The Man Who Could Have Replaced George Washington in Revolutionary War

By James Holmes,The National Interest

Queries the great Sheldon Cooper [3]: “How would the Civil War have gone differently if Lincoln had been a robot sent from the future?”

None can tell. Nor can we tell with any exactitude how the War of American Independence would have unfolded differently had George Washington been a robot on an errand from the future. (Assuming he wasn’t. He did have an otherworldly character to him.) But we can essay some critical analysis [4] about how the revolution would have gone had the Patriots rejected Washington as commander-in-chief and embraced the alternative strategy put forward by Washington’s sometime comrade, sometime antagonist—Charles Lee.

To provoke our students in Newport, we sometimes liken Washington to Mao Zedong [5]. The former was a model of republican virtue and the Father of His Country [6]. The latter was an abusive father of Communist China who heaped up bodies of his countrymen like cordwood during his catastrophic Great Leap Forward [7] and Cultural Revolution [8]. Americans tend to bristle at the comparison.

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As a battlefield commander, though, Washington bore a striking resemblance to Mao. Both flirted with conventional battlefield strategies—and by all rights should have lost their armies, their lives, and their political causes. Both were humble enough to know how close they had come to cataclysm. And both fashioned strategies whereby the weak could flummox the strong, gain time to build up martial might, and ultimately outfight erstwhile stronger foes. Washington had his Redcoats to vanquish. Mao had his Chinese Nationalists and Imperial Japanese.