks the British in Princeton.
So that's a place to end volume one.
And you know, we end on an upbeat note and there's hope.
'Cause Washington has just written virtually on the eve of those battles,
"I think the game is pretty near up." He writes that to his brother.
So things are very dark and as a writer, I don't want despondency
to, to overwhelm the poor reader.
Even those who know well what's gonna happen.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Despondency probably doesn't inspire a whole lot of people
to pick up volume two, I would imagine.
Rick Atkinson: Well that's part of it.
And anyway, I think it's a good place to stop and they go into winter
quarters, and they're in winter quarters basically for the next five months.
And not much happens in the 18th century in winter quarters.
So I pick up volume two where volume one ends.
This time we actually begin in Versailles so we can understand the French who
are gonna be absolutely critical to success if there is to be success.
And I want to introduce Louis XVI and the court at Versailles, and Marie
Antoinette, also known as Madame Deficit.
And we happen to be there with Benjamin Franklin, our first and greatest diplomat.
So he's a very fine guide around Paris and Versailles.
And we happen to be there with Lafayette 'cause he's leaving France against
the King's orders to come to America.
So that's a good place to start.
And then we pick up the action and the battles are fast and furious in
the middle volume of this trilogy with Brandywine and, well first with the
British coming down Lake Champlain and they capture Ticonderoga, and they're
in the Hudson River Valley and it's not looking good for New England and so on.
And all that's gonna lead to Saratoga.
But first we have disasters, Brandywine, and Paoli, and
then Germantown and and so on.
So where to end it?
Because a lot happens and the war becomes a global war, it goes from
being an obscure brush fire on the edge of empire to a global war on
four continents and the Seven Seas.
The British changed their strategy in the Southern Strategy to try to
roll up the colonies from the south.
Takes us to Savannah and to Charleston.
And that seems to me like a pretty good place to end volume two, Charleston.
Spoiler alert, Charleston is captured by the British after a siege in May of
1780, and it's an absolute catastrophe for the Americans, the entire Army.
5,000 men surrender and things look — okay now we can be despondent,
because despondency is certainly the order of the day then.
So that seemed like a good place to end it.
I actually have a coda in the epilogue.
A month after Charleston falls, we're in London again.
We go to Britain periodically in this book and we see the Gordon
Riots, which is the worst civil disturbance in British history.
Almost a thousand people are killed in the Gordon Riots for various reasons.
So the Brits have their problems too.
So if you're feeling despondent as a patriot, the other guy on the other
side of the hill, he's got problems too.
So that's where we are when this book ends.
And then the last volume will take us to Yorktown, obviously, and
through the end of the war in 1783.
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Lindsay Chervinsky: So I wanna dig more into the ups and the downs
and the leadership failures and spectacular successes in this volume.
But just for a little bit of context, especially because we
have this anniversary coming up pretty soon, what did it look like
for Washington to take command of this brand new Continental Army?
What did that mean?
What did it require to actually build the thing?
This question opened the door to a broader conversation about leadership during the
war, especially the role of generals.
How did Washington stack up against the British officials he faced?
Rick Atkinson: Well, he shows up in early July, 1775, having been appointed
commander in chief of what is now loosely called the Continental Army,
which is aspirational more than reality.
And he's had five years of military experience, which is
more than most Americans have had.
It's as a militia colonel in Virginia, always under superior British command
in the French and Indian War, the Seven Years' War as the Europeans know it.
But he's been outta uniform for 16 years, and there's a lot he
doesn't know or that he's forgotten.
He doesn't know much about cavalry.
He doesn't know a whole lot about artillery.
He knows nothing about continental logistics and on and on.
So he's a Virginian appointed by Congress to be the commander-in-chief of what
is largely a New England militia army.
And the first thing he's gotta do is get over the prejudice that
he's got against New Englanders.
Of course, you know, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
Those are different countries from Virginia.
And he talks privately about dirty New Englanders and he's really
got nothing good to say about them.
And he does not appreciate, in my estimation, the sacrifices that
these men are making to leave their farms, their shops, their families to
come and join the cause at his side.
He's got several hundred slaves at Mount Vernon taking care
of business while he's away.
I think during his lifetime there, the number is at least 578 slaves here.
He worries about Martha, his wife, and he worries about Mount Vernon, but
he's got business taken care of at home and he doesn't really understand that.
It's not clear to me that he grasps what these men are sacrificing.
That's gonna be his biggest, I think, requirement to succeed.
He's got to not only impose discipline and he understands the need for discipline.
"Discipline is the soul of an army," he declares.
And he's got a very good eye for subordinate talent.
So he sees a 25-year-old overweight Boston bookseller named Henry Knox, and somehow
realizes, "Hey you know, this guy is gonna be the father of American artillery." It's
not clear anyone else would've guessed.
He's absolutely right.
He sees this lapsed Quaker, 36 years old from Rhode Island named Nathaniel
Green, and somehow he recognizes that Nathanael Greene is gonna be
second only to Washington as the indispensable man in the Continental
Army over the course of the war.
So he's got that going for him, and he's gotta be attentive to
these large subordinate positions.
But he's also his own intelligence chief.
He's his own muster master general.
He's his own commissary general.
There will be men appointed to these positions, but he fortunately has a,
he's a devil for detail and he can seem like a real micromanager, but it's
because he's gotta be a micromanager.
If he doesn't attend to these critical facets of forming an army and growing
an army, it's not gonna get done or it's not gonna be done well.
So he's doing all these things simultaneously while he's
taking command at Cambridge.
And he's got a few months, as it turns out, because the war slows down a bit.
The British are more or less stuck in Boston.
The forces around Boston have the opportunity to congeal and
the troops get to know Washington and vice versa and so on.
So those are the challenges that he is got right from the Get-go.
And I think it's a tribute to his capacities that he masters
these things pretty quickly.
Lindsay Chervinsky: So you started off by saying there were a lot of things he
didn't know, including how to do logistics and how to bring together this force.
How did he learn those things?
Rick Atkinson: Partly it's book learning.
He's got a stack of books with him, the standard texts for
18th century wannabe generals.
He reads them and he learns some things from that.
Part of it is he's got common sense.
Those five years that he has spent with the Brits in the French and
Indian War serve him well because he's watched how they do things.
He's imbibed a lot of that.
He's fundamentally a British officer in a Continental uniform because he
recognizes that there are things that the British have evolved over the centuries
that are useful to his application.
It's trial and error to some extent.
It's trial and error with personnel.
It's trial and error as a battlefield commander.
He stumbles periodically, famously, but he's got the benefit of having
opponents who stumble, having opponents who are making bad strategic decisions.
Opponents who have the challenge as all counter-insurrectionary forces must,
whether you're fighting an insurrection in Vietnam or you're fighting an
insurrection in Iraq, you've got to win.
If you're waging a counter-insurrectionary war, particularly if it's an expeditionary
war, you're fighting at a distance.
So the British have to win.
If you're leading the insurrection, you have to not lose.
And there's a difference there.
And Washington comes to recognize that.
I think he knows that he's gotta fight on the strategic defensive.
It's not a natural act for him.
He is habitually aggressive and he wants to slug it out.
But he comes to recognize after getting slapped around pretty good that
that's not how he's gonna win the war.
I think, you know, he's got a big brain.
He's got a brain organized for executive action.
He's willing to take responsibility, usually.
He's willing to make decisions usually, and he's willing
to learn from his mistakes.
So these are attributes that are pretty important as it turns out.
Lindsay Chervinsky: You, you know, mentioned usually he's
taking responsibility and usually he's making decisions.
One of the times where I think he ducks that a little bit actually shows some of
the political savvy that you talked about earlier, which was when he ordered the
series of retreats across New York City, and called a council of war before every
single retreat and then conveniently sent a report to Congress without them asking,
saying "all of the officers agreed that a retreat was absolutely essential." And
that's one of those moments where, you know, I think in retrospect we all agree
retreat was essential 'cause if he had been captured, then that's basically that.
But that political savvy is something that we, I think, don't always see in
the Revolution and is quite essential.
Rick Atkinson: Well, yeah, I agree entirely with what you're saying.
The man who habitually could never tell a lie, can hedge the truth sometimes, and
his after-action reports to Congress in particular after Brandywine or whatever.
He's putting in the best possible light to the point of prevarication.
Uh.
Lindsay Chervinsky: How much of that do you think is essential?
Like, you know, if morale is an important part of war fighting.
How much of that is required and how much of that was him being
very sensitive to his reputation?
Rick Atkinson: I think it's both, actually.
He is sensitive to it after Brandywine, where he gets out-generaled.
And the guy who should have a surveyor's eye, since he was a surveyor,
misreads the ground as he had in New York, the Battle of Long Island.
He just doesn't understand, uh, the danger of being outflanked.
He should have ridden out and seen the ground for himself in a way that he
did not in either of the instances.
So there's a bit of CYA- "cover your ass," going on there.
I think it's pardonable in retrospect.
I don't think he's beyond the pale in fabricating what happened when
the, uh catastrophe occurs at Fort Washington, it's really the end of
the campaign for Manhattan and Fort Washington falls November of 1776.
He hedges his responsibility for it.
It's shared responsibility.
General Greene is certainly partly responsible, but Washington has been
out and he's looked at that ground and he has basically approved the
deployments of the forces there.
And he's agreed that those troops are largely invulnerable.
Well, they're not.
And you know, in one day, 3000 men are, are captured or killed.
He never really fesses up.
He doesn't say to Congress, you know, "This is my fault. I take
full responsibility for it." These are pardonable sins in my
estimation, looking back on it.
And uh, he tells Congress a lot and he's extremely diligent in reporting
to them and telling them what he needs.
So this is just part and parcel of this ongoing relationship that
he's got with his political master.
Lindsay Chervinsky: You mentioned that at the Battle of Brandywine,
he is out-generaled, and you also mentioned that some of the British
leadership sometimes make quite poor strategic choices as well, and so
he benefits from those poor choices.
You've kind of outlined for us what Washington's generalship looks like,
where he had strengths, where he had weaknesses, where he learned.
Can you contrast that for us with what did the British leadership look
like in terms of their generals?
What background experience did they have?
What information were they bringing in?
How was their approach to leadership similar or different?
Rick Atkinson: Well, on paper they looked great, you know?
And of course it's a substantial professional army.
The officers tended to have combat experience from the Seven Years' War.
The rank and file tend not to have much experience.
And that army, for example, led by Burgoyne down Lake Champlain in the spring
of 1777, which is the army that's gonna be destroyed at Saratoga, is pretty green.
Not a lot of the rank and file have experience.
So the generals are, starting with Gage, who's the commander in Boston
when the war begins, look like they're gonna have the right stuff because
they look the part, they talk the part.
And none of them prove to be particularly capable, and some of
them are catastrophically incapable.
Part of the issue is the difficulty of a waging war across 3000 miles
of open ocean in the age of sail.
Part of it is that when you're fighting a counterinsurgency as an
expeditionary force, you've got to win.
You can't wait them out.
You can't drag it out.
You've got to win.
And that is in part because you've got a restive populace at home in Britain, who
the King wants, wants the war to end.
It's very, very expensive in blood and treasure.
So the sequence of commanding generals who come — William Howe following
Gage, Clinton following Howe, Clinton is commanding general for four years.
Clinton is a capable, very smart guy who ought not have been command
because he avoids responsibility.
He's constantly bickering with his subordinates.
He's constantly bickering with a Lord George Germain who is the American
Secretary back in London, he's the Robert McNamara of this war for the British.
And he has got character flaws that are disqualifying as it turns
out, um, even though he has got his moments on the battlefield.
Lindsay Chervinsky: What were his character flaws?
Rick Atkinson: Well, for one thing, he's very reluctant to accept responsibility.
He doesn't really want the job.
He asks to quit several times.
He's incapable of getting along with the navy.
This is pretty important if you're fighting across 3000 miles of open ocean.
His father had been an admiral and so he has been around the navy all his life.
His father had been the governor of New York.
Lindsay Chervinsky: And the British were kind of known for
the navy, so it's a little bit...
Rick Atkinson: Yeah, they were known for the navy.
It's only the greatest navy the world has ever seen, and it's absolutely vital
that the navy support the army and so on.
Now, there's a series of duds who are admirals with the notable
exception of Richard Howe, who's one of the great fighting
admirals in British naval history.
But Clinton seems able to get along with almost none of them.
And this hampers operations.
Clinton is the commanding general at Sullivan's Island when there's
an expedition in 1776, it goes down to attack Charleston, essentially.
And he's bickering constantly with everybody, including the
commanding admiral on the scene.
It's a major loss for the Brits.
It keeps them out of the South for several years.
So he's a figure I find very interesting because he is very
smart and he writes things down.
We have a, a good record of his account of things
— Lindsay Chervinsky: Always helpful.
Historians are always appreciative of that.
Rick Atkinson: Always helpful.
It's very self-serving, but nevertheless, it's useful.
But, he's insufficient, so this is damaging to the cause to say the
least, that they don't have the capable leadership that they need for almost
the entire eight years of the war.
Lindsay Chervinsky: There's always a question with humans of how much
of it is nature versus nurture.
And I think with war, there's a question of how much of it is leadership
and how much of it is circumstance, because both of those play a pretty
big role in determining the outcome.
You've mentioned counterinsurgency multiple times, but you also mentioned
that the British were lacking in really sufficient leadership at various points.
How much of it was the counterinsurgency, the lack of understanding about the really
difficult circumstances that were going to make victory much harder, and how much
of it was the humans doing a bad job?
Rick Atkinson: You know, my friend Dave Petraeus says, you
gotta get the big ideas right.
If you don't get the big ideas right, you're doomed in warfare.
And the big ideas in this war, the Brits don't get right.
So for example, they believe that there — and this starts with the
King and it goes down through his government, and Parliament, and
the British population as a whole.
They believe that a majority of the 2 million white Americans
fundamentally are loyal to the crown.
They believe that there is a large residual Loyalist population
here that doesn't want to be part of this insurrection.
That's wrong.
Modern scholarship shows pretty conclusively that about 20% of
those 2 million Americans are really dyed in the wool Loyalists
who are gonna support the crown.
That's never enough to control the levers of government here.
So the British never, after 1775, control any of the 13 states.
They control pockets and there are pockets of loyalism along the
western frontier, and along maritime areas in the central middle Atlantic
states, New York City, and so on.
But it's just a wrong reading of the population.
Now that's pretty fundamentally wrong.
Another big idea that they have wrong, maybe the biggest of the ideas that
they have wrong, is the conviction, again, starting with the King and shared
by virtually all of the ruling class in Britain, is that if the American
states, if the American colonists, if the American rebels are permitted
to secede from the empire, that it's gonna encourage insurrections in
Canada, in the Sugar Islands, where the real money is, in Ireland, in India.
And that it'll be the beginning of the end of the first British
Empire, which is a new thing.
It had been created at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763.
And the King is absolutely determined that it's not gonna happen on his
watch, to the point where he threatens to abdicate if a hard line is not
maintained against the Americans.
This is wrong.
This is a wrong reading of the dynamic of the relationship between
colonies and the mother country.
He's told that it's wrong by the likes of Edmund Burke, and particularly by
Adam Smith, who's brilliant treatise, the Wealth of Nations is published in 1776.
Smith says that this is just not how it works.
You can have a better relationship at a much smaller cost in blood and
treasure through international trade.
Well, King just doesn't believe that.
So when you start with these wrong, big ideas, and there are other things that
they get wrong too, it's hard to execute a successful war winning strategy.
And it's even harder when you don't have capable war-winning
generals that you need to do it.
So I think it's a sequence of issues that kind of fit hand
in glove and lead ultimately to failure on the part of the British.
Lindsay Chervinsky: I know most historians hate counterfactuals, but if you'll bear
with me — do you think it's possible, given all those wrong ideas, that
there were circumstances under which the British could have won the war?
Rick Atkinson: I love counterfactuals 'cause you can never be wrong.
You know, I think it's possible they could have won.
There were moments when they could have destroyed the Continental Army.
Washington gets away by a whisker in the fog after the Battle of Long Island.
The army is less than 3000 men retreating across New Jersey and across the
Delaware River in the late fall of 1776.
There are other occasions when if you kill or capture Washington and
destroy the army, well, you think the insurrection is probably over.
I think the problem is that by this point, there are issues that the
British have not really considered.
One is that the American population is doubling every 25 years.
It's a rate of growth unseen in the history of Europe, far outstrips
the British rate of growth.
So you know that two and a half million people here, including
500,000 enslaved Blacks, is going to get bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
And it's soon gonna be bigger than Britain.
It's soon gonna be way bigger than Britain.
How they're gonna keep that under their thumb is impossible, really.
And there are some in Britain who recognize that this is unlikely.
So I think that ultimately, even if they win tactically and operationally in the
period we're talking about, 1775 - 1783, they're not going to win in the long run.
Now no one has the wit to recognize early on that there's potentially a political
solution to this and it, and we recognize it in retrospect as the Commonwealth.
You know, nobody's actually, Burke has some ideas about a Commonwealth, but he
doesn't have the King's ear, and it's hard to articulate and it's hard to envision
at this time that there is a relationship between these, what will be independent
countries, that are still fundamentally loyal in some way to the mother country.
Well, that's not gonna happen.
And when the killing starts, it's never gonna happen.
Uh, so even if the British, and the British are gonna have to have a huge
occupation army here, if they win, that's gonna cost them a lot of money.
They're already deeply in debt from the Seven Years' War.
So the cards are against them.
They've not got good cards to play here.
Lindsay Chervinsky: April 19th, 2025 marked the 250th anniversary of the
start of the American Revolution.
As we here at Mount Vernon are keenly aware, that means that the
next eight years will be full of crucial anniversaries, including the
250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next summer.
I wanted to hear Atkinson's take on how, and if, the events of the war are still
relevant for modern, everyday Americans.
We're now in a season of anniversaries.
A couple weeks ago was the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord,
and we are going to be experiencing anniversaries for the next several years.
And I'm hoping that the American people will pay attention, and will care,
and will feel like it's relevant.
But there are probably a lot of Americans who do feel like it is very distant
and inaccessible or irrelevant to them.
I would love to know your thoughts on what you think we should be thinking
about with these anniversaries, why it matters, what, maybe what the legacy is,
or, or how we should be observing them.
Rick Atkinson: Yeah, I've thought about this.
Well, first of all, I think looking back allows us to see
what our forebearers believed, what they were willing to die for.
It's the most profound question any people can ask themselves.
It tells us something about who we are, where we came from, and that's
regardless of whether your family arrived in the 17th century or three years
ago as new citizens in this country.
We are the beneficiary of an enlightened political heritage handed down to
us by that revolutionary generation.
And it includes a tradition of personal liberties and strictures on how to divide
power and keep it from concentrating in the hands of authoritarians
who think primarily of themselves.
This is priceless.
This is a priceless political legacy that we've got, and we
can't permit it to be taken away.
We can't permit it to slip away, and we can't be oblivious to
this priceless political gift or the hundreds of thousands who've
given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past 250 years.
So this is an opportunity with the semiquincentennial, the 250th,
to affirm that and to see that we've got this in our hands.
It's something to pass along to our children and our grandchildren, and it
should act as a polestar for becoming the people that that revolutionary
generation thought we could become.
Lindsay Chervinsky: I love that.
One final question, which is if someone wants to, other than your book of course,
or we should say all of your books.
If they want to read more about leadership, what is a book
that you read that taught you something about leadership?
Rick Atkinson: There are a number of them, including War and Peace by Tolstoy.
But I, you know, I think I would recommend Grant's memoirs.
There's no better set of memoirs by an American general.
He writes really well.
It's a very poignant accomplishment because he is dying as he is writing
his memoirs — this is after the Civil War, obviously, after the presidency.
It shows, I think, a man who's been a failure in a lot of ways — as soldier, as
a fellow, a failure as a citizen almost, who nevertheless, through persistence and
capability and — rises to the occasion.
And he writes about his leadership and learning how to lead through
the most arduous circumstances.
You know, he presides over the deaths of hundreds of thousands,
which is the the most difficult thing to imagine for any leader.
And yet he does it with a certain grace, and he does it without ever losing
fact that those men, each of those men died, their individual deaths were as
unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake.
So he writes with great humanity about the most inhumane thing, and that is war.
So I recommend Grant's memoirs.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, that is a, a great suggestion.
Well, no one has ever said that before, so I, I love that it is unique.
Thank you so much for your time and sharing your wisdom with us.
Rick Atkinson: Yeah, thanks, Lindsay.
It's great talking to you, as always.
Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you for joining us this week on Leadership
and Legacy, and thank you so much again to our guest, Rick Atkinson.
You can find his new book, the Fate of the Day, wherever you buy books.
You can also check out more content from him on the Mount Vernon YouTube page,
including a recording of his book talk and some shorter videos he was kind enough
to record with us while he was visiting.
I'm your host, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.
Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential
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