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Was Washington’s plan successful? If not, what happened next?

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In 1965 James Flexner published the first volume of his biography of George Washington in which he coined the term now indelibly stamped on the image of the iconic Founder: Washington was the “indispensable man.”1 Supposedly, he was the individual central to American victory in the struggle for independence and without whom the cause would have failed. No one has seriously disputed the importance of Washington’s role; more than anyone, the rebel commander in chief emerged as the public face of the Revolution, the Olympian figure who persevered through the darkest days of the War for Independence and led his ragged Continentals to victory.

But indispensable? Really? Was any one individual caught up in a movement as broad and multifaceted as the revolutionary struggle really irreplaceable? John Adams, one of the men who proposed Washington as patriot commander in chief, thought not. “The Idea that any one Man alone can save Us,” he wrote to his friend Benjamin Rush, “is too silly for any Body . . . to harbor for a Moment.” In his view the Revolution was too big an event to ride on the fortunes of one man. But Adams instinctively distrusted powerful generals as threats to liberty, and he ventured his opinion in early 1778 when Washington’s generalship had come under considerable criticism.2

Adams’s skepticism hardly settled the issue. Others of the revolutionary generation were fully convinced only Washington’s leadership saved the patriot cause from certain defeat. The young Lafayette tellingly wrote Washington: “if You were lost for America, there is no Body who Could keep the army and the Revolution [alive] for Six months”; and Henry Laurens, president of Congress, feared “the ruin of our cause” without the commander in chief at the helm.3 So we are left with the question: If Washington had never existed, or had not received the top patriot command, or been killed in action, would the Revolution have failed?

Historians have long grappled with similar questions about the Father of His Country. Absent Washington, could other patriots have led the rebel armies to success? It is one of the great “what if” questions of American history, and not everyone has shared Flexner’s certainty on the matter. Narrow military debate goes back and forth over Washington’s merits vis-à-vis other generals. Aside from Flexner, the formal literature directly addressing the question is actually quite small. In 1940 Bernhard Knollenberg published his debunking look at Washington’s leadership; Knollenberg thought highly of Horatio Gates and hardly considered Washington indispensable. Historian John Ferling, a distinguished Washington scholar, has hedged a bet on the issue. He admires Washington’s strength of character and considers his military leadership “mostly laudatory, if not brilliant.” Still, he has pointed out we really don’t know if another general might have done as well as the patriot chief simply because Washington successfully froze out or politically outfoxed potential rivals. Artemus Ward, Charles Lee, and Horatio Gates all fell into this category.4 Any others who may have seen themselves in the role, such as John Hancock—who, just in case, brought a splendid new uniform to Philadelphia with him in 1775—never figured seriously in the question. At least we can believe that Washington was a better political general than any others in the Revolution’s military pantheon (no small point, and it merits further comment later).

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