When you see an entire hill disappear in an explosion, the reason it happened was because someone pushed the pluner that set off the blast.
You could, however, push the plunger all day long and get nothing but a squeak out of it unless certain preparations were made in the pre-plunger stage.
Washington watched while his army nearly starved and he despaired many, many times.
What confuses historians is that all that time he was also writing letters about what land he intended to buy after the war was over.
This is not confusing if you understand that GW was not looking at the Revolution as a Path of History or in terms of Glory or disaster. He just didn’t think that way.
GW saw that things could go two ways: 1) He could lose and be hanged or spend the rest of his life as a guerrilla fighter with all his property confiscated or 2) He could win.
There is no good way to plan getting hanged.
So he planned what needed planning. He wrote letters about land purchases, detailed instructions to Martha about hwat to do on his plantations while he was away, and he knew and remembered every detail about each of his holdings, down to the health of each of his slaves and which overseers should be gotten rid of.
The average historian cannot understand that. I can understand it, but I could never DO it.
I have been in situations where people were trying to kill me. In those cases I never wrote one single calm letter about hwat stock I planned to purchase if the market looked promising.
George Washington assassination plots were everywhere. The British Army could appear out of nowhere and wipe his tiny frozen army out at any moment. But Old Dumb George kept writing letters reminding Martha to get those damned overseers out of bed at dawn.
I am sure that most historians consider him Old Dumb George, a man who simply did not understand how serious things were.
I have heard some of them say so, but not in print.
Actually, the Revolution was over in July of 1776, so long as GW kept his army in one piece.
By July 1776 every single colony had chased its Royal Officials out.
There was no going back.
The Revolution was costing Britain a fortune every day it kept going. Britain couldn’t afford it forever.
So GW lost New York, but savedhis army.
GW lost the nation’s capitol, Philadelphis, and kept his army in being.
We lost Charleston. We lost Savannah, which was about there was of the pitiful little colony of Georgia.
It was exactly like Napolean when he took Moscow in 1812. By all the rules, he had won.
Dumb George didn’t understand why those rules mattered. Britain was bleeding, and possession is nine points of the law. They had all the places that constituted Victory.
GW just sat around and thought about it, and he realized that none of that mattered. He just kept bleeding Britain.
That, my friends, is GENIUS.
Every historian understands why Napolean’s conquest of Moscow in 1812 destroyed him.
But they cannot see that GW foresaw all that in the 1770’s.
The point is that Napolean was a high-IQ type. GW was a genius.
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