Little Short of a Miracle

A very interesting fact is that George Washington was never formally educated.  He was raised, instead, within the domain of military striving and achievement, so much so that he was nearly a failure during his shorter stint as an officer and commander in the French and Indian Wars decades previous to the Revolutionary War because he was so ambitious. He made costly mistakes based on vanity and craving for acclaim.  In one more example of a twist of historical fate – and one that Washington probably carried with him all the way to his grave – was that his one chief goal as a young officer from Virginia was to become a British Regular!  In colonial America the Redcoat would have symbolized the epitome of a professional soldier and very few American military personnel ever

received papers of qualification.  Washington tried anyway but was denied by a subordinate military administrator who barely listened to him, turned his back on him and dismissed him as nothing more than a young upstart out Virginia.  Later, at Yorktown, 1781, when the British surrendered, Washington did not allow Cornwallis's men to march away from the scene in the commonly practiced dignified manner allowed for in battles at that time, but instead the Regulars (and German Hessians), had to lay down arms and slink away like beaten dogs from their entrenchments.  At the beginning of the siege, Washington was sure to fire the first symbolic cannon shot to begin what he felt and probably knew to be the final battle scene of the war.


It had been six and a half years after the battle at Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston.  Since that time, the Revolutionary War had taken many brutal turns. Campaign seasons came and went, winters crippled both sides, disease decimated troops, and what seemed like red hot causes in the beginning of the war turned to the more cold hard facts of living day by day.  After the British was defeated severely at Saratoga in 1777, politicians concluded that they could no longer sustain so many small defeats in the northern theater and turned their attention to the southern colonies where their primary trade resources resided and where, as they hoped in theory anyway, many more Loyalists (loyal to the King) lived – they simply needed to be stirred into action.  As always, the British troop numbers and discipline made its mark, bombarding and taking Charleston, as well as other coast sites, but something changed in this war at this point and the 'locals,' now called partisans, began to take up the challenge and turned the Revolutionary War – a war sometimes thought of as set field battles – into guerrilla warfare, a style that the British were ill-prepared to win.  Nathaniel Greene, chosen commander (by Washington) in the south, pulled Cornwallis into a cat and mouse chase around the countryside, exhausting them, devastating the British troops with not only exhaustion and lack of supplies but malaria, for example, a sickness which South Carolinians were immune to, but not the troops from a small island in the northern Atlantic.  The British had to eventually retreat back to the safety they perceived at Yorktown Virginia

by the sea, where they felt they held dominant sea power.  They were beat down, trapped, no escape route, and little loyalist support.  Engineered entrenchments and other standard battle structures no longer mattered.  Outnumbered, outmaneuvered, nearly seven years after Concord and Lexington, the Americans literally bombed the living daylights out of the British until one morning a British drummer could be heard tapping the chords of submission.  Washington, the overlooked officer of so many years

before, had persevered not so much as a charismatic leader, but one of a quiet, strong, extremely disciplined leadership. He had rarely, if ever, left the side of his Continentals throughout the hardships of the Revolutionary war, and thereby kept the loyalty of the men, the country and the cause for independence.  One historian commented accurately that most of what we think of today as 'American' values were set during the actual course of the Revolutionary War.  Where the British depended upon a rigid stratification in ranks (officers positions were often literally bought), the American Army was one of an extremely diverse and mostly democratic system.  Washington never stole power. He purposefully kept his Army run by the civilians in Congress.  He did not serve a monarch, but an idea of a governing body spread among many states.  When the war was over, he was astonished of victory.  He didn't feel entitled to it.  He had the presence of experience to admit victory was nothing short of a standing miracle.  America was born.