The Man Who Could Have Replaced George Washington in the Revolutionary War

By James Holmes,The National Interest

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

None can tell. But we can essay some critical analysis 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. The former was a model of republican virtue and the Father of His Country. The latter was an abusive father of Communist China who heaped up bodies of his countrymen like cordwood during his catastrophic Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Americans tend to bristle at the comparison.

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.

But if Washington arrived at his martial Maoism through trial and error on American battlegrounds, Lee was the real deal. He was Maoist by philosophy and temperament. Or, since Lee was born long before China’s Great Helmsman, maybe Mao was Lee-ist. He was certainly no stranger to borrowing from the likes of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu to inform his treatises on military affairs.

Charles Lee was a fascinating character. In a sense he was Washington’s alter-ego. Washington was a colonial militia officer who longed to fight decisive Clausewitzian engagements, cementing his standing as an equal of regular-army officers, and who failed abysmally in his early career at arms.