LECTURE VIII.

CAMPAIGNS OF THE REVOLUTION.

“THE

HE success of a war," says one of the greatest masters of the art, "depends in a great measure upon the ability of the general, upon his knowledge of the country, and the skill with which he takes advantage of the ground, both by preventing the enemy from taking favorable positions, and by choosing for himself those which are best suited to his designs." "The talent of a general,” says Jomini,"consists in two things very different in themselves: to know how to judge and combine operations; and to know how to carry them out."

And thus the history of a war becomes, to a certain extent, an individual history, - the history of the genius and success, or of the errors and failures, of successful and unsuccessful generals. In the second Punic war Hannibal fills more than half the canvas. In the Seven Years' War we pass hastily over every other name to concentrate our attention upon Frederic. And in the long European wars from 1796 to 1815,- from the battle of Montenotte to the battle of Waterloo,

we instinctively refer every great event to the genius and the ambition of Napoleon.

The war of our Revolution forms no exception to this tendency of the human mind to make individuals the representatives of ideas and events. As the page of our history fills up, names that were once familiar are cast into the shade; and acts in which the concurrence of many hands and many minds was required, gradually become associated with the master minds which inspired and directed them all. Washington is the first name that occurs to us in connection with our military history, as it is the first in our civil history; and wherever our history comes in as a chapter in that of the world, it will, for the period to which it belongs, be almost the only one. Next, for the importance of the events with which they are associated, though with very different degrees of merit, come Gates and Greene. Thus, whenever we see the main army, we find Washington directing all its movements. The great historical importance of the Northern army was derived from the defeat of Burgoyne; and with this, Gates has succeeded in connecting his name, almost to the exclusion of Schuyler and Arnold, by whom most of the real work was done. The reconquest of the South in the brilliant campaign of 1780–81 belongs exclusively to Greene.

If we would form a correct estimate of the military genius of Washington, we must study his

upon

eight campaigns as a connected and harmonious whole; the result of a careful study of his own situation, a just appreciation of the character and resources of his enemy, and a thorough knowledge of those fundamental principles which, though not yet set forth in the art of war, treatise any had inspired the combinations of every great commander from Cæsar to Frederic. I know that it has been common to underrate Washington as a soldier; to speak of him as a man of sound sense surrounded by men better inspired than himself, whose advice he always took before he ventured to act. I know that the original suggestion of his most brilliant movements has been claimed for other men, and that he has often been represented as deliberating and discussing under circumstances which admitted of no deliberation and called for no discussion. But history teaches us that, in situations like his, none but great men know how to take counsel, and that the mind which gathers around it the master minds of its age, and through a series of years, and under great diversities of circumstances, uses their best faculties as its own, must, in some things, be superior to them all.

I know, too, that the campaigns of the Revolution have none of that physical grandeur which overwhelms the imagination in the movements of vast masses. The loss of the allied armies at the battle of Leipsic, was greater than twice the population of New York city in 1744; and the French

lost fifteen thousand more than they. But there is a moral grandeur about Trenton with its two officers and two or three men wounded, and two frozen to death, which gives a glow-or, as the poet terms it, a "kindling majesty❞— to our conceptions, which none but moral causes can awaken. And even as illustrations of the art of war, we shall find that the principles applied in these campaigns the principles which for seven years kept open the communication between the Eastern and Middle Provinces by the line of the Hudson, which kept an ill-armed and half-organized army year after year within striking distance of the enemy, harassing where it could not openly attack, retarding and embarrassing where it could not openly oppose, and often attacking and opposing with a skill and vigor which astonished its adversaries and revived the drooping spirits of its friends are the same principles by which all great armies have been moved and all the most brilliant achievements of war's most brilliant masters performed. Never did a general change his line of operations more promptly or with more effect than Washington changed his between sunset and midnight of the 2d of January, 1777. Never was an enemy more effectually deceived by skilful manouvring than Clinton in New York, or more effectually taken in the snare than Cornwallis in Yorktown in the autumn of 1781. There is a way of doing things upon a small scale which reveals the

existence of capacity to do them upon a large scale, as plainly as the action itself would have done. And the general who carried a nation of less than three millions through a successful contest of eight years with the most powerful nation of modern times, may justly claim a place among great generals.

The campaign of 1775 was a campaign of preparation and organization. Much of Washington's time was necessarily given to the study of his materials. He had the character of his officers to study, - strangers, almost all of them, and most of them with the barest tincture of military science. He had the character of the people to study, and to find the way of establishing himself firmly in their confidence and affections. He had the country itself to study, in order to form a calm estimate of its spirit and its resources, and to devise the most effectual way of guiding the one and drawing out the other. And, meanwhile, he had to keep close watch upon his enemy, harass him, annoy him, cut off his supplies, weary him with false alarms, and by a menacing aspect keep up the appearance of strength even when most wanting in all the elements of which military strength consists. His army was what Frederic has described as one with which a general will hardly dare to look his enemy in the face, badly exercised and badly disciplined.

There was no room here for the display of enterprise. Prudence, caution, self-control, were