George Washington's War [signed] [first edition]

The American Revolution was won not on the battlefields, but in the mind of George Washington. A compulsively readable narrative and extensive new history, George Washington’s War illuminates how during the war’s winter months the young general created a new model of leadership that would become the foundation of the new nation and the model for the American presidency.Based on more than 1,500 original sources and written in the tradition of David McCullough’s John Adams, historian Bruce Chadwick, Ph.D., dramatizes how the greatest threat to the American Revolution was not the British Army, but the infancy of the United States. During those terrible times, Washington had to create a military with soldiers who most often quit after a brief enlistment; deal with a backbiting and often uncaring Congress and the emerging states; overcome starvation, mutinies and a smallpox epidemic; and face winters so bitter that some of his men, without blankets or shoes, would freeze to death. By holding together an often despairing army and a disparate nation through creative, ingenious and often shocking methods, and by supporting democratic institutions to do so, Washington sired the republic that we know today. Authoritative and dramatically rendered, George Washington’s War is a spellbinding account of the hardships and real-life events that forged a great leader and a nation.