trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
"...[Nathaniel] Greene was a most unlikely soldier. A Quaker pacifist by birth, he suffered from asthma and had walked with a limp since childhood. He developed an early love of reading and often tended the family forge in Potowomut, Rhode Island, with a book in hand. Painfully aware of his lack of formal education, he cultivated younger and better educated friends who could contribute to his ongoing program of self-improvement. By the time of the Boston Tea Party, Greene was no longer a practicing Quaker and felt free to assume a leadership role in organizing his community's militia company. However, when the company voted to select its officers, Greene was overlooked. The reason: his physical disability detracted from the impression his company made when performing military exercises...."
-Nathaniel Philbrick
In The Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory At Yorktown
New York, New York 2018.
Very few people are aware that it was the French Navy's defeat of the British Navy at The Battle of The Capes that enabled the combined American and French armies to capture Cornwallis' army at Yorktown. Even fewer know of the March, 1781 French naval attack on Mariot Arthbuthnot's British Navy squadron during The Battle of Cape Henry in their attempt to capture Benedict Arnold (commanding British forces at Portsmouth, Virginia). That unsuccessful French naval foray turned out to be a forerunner of French admiral DeGrasse's later success defeating the British Navy at the Battle of The Capes.
In what appears to be a stab in the direction of political correctness, in the epilogue, Philbrick asserts that the slave-owning Washington wouldn't have committed to fighting for his native state of Virginia in the Civil War as did his step-great-grandson-in-law R. E. Lee. Washington, of course, was not faced with a decision of whether to attack his native state, family and neighbors. Washington did, in fact, manumit his slaves on his death by operation of his will.
Philbrick rarely disappoints though I will say this is probably the least enlightening of the long series of books he has written about American history. I did benefit from his thorough description of the Cornwallis' chase of Greene and Morgan through the Carolinas along with the discussion of King's Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse.
I wonder where Philbrick's interests and curiosity will take him (and me) next? He's done the Pilgrims/Metacomet/New England. He's done the Essex/Moby Dick. He's done Maury and the Ex/Ex. He's done Lexington/Concord/Bunker Hill. He's done the Battles of Saratoga/Benedict Arnold. He's done Custer and The Little Bighorn.
Kant 
