The Rest Is History - 683. Washington: Hero of the Revolution (Part 1)

Episode Date: June 28, 2026

Where did George Washington come from, and what was he like? How did he come to take on such a pivotal role in the American Revolution? And, was he really central to America’s triumphant struggle for independence?  Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into the extraordinary life and origins of George Washington.  Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ Discover something new on TikTok. _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton   Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's business and commercial banking. One of the great things about finance is that it may result in you having to pay tax. And this was a constant grumble in Anglo-Saxon England, which was the most heavily taxed country in the whole of Christendom. And just when the Anglo-Saxons thought it couldn't get any worse, they got conquered by King Canute. And Canute imposed a tax rate that was effectively... 100%. Yeah, well, that was one very big change, Tom, but another tax change is upon us. And this is the advent of making tax digital for income tax. And if you're at all concerned about it, this is where Lloyd's come in, because they're here to help make that change much simpler for

you with a useful HMRC-recognised accounting tool that will help you stay in line with all the making tax digital requirements. And the brilliant thing about this is, is that it is free for Lloyd's business account customers. So when it is time to digitise your income tax, you can bank on Lloyd's. Search Lloyd's business accounts to find out more. Oh, history is a journey. And as we continue our journey,

we think of those who traveled before us. and we see and hear again the echoes of our past. A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge. A lonely president paces the darkened halls and ponderes his struggle to preserve the union. The men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other. A settler pushes west. and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever, and fills the unknowing air.

It is the American sound. It is, oh, hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair. That's our heritage. That's our song. We sing it still. We raise our voices to the God, who is the author of this most tender music. And may he continue to hold us close

as we fill the world with our sound in unity, affection, and love. One people, under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom. God bless you and God bless America. So that absolute mush was obviously Ronald Reagan, unmistakable tones there, delivering his second inaugural address on the 21st of January,

1985. And Dominic, Ronald Reagan loved American history, didn't he? He loved the idea of American exceptionalism. He loved the idea of his country as a shining city on a hill. And clearly, there is no better way to kick off our new series, which is marking the 250th anniversary of the colonial tax rebellion than with that great Hollywood actor turned two times president. Yeah, you're right, Tom. Reagan absolutely believed in America's special place in the world, didn't he? I don't think any president has ever really topped it. Yeah, has drunk so deeply of the Kool-Aid than Ronald Reagan. And so what better way to kick off. I mean, I said that

was much. I had to say that to reassure myself that I wasn't buying into the whole thing, because obviously we are a patriotic British podcast. We are. Yeah. So we have to keep our distance from some of the flag of liberty and all of that stuff. Yeah. All of that. So we are going to be looking at four of the founding fathers. And in due course, we are going to be looking at Benjamin Franklin and his extraordinary transatlantic career. So the sense in which he's British as well as American, we're going to be looking at the infamous duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Yeah. As in the eponymous musical. And we're going to be looking at the the moral and intellectual contradictions of Thomas Jefferson. That's a kind way of putting it.

in all kinds of ways I think the most extraordinary of the founding fathers but also perhaps the most compromised but today there can be only one candidate can't there for our opening episode and this is the most famous tax independence fighter of them all right so George Washington the man who gave his name to the capital the city where Reagan gave that speech the man who led the Continental Army through the War of Independence, and the man who, of course, became the first president of the United States. And Washington had, I mean, a really, really extraordinary life, not quite apart from his military career.

There's obviously his time as president. So I thought it would be fun to focus on just one particular episode. And one episode really stands out, and it's the one that Reagan alluded to in that speech. So he mentioned the moment when a general falls to his knees in the horrid snow of Valley Forge, you know, tears glistening in his eyes. Did that happen? Did it happen?

Well, we will be finding out. Yeah, we did a serious before about Ronald Reagan, in which Reagan tells the series of absolutely tremendous anecdotes about things that never happened. Yeah, he commented on an entire baseball match, didn't he, that never happened? Exactly. Exactly. So that sets the tone for what we'll follow. Anyway, this moment when George Washington does or does not fall to the snow in Valley Forge,

Many of our American listeners will immediately recognize this. I would say not one in a hundred of our British listeners will ever have heard of this moment. So we should explain just a bit of context. This moment at Valley Forge happens in the winter of 1777, 1778, and things are actually looking bleak for the American cause. So they have been fighting their tax rebellion for almost two years, but it's not going well. their capital Philadelphia, their provisional capital, has been occupied by British troops. They have been looking to the French to come in and bail them out, but so far the French have not yet officially entered the war, and it looks quite possible they might not enter at all.

Although Dominic, Benjamin Franklin is on the scene to help out, so we'll be doing that in our next episode. That's right. And George Washington and his Continental Army are hold up in a place called Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They've hold up there for the winter. they are desperately short of food and supplies and clothing. They're at the mercy of the weather. They are ravaged by disease, and they are hoping for a miracle.

So this is one of the mythic moments in American sort of patriotic history. It is the episode that turns Washington into a national father figure. And before we get into the story of Valley Forge itself, we should pull back a bit and look at who Washington is and what on earth is going on with this story. So, as a recent biography of Washington, one loads of prizes, great acclaim, by Ron Chernow. And Chernow calls Washington the most elusive figure in American history, more revered than truly loved, an impossibly stiff and inflexible figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human. And one of the things that Chernow does is to show that actually he was human, he was a flesh and blood character behind the kind of marble facade. And Tom, I think you've got a tremendous anecdote, haven't you, that will illustrate this.

I do have an amusing anecdote. So it happens at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. And the guy who writes the preamble to the Constitution is a guy called Governor Morris. He sets the template for mad American names, right, from the very beginning. Suspiciously French. And he's the guy who goes on to, he's kind of involved in establishing the grid system in New York in Manhattan. Yeah. But he's a massive japster.

So he's the funster of the constitutional. convention. And he is approached by Alexander Hamilton, as in the musical. And Hamilton says that if Morris will go up to Washington and slap him on the shoulder and say, my dear general, how happy I am to see you look so well, then Hamilton will buy him a dinner. And Morris does this. But the icy quality of Washington's stare as he greets this slap on the shoulder was so terrifying that he would not do it again for a thousand dinners. Wow. And surely he ruined the dinner. The memory of that would have ruined the dinner. It must have been a chilly occasion, I imagine. Yeah. He just let himself down. He was ashamed of himself, surely. Well, he had to go off and design grid systems to work it out of his system.

That's quite a good anecdote, isn't it? It's a brilliant anecdote. That's one of the best anime that's actually I think I've ever heard. Thank you. That's tremendous. Certainly the best I don't have heard about George Washington. So Washington was born in 1732. He's born into a kind of gentry family in the colony of Virginia. That's the oldest of all the British colonies in North America,

named by one friend of the show, Saul to Rally for another, Elizabeth I first. So the Washington's originally, I believe, from Tring in Hertfordshire. John Washington, Washington's great-grandfather, had started off in Tring and he had moved to Virginia. He establishes a tobacco plantation with African slave labor in the late 1650s.

So this is a theme that will run through this series. There's a lot of slave labor in this series. Anyway, George grows up in the 1730s and 1740s. His great ambition is to be an English country gentleman. And he does stand out. He means he's an outstanding man because he's so big. So he's six feet tall, which of course in the 1740s is very tall. It's very powerful, huge shoulders.

Everyone talks about his massive hands. So he has to have gloves made sense. especially. He's a great horseman, and he likes riding, he likes drinking tea, and he likes reading the novels of Henry Fielding, which is nice. I'm just wondering about the cherry tree. Yeah. Because that's the other famous story that's told about him, is that he chopped down a cherry tree and then whatever said, I cannot tell a lie. Yeah, his father said, did you chop down a cherry tree? And he said, I did, I can't tell a lie. This story is itself a lie. It was invented. It was invented by a man called, of course, inevitably, an American writer called Parsons Weems.

Oh, yes. And Parsons Weems will be reappears. in this story. Oh, brilliant. Barson Weems just basically goes around making stuff up. Today, he'd have a history podcast. Absolutely. About the Costa Rican Civil War. Right, anyway, so George Washington, he's this massive bloat with his huge hands.

But, disappointingly, he's got a very weak voice. He's got a very thin sort of breath. He describes something a breathy voice because he had pluracy. So he speaks like Marilyn Monroe. Happy birthday, Mr. President. Exactly. To himself as he looks in the mirror. And can be just on the topic of accents? Does he have a West Country accent?

Undoubtedly. How do they talk about it in Virginia? Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, Mr. President. If you can basically imagine a Dorset Yokel doing Marilyn Monroe with massive hands, with Kenny Everett's hands in the 1983 General Election Rally. That's a niche reference. Didn't expect we get that in.

Okay. So the thing is, you said that Governor Moritz. Morris was a great funster. George Washington is a total fun. He's a massive fun sponge. He, it's often said of him, people would say they never saw him laugh. One of his officers said of him, you would seldom see a frown or smile on his countenance. His air was serious and reflecting. And part of the reason he's not keen on smiling is that he's got these terrible dental issues. So from early age, his teeth are decaying as early as 1760. So long before he's involved in the tax business.

One of his friends said of him, his mouth is large and generally firmly closed, but which from time to time discloses some defective teeth. Is that because of all the sugar from the plantations? Yeah, possibly. Is it a Virginia thing? I don't know. Tobacco is Virginia, really. Virginia is tobacco.

Does that damage your teeth? Surely it does. Anyway, it's just got terrible teeth. Again, a theme that will run through this episode. The key to him, says Ron Chernow in his biography, is Washington's intent. self-discipline and his sense of control. So Washington is not actually as boring as you would think. He is a man of fierce passions and a hot temper, but he keeps these under sort of rigid, inflexible control. Thomas Jefferson said of him, his temper was naturally high-toned,

but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy over it. John Adams, he had great self-command, but to preserve so much equanimity as he did required a great capacity. John Adams also called him a muttonhead. He did. Actually, John Adams would have said, he had a great self-command, but to reserve so much equanimity as he did required a great capacity, because that's how John Adams spoke, as we discussed in our previous American Revolution series. Anyway, the crucial moment in Washington's life comes when he's in his early 20s. Britain and France were fighting for control of North America. This is what we call the Seven Years War and what American school the French and Indian War, Washington became a commander of the Virginia

militia. And he established reputation as the preeminent colonial officer from North America, from the colonies. Everyone said, he's very brave, he's a good leader, he's very disciplined, he's great. But at the end of the war, he was denied a royal commission by his British superiors. They said, no, you know, he's not quite good enough or whatever. And he felt a deep sense of resentment. he thought basically they look down on me because I'm a mere colonial and they're from the metropolis, the imperial metropole. And they've made me grovel to them and I've got nothing out of it. And so he definitely has a sort of, you know, for him, this is personal.

There's a chip on his shoulder. The Seven Years War has been a great triumph for Britain. But unfortunately, Tom, it creates huge problems, which is sad. Because the victory in the Seven Years War leaves Britain with this massive debt, 140 million pounds. So basically our debt has gone up 10 times to win the war. And paying interest on the debt, that alone takes up half Britain's national budget. This sounds quite familiar. Yeah, it does. Except we're not winning triumphant wars against the French. No, no. Anyway, the question is, how do you pay for this debt? Now that you've conquered all this territory

in North America, how are you going to fund troops to look after it and to keep the peace, not least because there are increasing conflicts with native tribes as the settlers push West. In England, the gentry, who shoulder the tax burden, are already paying more tax than they've ever paid before. So what, 3%? Yeah, exactly. Half a percent or something. So Parliament decides it will raise revenue from the colonies themselves to pay for their own defence. I mean, that sounds entirely reasonable.

Quite right. And Parliament also says, well, this is the time. Basically, the British Empire, Britain's overseas possessions, have now swollen to dimensions that we never dreamed of. And the system for dealing with all this is very ramshackle and corrupt. There's all sorts of smuggling and whatnot. Basically, let's use this opportunity to sort this out and to streamline and modernize it for the age of the Enlightenment. Sensible policies for a happy America, basically. Exactly.

We'll have new courts. We'll have nice new customs duties. On all legal documents in America, there'll be a stamp tax as there is already in. Britain. We'll just basically streamline the whole thing. This sounds great. I mean, who could possibly object to that? It is great. Because basically, if you just follow this, you'll turn into Canada, which is brilliant, or Australia. And everyone loves those countries. However, at the time, the American colonists don't like this at all. And very, very simply, I mean, obviously this is a massive issue that we could spend hours discussing and going into all the

nuances, but very simply. The issue is that until the 1760s, the North American colonists had basically been left alone. But what's happened now is that obviously Parliament is trying to legislate for them. Parliament says, look, it's time to sort all this out. And the more militant colonists don't like it. They don't want to be sorted out. They don't want to be interfered with. And the militants say, well, we had traditional liberties, you know, from the 17th century.

Which are English liberties. English liberties. And you're interfering with them. You don't have any right to make laws for us without our consent. And the French have been beaten. So actually, frankly, we don't really need. need you anyway, because we can probably deal with the natives ourselves. Right. So that's the thing, isn't it? That they don't actually want the British to come in and be

woke about the Native Americans. They just want to go out and grab their land. Yes, absolutely right. This is such a great patriotic podcast. Brilliant. But it's true, isn't it? It is true. I mean, that is the state of play. Yeah. And to just point out what the British and the loyalist take on, because don't forget, at least one in five Americans probably is a loyalist and stays loyal to King and Parliament, they say, well, here's the reasons for doing this. Don't go moaning about that you're not represented in Parliament. Most people in Britain don't vote in elections for Parliament. Most towns in Britain, lots of them don't have an MP. The way that Parliament works is Parliament has chosen on ancient, organic principles that have

evolved over time. Parliament as a body represents our entire British global family, and Parliament's laws bind not just British subjects in Britain, but British subjects all over the world. So Parliament does speak for you as it speaks for everybody at home. Now that doesn't cut any ice with the militants or indeed with George Washington. Washington stands very much on the more extreme wing of this issue. He has money problems like a lot of landowners do after the seven years war.

The tobacco price had fallen considerably in the 1760s, so he's struggling to maintain his gentry lifestyle. He's run up big debts, and obviously he hates the thought of paying new taxes. He doesn't want to pay a stamp tax. He doesn't want to pay a tax on glass or paper or tea brought in by a parliament in London, where he's never been. Washington is also involved, you mentioned land, so important. Washington is involved in land speculation in the West,

and when in 1763, Britain forbids American settlement west of the Appalachian. So Parliament says, stop it. expanding West. We don't want to get into conflict with the native tribes. Washington is gutted. Washington and his mates want to get stuck in. Yeah, of course. So at every point during the breakdown of relations, Washington is very much with the militants. So he goes to the first continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774. And he doesn't really say much because, of course, he's worried about showing people his teeth. But he's very much on the hawkish wing. Then in 1775, after fighting is already broken out with British troops at Lexington Concord,

there's a second Continental Congress. This time Washington turns up in his militia uniform. And it's at this second Continental Congress that the militants vote to set up a secessionist proto-state called the United Colonies of North America, which will have its own continental army to fight off their imperial overlords. Can I ask, is this why Washington turns up in his militia uniform? Of course. That he suspects this is going to happen.

He therefore thinks there's going to need to be a commander. And if I turn up in my militia uniform, it will serve as a nudge to everybody that I'm the guy. Yeah. Fighting has broken out and Washington wants to proclaim that he is, you know, tanned, rested and ready to take on the British. So the Continental Army has been set up. Someone's got to command it. There are various people, but Washington is by far the most obvious. He's got military experience from the seven years war.

He's from the most populous colony, which is Virginia, the oldest. And the other important thing about Washington, which will run through his career, he is a unifier. He is a bit vanilla. Because he's a bit boring and he doesn't say anything, no one's offended by him. So a delegate from Massachusetts said of him, he's a complete gentleman, his sensible, amiable, virtuous, modest and brave. A bloke from Connecticut. He seems discreet and virtuous, no hair and scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady and calm. I mean, you know, these could be Washington's epitaph. So now what he has to do is he has to weld the militias from these 13 rebel colonies into a continental army, and he has to lead the resistance to the British, arguably at this point the greatest imperial power on earth. And a power that Washington knows well because of his experience with them. Knows very well. Now, in American kind of patriotic legend, this is a great underdog victory.

And you can see why they would say that. Britain has the Royal Navy. Britain has a bigger population. Britain has a trained professional army with up to 50,000 men, and Britain also brings over about 30,000 German mercenaries, the so-called Hessians. But if you read distinguished American historians, academic historians of this period, like Gordon Wood, who died a week ago, sees obituries in the papers in Britain as well as America. Gordon Wood points out, actually, the rebels have an awful lot of things going for them.

First of all, they're fighting on home soil. The British have to send troops 3,000 miles away, you know, in an age when there are massive communications and logistics problems. And actually no country in the 18th century has ever fought and won a war like this, 3,000 miles from home. God, I suppose that's true, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's not been done before. The British are trying to do something that's never really been done. I suppose the closest analogy would be the conquest of America by the conquistadors.

But they're nothing on the scale that's required to defeat the colonial rebels in America. Yeah, I mean, there's a big difference between basically toppling a kind of bronze age state. A widely disliked regime that doesn't even understand what you are and dealing with an insurgency on a massive scale. I mean, that's a really important point. Second point, you could send 80,000 troops or whatever, but you can't conquer North America. It's huge. And it's perfect for a guerrilla war. I mean, it's covered with woods and forests and lakes and all of these things.

even if you captured the towns and cities, which of course are very small by European standards. So what? The guerrillas can just go off into the countryside. So there is a kind of Vietnam quality to it. Totally there is. So I think that's the other issue. I think Vietnam is absolutely the right comparison.

Because basically what the Americans can do, first of all, they care much more than the British do. The Americans basically know, I think, even from the start, that if they just keep going, they will probably win. The British will eventually give. I mean, and in Britain, there are lots of people who have sympathy with them. It's not like everyone in Britain is opposed to this. No, no, there's lots of people who sympathise with the colonists, but also, even if you don't

sympathise with the colonists, you're much more interested in India or the Caribbean, the rich sugar islands of the Caribbean, than you are in, you know, Georgia or Vermont or something. I mean, no one in Britain cares that much about these places. So basically, Washington's job, I mean, rather like if you're a member of the Viet Cong or something, his job is don't get caught into a massive pitch battle, just keep going, melt into the shadows, keep up a long guerrilla campaign, and eventually the British will come to terms. Surely they will. And so this is the story of the next two years. Washington does a pretty good job of building this into an army, although he's often complaining that they're very licentious and disorderly his men,

because Washington is very straight-laced. He loses far more battles than he wins, but these are very small battles by European standards. Kind of little skirmishes. If they were fought in Europe, we would call it a skirmish. We wouldn't even think of them as a battle. Of course, they're battles by North American standards. But the thing is, every time he loses, he just melts away into the woods. A good example is one of his biggest defeats. He's driven out of New York in 1776.

He escaped south from New York into Pennsylvania. And then he pulls off this tremendous PR coup by crossing the River Delaware at Christmas. And then he wins two little battles at Trenton and Princeton. and everybody in Europe says, oh gosh, Washington, you know, he's got one over on the British again. Washington Crossing the Delaware. That one. Wasn't that nice? Yeah.

Lydia the tattooed lady. Do you want to explain that reference to people, Tom? It's a song called Lydia the tattooed lady, and she has all kinds of tattoos, and one of them is Washington Crossing the Delaware. There you go. So people can Google it. Maybe you should sing the entire thing as a bonus, special bonus treat for our rest of history club members. Do you know? Maybe.

So let's get to 1777. It's a very mixed picture of the war that year. On the one hand, the Americans get a massive result. They captured General John Burgoyne's army at Saratoga, and they capture lots of prisoners, and that's a great propaganda coup for them, especially in the capitals of Europe, Paris, Madrid and so on. But for Washington personally, 1777, is a nightmare.

He's outwitted by the British General William Howe in rural Pennsylvania. He loses a crucial battle, and the result of that is that the British, at the end of September, are able to march into the rebel capital of Philadelphia unopposed. And the Continental Congress, this is the kind of political wing of the tax protest, they have fled, and basically Philadelphia has been, only the women and children remain. Washington's army is outside Philadelphia, kind of lurking around in the woods, and morale that autumn is very, very low.

So it's the pouring with rain, they haven't got any food, the discipline is breaking down, Even Ron Cherno, who's definitely a patriotic American historian, describes them as marauding through the countryside terrorizing the inhabitants. So they're basically sort of looting and stuff, and they're very miserable. So let's pick up the story a few weeks after that. Winter has come, and Washington has a dilemma. What's he going to do with his army? So his army, there's about 12,000 of them and about 400 women and servants and general hangers on. And among those 12,000 men are men from all 13 breakaway colonists, and we'll talk about them more after the break. They can't just go home. Washington himself only went home once between 1775 and 1781. What they need to do, you need to keep

the army together, and he needs to find winter quarters for them. He doesn't want to retreat too far from Philadelphia, because he doesn't want to abandon the capital's kind of rural hinterland to the British. But he also wants to stay in touch with the Continental Congress, which is in York, Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania legislature, which is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Oh, so it's very Wars of the Roses. Very Wars of the Roses. Yeah, I don't think that was by design. I think that's by actor.

Yeah, it would be possibly pushing things too far to imagine that was by design. It would. So the place he chooses is Valley Forge, which is 18 miles northwest of Philadelphia, and Valley Forge is somewhere that becomes one of the most sacred sites in American history. Washington said it was dreary, which was a bit unfair, I think. It's a sort of plateau, it's high ground, surrounded by woods and fields. Because you're on high ground, you can see if the British are coming. Because there's woods, you've got timber for your camp, there are streams for water,

and you can basically sort of keep an eye and make sure the British don't go out from Philadelphia to raid the countryside. And because there's farmland around, Washington is hopeful that the locals who are Welsh Quakers, So ticking two very familiar rest of history boxes in one go, that the Welsh Quakers will keep them supplied with crops and livestock. Unfortunately, Tom, one of the only lessons of history that really endures is that you can never truly rely on a Welsh Quaker. So Washington will learn that lesson in the second half of the episode. So they're on their way to Valley Forge.

Washington knows, even as they're marching there, that this is going to be pretty grim. His men have run out of supplies. many of them don't have a blanket between them. About 4,000 of them don't have any boots or shoes. And Washington said later that even the march through the sleet to Valley Forge was a pretty grim ordeal. He remembered seeing men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lay on, without shoes by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet,

marching through frost and snow without a murmur. But I think you can argue that, I mean, we've been quite down on Washington, But this is the moment when he really emerges as a national leader. Because basically, Washington says, and he has it known, has it widely known, that he will share the hardships of his men. He's not going to bunk off to Mount Vernon. He will be there with them every step of the way. And his artillery commander, Henry Knox, said to him,

the people of America look to you as their father, and into your hands they entrust their all, confident of every exertion on your part for their security and happiness. So basically, this is on you now. Like, you're going to, we're looking to you to get us through this. Anyway, six days before Christmas, the 19th of December, they arrive at Valley Forge. There is absolutely nothing there. No shelter.

But this is the sort of challenge at which Washington excels. So he divides his men up into construction teams. He says, I want you to cut down the trees and build these cabins. American historians love these cabins. Wood cabins. Log cabins. Because they love like, they love summer camps in America, don't they? This must be the ancestor of that, winter camp.

Washington says, we'll have a race so you can build their cabins most quickly. And the winner gets $12. And Washington says, I'll give $100 to the team that comes up with the best way of making a waterproof roof using the least wood. So very exciting scenes. I mean, you called him a fun sponge, but that can be more fun than that. It's great fun. Winter fun, the Washington way. And actually, they do a really good job.

They put up 2,000 log cabins within a few days. they dig trenches, they dig redoubts. Oh, we love our redoubt, don't we? We haven't had a redoubt on the show since the Battle of Poltava. Yeah, great to have the redouts back. And actually, I mean, this gives you a sign of how small North America is in terms of demography. By the time they've finished, they've built the fourth biggest city in North America with these 2,000 cabins. That's an amazing stat.

Anyway, I compared this momentarily to a summer camp. It is not like a summer camp. It's pouring with rain. There are dead horses everywhere. They just throw discarded wood everywhere. It's very muddy. It's very sludgy. As we will discover in the second half,

the toilet facilities are extremely poor. Can I ask why they don't bury the horses? That baffled me. I mean, isn't it kind of basic know-how? Yeah. There's just rotting horse corpses everywhere. Yeah. A British would have buried their horses, I think.

Anyway, a lot of them haven't got any clothes And because of that, they've ripped up some tents and they're wearing them as shirts and as shoes, weirdly. One European volunteer said, afterwards, the unfortunate soldiers were in want of everything. They had neither coats, hats, shirts, nor shoes. Their feet and legs froze until they become almost black. And it was often necessary to amputate them. Now, on top of all this, they don't have enough food, because the war has destroyed the continental arm is supply chain. So to Washington's horror, the days go by, some supplies come, but they're all rotted.

So they live on something which they call fire cakes, which is basically they make this disgusting mixture of flour and water and they cook it on kind of heated stones. Oh my God. Sounds horrible. Yeah, they're eating flour, basically. I mean, Americans do love a big breakfast, don't they? They do.

And before we started recording, we were discussing the quality of American food. So, you know, again, I think that will run through American history. So after a few days, they're basically like a camp of ghosts or beggars. And there's an excellent diary entry by another. splendidly named American. I've just looked at the name. He's a regimental surgeon. This can't be true.

He's called Dr. Albigents Waldo. That's just a Star Wars name, isn't it? That's just one of those Star Wars names or an NFL name. Alba Jens Waldo says, he's describing the scene, he says, poor food, hard lodging, cold weather, fatigue, nasty clothes, nasty cookery, vomit half my dime I'm going more West Country the more I do it

Smoke out of my senses The devil's in it I can endure it There comes a bowl of beef soup Full of burnt leaves and dirt Sickish enough to make a hectare spew And he on and on he goes On it goes

Poor food hard lodging cold weather Nasty clothes nasty cookery Tom it's like my days living in Minnesota Oh bang Bang Great banter So anyway they're all really sick They've got scabies

They've got scurvy They've got typhus They've got typhoid, they've got dysentery. I mean, we emphasize dysentery, the role of dysentery in history, don't we? Yeah, and they've got loads of it. Very rarely discussed by historians, but a key key factor, the massive killer. Now, you know, I had that fact for you about this being the fourth biggest city in North America. Yeah.

I actually have a better fact that I hope people will take away from this podcast, apart from the teeth. More Americans died at Valley Forge than at any battle of the entire war. Well, I mean, that is illustrative of the impact of dysentery on the patterns of history, isn't it? I have to say, I was really struck by that. And that's partly because the battles have basically glorified punch-ups in fields. But, you know, 2,000 people died at Valley Forge, which was the sixth of Washington's army. And more would probably have died if Washington hadn't been an enthusiastic proto-vaxxer. So it's inoculations, isn't it, at this point?

Inoculations. It's not vaccination. It's inoculation. So basically what they do is they scratch your skin and they give you a very mild dose of smallpox from which you'll probably recover. Because if you get it through the skin, you're more likely to recover. And the army had been plagued by smallpox. Had Washington not organized this program of inoculation, probably more men would have died. So it's one of the more memorable scenes in John Adams, the TV series. Yeah. where they scrape a bit of pass out of one of a, someone with smallpox.

Franklin was very keen on this. Was he? Because he'd lost one of his sons when he was four years old to smallpox, and he hadn't inoculated him, and so he became a great proselytiser. And of course, he's the great, you know, the great scientist of America. So everyone listens to him. Yeah. I have to tell you that we gave up on John Adams as a family,

because Mrs. Sambrook said she found it interminably boring and refused to watch any more. There were similar sentiments from Mrs. Holland. And she didn't actually complain. She just fell asleep. She voted with her eyelids. Voted with her. I love it. So anyway, the inoculation campaign, this is testament to Washington's great strengths as a commander. So actually, on the battlefield, Washington is not a brilliant tactician at all. I mean, he loses most of his battles. But he is brilliant. I take my hat off to him. He is brilliant at managing his men. And this doesn't matter if the battles are just glorified skirmishes. Correct. Exactly. So he's got, he's basically, he's got his headquarters in this little

stone cottage at inevitably Valley Forge Creek. Hold on. How come he's got a stone cottage? Yeah, the sharing the hardships was kind of nominal for the first few days. He was in a tent for the first few days. And now he's got a stone cottage? Luxury. But, yeah. His entire reputation is a lie. We dare to tell it as it is. Yeah. It's a podcast that tells you the truth finally about top hypocrite George Washington. So here he is in his lovely stone cottage, his holiday home. with his auger. Though it's not terribly good fun because he doesn't believe in fun.

So dice and card games abammed and all of his aides are sleeping in the downstairs rooms and stuff. And actually, the general sense of discipline was very impressive to European visitors. So one French officer said he was struck by the air of calm dignity

through which you could trace the strong feelings of the Patriot and discern the father as well as the commander of his soldiers. And this emphasis on Washington as a father figure. You know, it runs right through accounts of Valley Forge even at the time. And I think, again, that's one of his distinguishing characteristics.

Now, it's precisely because of Washington's insistence on his own dignity that Ronald Reagan's story about kneeling to prey in the snow must be false. We know it must be false. And historians have, you know, spent a lot of ink talking about, did Washington believe in God or not? Was he a Christian? because it's a slightly confusing picture. He did go to church, but he didn't go regularly. When everyone else knelt to pray, Washington would stay standing. Washington never took communion. Washington very rarely mentioned Jesus Christ.

He would talk about providence, or we'd talk about the author of our being. So some historians have painted him as a deist. So, you know, God is a clockmaker. But some of Washington's mates, like James Madison, said, No, no, no, he was a very devout Anglican. And it's probably, I think the consensus actually is that in the 18th century, if you were part of the Virginia gentry, your Anglicanism was very austere and sort of restrained. I like that in Anglicanism.

Yeah, you like that. Sort of small pea puritanical. Well, literally upstanding. Exactly. You want to say standing, kneeling is flummery. You don't want to do that. It's performative. And it's precisely because of that, that it's utterly implausible that Washington

would have knelt in the snow, especially where his men could have seen him. I mean, Reagan would have done that. Yeah, but Washington wouldn't. He definitely would. Oh, my lord. It would have been a lapse of the dignity. Bill Clinton would have lain down in the snow or something. Oh, God, yes.

Tears streaming down his cheeks. Trump would have stayed in his stained cottage. Yeah, in his gold cottage, surely. Made out of gold ingots. Well, anyway, this story, about him kneeling in the snow is absolutely fake. It was invented in 1800 after Washington's death. This is Parsons Weems again.

This is Parson Weems. He's an absolutely villainous man. He's a terrible man. Making up stuff randomly. But actually, do you know what? Washington should have knelt in the snow. Maybe he should have done because things are looking very bleak for him as they approach Christmas. Two days before Christmas, 23rd of December, he writes to the Continental Congress.

He says our situation here at Valley Forge is absolutely desperate. Yesterday I asked the troops to be in retinous to scour the countryside for food. He said, but they were too weak and hungry to obey. Only the efforts of my officers, he says, prevented a dangerous mutiny. I am now convinced beyond a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place, this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things, starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence. and just three or four days of bad weather would prove our destruction.

So Tom, is the game up for George Washington the American cause? Are they going to abandon the rebellion, pay their taxes, obey the laws, and peacefully evolve into a warmer Canada? Well, there's only one way to find out. And spoiler, I'm afraid the answer to that is pretty disappointing. But come back after the break and find out the worst. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. Now, discovering something new. Nothing could be more thrilling than that.

That's so true, Tom. So the most exciting intellectual adventure that I've been on in the last couple of years was finding out all about the siege of Shilmishl in eastern Poland, so that's during the First World War. And I went online, I read lots of books about it. But what particularly thrilled me was discovering that there's a phenomenon called Shirmishler-Tok. So people on TikTok exchanging facts about the Siege of Shamishler talking about its history, its people, and for me, that was one of the most invigorating intellectual journeys that I've ever been on.

Well, of course, studying the history of obscure First World War battles, that's the kind of thing we're all into. But there are less mainstream areas that you can discover on TikTok like history or maths or literature or cooking or music or sport or anything like that. Creators on TikTok make it easy to discover. discover something new every day. TikTok is where discovery turns into conversation. Visit TikTok.com forward slash explore more to learn more. Hello everyone and welcome back to the rest is history. It is the 23rd of December 1777 and in Valley Forge it's not looking like it's going

to be the best Christmas ever. So a very cold, miserable George Washington, even though he's, He's got his lovely stone cottage. He's still not having a fun time. He sent a desperate message to the Continental Congress, basically saying, you've got to help me out here, or the entire army is going to implode. And with it, the war effort.

Exactly so, exactly. So two days later, they have Christmas. And Washington and his age, they have a dinner, a Christmas dinner, of mutton, cabbage and crusts of bread with water to drink. Because he'd lost all his baggage in the campaign outside Philadelphia, he's only got a single spoon to eat it with.

So his aspirations of becoming an English country gentleman are very, very far from being realised at this moment. Well, you could say, I mean, this is the kind of training that you get at an elite English public school, don't you? It's true, actually. It's true. Kind of awful food and kind of shivering in the cold to toughen you up.

Yeah. If he saw it in those terms, perhaps it would have cheered him up. Maybe, exactly. Well, actually, do you know what? you say it's terribly cold. And Reagan talked about the snow and Parson Weems talked about all the snow. But it's not actually that cold.

So it's not a particularly cold winter. It doesn't snow that much. It's basically rain and wind that they have to worry about. Now, before the break, I mentioned that he was hoping for aid from Welsh Quakers. This was foolish.

Because basically, the locals are not that interested in helping. him. And this may surprise American listeners who have been brought up, you know, in the sort of hurrah, hurrah view of the American Revolution. Historians disagree about the exact numbers, but let's say a quarter, a third maybe even, of the colonial population, support, actually support the British in this war. The Quakerism, I think, means they're probably not desperately keen on piling into a war. But by and large, they just want to keep out. They just want to get on with their lives. And they do have food, but the British troops in Philadelphia paying them more for

their food. So they just think, well, I'd rather sell it to the British troops in Philadelphia than I would to these blokes. Well, that's the American way, isn't it? Yeah. Capitalism is the American way. Washington is very disappointed by this. Interestingly, Washington does not think that selling to the highest bidder is the American way. So Washington at various points talks about making trading with the British punishable by death. He sends a thousand men out to basically requisition all the livestock from the local fields. So basically you'd steal it. Steal it, exactly.

And he says in letters, this business about selling to the highest bidder is a sign of the debasement of our national character. He says our spirit of American independence is imperiled by our own abominable lust of gain. Goodness. What would he make of Elon Musk? Yes, exactly. Very good question. And actually, the interesting thing is that Washington at this point is not quite as popular

with even his fellow officers or with Congress, as he would later become. So that winter, while he was a Valley Forge, there was a movement to sack him as commander-in-chief and bring in the bloke who won the Battle of Saratoga, six months earlier, General Horatio Gates. And this movement fizzled out, but it's a reminder that Washington is not as secure as he looks. And actually, at the end of January, 1778, you know, he's been writing these letters to Congress. A congressional delegation at the end of January visits the camp, Washington has to be on his very best behavior. He's very polite.

He's very respectful. And he basically begs them to improve recruitment and to sort out their supply chains. But the visitor that he's really looking forward to getting comes a few days after that. And this is his wife, Martha. So Martha hasn't seen him for months. She arrives in early February by carriage over the kind of icy roads. She's joined by some of their slaves. She gets to Valley Forge.

She's really shocked by his. condition. She writes to a friend. He is well but much worn with fatigue and anxiety. I never knew him to be so anxious as now. Now, if George is a little bit elusive, I have to say Martha is positively opaque. So I had a look in my files and in 2015, I reviewed a biography of Martha Washington for the Sunday Times. And the final line of my review read as follows, I don't think I've ever read a biography of a more boring woman. Really? Anyway, she arrives at the camp she rolls up her sleeves she gets stuck in

she manages the staff she organises the meals everyone says oh she's brilliant you know I never in my life knew a woman so busy from early morning till late at night as was Lady Washington interesting they call a Lady Washington actually yeah very now she's not the only woman at the camp and

modern historians perhaps unsurprisingly are very very keen to play up the general diversity of Valley Forge so there's other generals wives this woman with the ex-in. I just again just saw that and thought,

did I read that right? It leaps off the page, isn't it? So this is Lucy Flucker Knox. So which prompts me to ask? So we clear, flucker is not a nickname. Nor is Knox. No. So you've put down that there are wives of the various generals, that there are nurses and there are laundresses.

But are there prostitutes? But are there prostitutes? Because, I mean, they generally follow armies, don't they? Do you know what? I haven't seen any mention, which I did find odd. And I wondered whether that was either because American historians don't really want to mention it, or because Washington forbade it. It's perfectly possible that Washington, because he is very puritanical,

where he basically tried to stamp it out, even so, 12,000 men. Is it really plausible that there's nobody there? Well, he's shown that he's alert to the danger of disease, I suppose, so that might be possible. Yes. And Washington generally was very down on women being at the camp. He said, the multitude of women in particular, especially those who are pregnant or have children, or a clog upon every movement, but he can't stop them. Now, the other thing is the kind of the racial diversity or the ethnic diversity. So as we said before, there are men from all 13 rebel colonies. There are Catholics and Jews. There are lots of people from Scotland and Ireland. There are French. There are Prussians. There are Austrians. Poles, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, even Hungarians. Now, the most celebrated foreigner at the camp, somebody you admire

Tom, or you always make excuses for, the hapless and ineffective Marquis de Lafayette. Is he dazing off? Right, a man who fell asleep at the crucial moments of the French Revolution, and thereby completely lost the initiative.

So, Malafayette had arrived in the summer of 1777 as a volunteer when he was only 19 years old. He was incredibly idealistic. He'd gone and made his case personally to Congress about being involved. Washington at first was suspicious of him, but basically fell in love with him at Valley Forge. Really impressed by Lafayette's energy and his enthusiasm. So he's not falling asleep at this point. No, no, not at all, actually. Maybe he burnt himself out at Valley Forge, and that meant he was underpowered when it came to the crisis in his own country. But Washington

adopted him as a protégé. Kind of son almost, wasn't it? Yeah. Exactly. As a surrogate son, really. Exactly so. Now, there are also some people of colour at Valley Forge. So, most native tribes sided with the British for understandable reasons because they think the North American colonists just want to steal all our lands. And they're not wrong. Yeah, they're not wrong. And the British have, you know, although they probably would have taken them, the British have made a feeble attempt to stop this happening. But there were about 50 scouts from the Orneda tribe. And Washington was a great fan of these. fellas. He said they were brilliant. But the really striking story is the presence of African-American soldiers. And if you look at sort of online accounts of this and very recent history books, in the last decade, the estimates have kind of got bigger and bigger and bigger, I think probably because historians are trying to see what they want to see. To get into the sort of the details of this. In January 1778, the smallest colony, which was Rhode Island, was struggling to fulfil its quota that it had to send. Basically, it's kind of recruitment quota. And one of

Washington's officers, who was a guy called James Mitchell Varnum, said, well, why don't you just, why don't you sign up slaves? Put them in the army. And for Washington, that's a big ask, because Washington was born into a slave-owning family. And Washington did own slaves himself. He was conflicted about it. By the standards of slave owners, Washington was pretty humane. Even so, he bought dozens of slaves during his lifetime. By the time the crisis with Britain breaks out in the 1770s, he owns for getting on 100 slaves, something like 87 slaves.

Ron Cherno, who loves Washington, says in his biography, slavery was woven into every aspect of Mount Vernon life, even for visitors. Even though Washington has slaves, even though Washington knows that Southerners will be appalled by this, he agrees to this proposal. And so the colony of Rhode Island bought the freedom of 117 slaves and sent them a soldiers to Valley Forge. And two other states then followed suit, Massachusetts and Connecticut. And the deal there in Connecticut, for example, was if you're a slave owner, you could duck military service if you sent slaves in your place. But they're not slaves, they're not like the Mammalooks or something. They've been freed by this point.

You get freed, exactly. You're freed and you're sent into the army and then afterwards you will be free. So by August 1778, so this is the point after which they've lost Valley Forge, the total of black men in the army is about 755 soldiers. And the really interesting thing, the top man on this, top historian on this is a guy called Henry Weincheck. and he says there are remarkably few reports of any trouble at all. There's no record of people complaining. There's no record of fights or interdisciplinary problems caused by racial integration.

And both Weincheck and Chernow think that the war had a big impact on Washington personally on his attitude to slavery. So it's at this point 1778 that he tells his steward back home at Sturham, Mount Vernon, we should stop selling slaves against their will. We should stop breaking up slave families. And then at the end of the year, he's writing to his steward. He mentions his slaves in passing. And he says, my slaves, of whom I every day long more and more to get clear of.

In other words, set free. I'd like to set them all free. He never actually does set them all free, though. I thought he did in his will. Well, not in his lifetime, exactly. He doesn't set them free in his life time. There's a complication because actually Martha owns most of them. Exactly.

But he kind of makes provisions for when she dies that they will be set free. Exactly so. It's a complicated story of Washington. I don't think there's any doubt that Washington thinks slavery is wrong and he feels bad about it. As we will see with Jefferson, that doesn't necessarily mean that you set your slaves free though. No, exactly. So back to the story, we're in February 1778. They're still very short of food. They're still suffering from disease. Washington writes to the governor of New York, George Clinton. He says, you know, we're pretty close to a famine in the camp. There are more rumours of a mutiny. Nothing but the most active efforts can avoid so

shocking a catastrophe. But a week later, it's his birthday, his 47th birthday. And I thought you'd like this detail, Tom. His junior officers organized an entertainment for him. And this was a British play by Joseph Addison about the life of Cato the Younger. So do you want to tell everyone who Cato the Younger is? Katie the Younger is a model of Republican virtue who prefers to commit suicide rather than submit to Caesar. There you go. So basically he's the kind of model of inflexible, humorless opposition to monarchy that Washington is all about. Exactly.

He's seen this play several times. He actually could quote bits of it at length without the text. So some of his favorite lines, Lowe's steady temper can look on guilt, rebellion and fraud in the calm lights of mild philosophy. Tis not immortals to command success. but we'll do more, we'll deserve it. So all this sort of stuff about duty, steadfastness, deserving success.

Yeah, this is absolutely Washington bingo. So that's his birthday. Brilliant. Watch his play about Cato the Younger. And the next day, an excellent man arrives in the camp. And this is a man who actually is going to transform the fortunes of the Continental Army completely.

And this is a man called Friedrich Wilhelm, Ludolf Gerhard, Augustine, Luis, Freire von Steuben Dominic, would this gentleman by any chance to be a German? He is German. He's a top, absolutely top, tip top, Prussian. And this bloke von Steuben

he came from a military family in Prussia, he'd served in the Seven Years' War, he'd been a captain, he'd been a great pal of Frederick the Great, but then he'd been discharged from the Prussian army in murky circumstances, and there are some clues to those circumstances, perhaps, that will emerge in the next few moments. moments. He became the court Chamberlain for the Prince of Hoenzollon Hechingen, but he found it a bit

boring, so he made contact with your great pal, Benjamin Franklin, and in the summer of 1777, this Blake von Steuben sailed to America with his greyhound, who was called Azor, he went with him everywhere, his secretary, the excellently named Pierre Etienne DuPonso, and DuPonso was only 17 years old. So you're very good-looking young lad. Good-looking young man. his suspiciously handsome young aide, Louis de Pontierre. Okay. So they land in Boston. They're wearing these very tight red uniforms and they've got loads of medals.

And Stoeven says to the Americans, I've come here to fight for you. I don't want pay. I just pay my expenses. So what's his beef with the British? Because, you know, Britain and Prussia were allies. Same side. Yeah. Sad.

He's just there for fun. He wants to hang out and have some, you know, with the lads. And they're tight uniforms. I think it's a big element of the appeal. So he arrives at Valley Forge and he makes a great impression straight away. He's an unusual looking man. He's very jowly.

He's got a gigantic red nose and he speaks comically bad English. And one American private said later, the trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size and his strikingly martial aspect made him a perfect personification of Mars, the ancient fabled god of war.

Now when Stuybin arrives, remember he's a German. he is appalled by the litter and the filth of the camp. The dead horses... I mean, we've flagged that up, haven't we? We have already, so we too are appalled by it. He says, he remembers the officer's wearing, and I quote, a sort of dressing gown made of an old blanket or woolen bed cover,

and most of all the issue about the lack of proper toilet facilities. And he says to Washington, look, mate, and he says in his broken English, in Prussia we would not stand for this. You are literally preparing the food, feet away from the bodies of rotting horses. You have your toilets next to the kitchens and next to to people's cabins. Dig your latrines on the other side of the camp. Sort yourself out. If they are so short of food and they're reduced to eating kind of water and flour,

why are they not eating the horses? God, I'm not an American, I don't know. God's sake, I mean, I just think I'd do a better job than Washington. Absolute shambles from Washington. Yeah. So anyway, Washington is delighted this bloke's turned up, basically because he's lost loads of officers. Some of his officers have gone home. They're sick of things. And of course, 2,000 of his men have died of disease.

So this bloke, who's a palafred at the Great, he's like a manor from heaven. And Stoibin says, I'll train your army for him. Washington gives him 120 men as guinea pigs, and Storibn basically turns them into Prussians. What he does is, he writes out the drill every day in French,

and he gets some of Washington's young officers to translate it into English for him. And do you know one of those officers who does it for him? Alexander Hamilton of musical fame Yeah Because he hangs out with Washington

In the musical doesn't he? He does, yeah So, Stroibn't drill them? He teaches them to march in formation He teaches them to use a bayonets They're not, they don't have me using their bayonets property He said afterwards,

The American soldier had no faith in it And never used it, but to roast his beefsteak And the men love him, they think he's brilliant Because they think he's very eccentric, He's funny, He's an absolutely textbook example of the hired football manager of a Premier League team

who speaks only in sort of mumbled English obscenities. F this, F that. He's basically Claudio Ranieri when he was the manager of Leicester. And he's going to pull off a similarly startling feat of promotion, isn't he? Yes, exactly. So Stoybans' drills actually became the instruction manual for the US Army until like decades. still influencing American military strategy right up to the Civil War.

So Custer might have experienced it. Exactly. So the result of this is the Continental Army will leave Valley Forge, a much more modern and professional unit than they came. And afterwards, Strobun was made an American citizen. He was given a big estate in New York. And he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society, alongside loads of other founding fathers.

He clearly had a brilliant time because he became very close to two, other handsome young men from Washington's Army in their early 20s called Benjamin Walker and William North. He adopted them. He made them his heirs, which was actually very common for gay men to do in the late 18th century. This was a way for you to establish a kind of formal relationship. When he died in 1794, he left them his estate. So it worked out well for him. It worked out well for him and for them, actually. So that's one European contribution to the insurgent effort.

but obviously the Americans need more help than just this one Prussian. The war is now almost three years old, and although the British are not really anywhere in their victory, it's not clear how the Americans will ever force the British out. They have pinned their hopes all this time on French intervention. But the French, although they've sent arms, kind of surreptitiously, they haven't formally joined the war. And basically the Americans are praying that the French will one day join the war

to challenge Britain's command of the seas. The months have passed and there's been no breakthrough, but then in the dying days of April 1778, the news reaches the insurgent camp at Valley Forge. There has been a diplomatic bombshell because at Versailles, two months earlier, your mate Benjamin Franklin, he has secured French recognition of the American Republic

and a military alliance. And a month later, war was formed declared between Britain and France. And when the news reaches Valley Forge, Washington and his officers recognize this as a total game changer. Lafayette is said to have kissed Washington on the cheeks with joy, which Washington probably didn't really approve of. And a week later after they got the news, Washington is troops, they have a day of Thanksgiving,

they fire their guns in the air, they read copies of the treatise aloud, they all shout, long live the king of France, and, I'm not a brilliant shout this, God save, the friendly powers of Europe. That didn't become an anthem. No, that didn't become an anthem. And there had loads of drinking. Everyone said that actually this time, this is the one time that Washington's

lost his sort of imperturbable glacial exterior. He had accountants of uncommon delight. And the most shocking thing is that at the end of the day, he agreed to throw aside his dignity and to play cricket with the junior officers. Well, that is the traditional American way of celebrating, isn't it? Exactly. he was very, very good at throwing things

because there are all these kind of mad stories of him throwing bricks over rivers and things. Right. So I think he'd be quite good at cricket. As a bowler or as a fielder? Well, the bowling, because at this point the ball was rolled along the ground rather than it wasn't kind of airborne.

But you know, you hit the ball, you have to throw it back in. So is this the ancestor of American enthusiasm for Tempin bowling? I think it, well, yeah, it's cool kind of part of it. Also, he had very big hands and that's very useful if you're a bowler in cricket. Of course, of course. So, French entry into the war has changed everything Because from this point onwards, the odds really are against Britain And from this point onwards, London thinks,

OK, well, the North American coloners, Southern North American coloners, what really matters is the Caribbean and the Sugar Islands. So within weeks of this, London sends a message to the new British commander in North America, Sir Henry Clinton, send a third of your army to the Caribbean. When Clinton gets this message,

he says, well, our position in Philadelphia is now untenable. we should evacuate east to New York City. On the 16th of June, Washington at Valley Forge gets word that the British, British in Philadelphia have asked for the return of their clothes from the local laundries, which is a sign that they are moving out. It's obviously a British army would never take to the roads in unlaundered uniforms. That would be appalling. So a couple of days after this, the First American Brigades move out of Valley Forge in Hot Pursuit.

By the 22nd of June, the whole continental army has crossed the Delaware into New Jersey. And on the 28th of June, a base called Monmouth Courthouse, New Jersey, Washington's men have their first military test since they've been at Valley Forge. So they have caught up with the British. The heat is overpowering. It's almost 40 degrees Celsius, so 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot that some soldiers actually drop dead from sunstroke. And the result of this battle, I mean, I say battle, it's basically another skirmish, is a draw, really. There's about 350 casualties on either side.

The British continued their evacuation to New York. But having lost so many battles, even a draw to Washington seems like a victory. And actually afterwards, even the British commented, they said, gosh, you know, the Americans have changed their tune. They're pretty professional. And obviously this is the result of this top Prussian, this bloat von Steuben. So where does all this leave the war? They've got out of Valley Forge. They're back on the road again. You know, things are looking up. They've got the French on their side. The war's not over, but the balance is fundamentally shifted. Because 10 days after this battle, a French fleet sails into Delaware Bay with 10 ships of the line, four frigates and 4,000 French soldiers. So from this point, the war is a global war. Britain will be on the defensive. And although American independence is not inevitable at this point in 1778, it is probably much more likely than not. Washington himself never gets the Hollywood ending that you might have thought he would have

liked, because actually Monmouth Courthouse is the last major battle in the Northern Theatre. Do you think that's why he hasn't been the hero of a kind of classic Hollywood film? And that's also maybe why the War of Independence, actually there aren't that many Hollywood films about it. There's the Patriot of Imel Gibson, but I can't actually think of any others. I mean, certainly none of those that are well known in Britain or in Europe. And part of the of that is because it ends in a very kind of desultory manner. It kind of splutters out, doesn't it? It splutters out. The British end up sort of trapping themselves at Yorktown. Washington is there, but even Ron Chernobyl's biography says this is really a victory for French siegecraft and French naval supremacy.

And Washington is really a supporting actor, a Yorktown. And it's a sort of slightly confusing ending. The war then, it normally goes on for another two years before the treaties at Paris is. signed. Anyway, back to Washington himself. Did Washington matter? I think the answer is undoubtedly yes, and actually this is why the story of Valley Forge is so important. Because at that moment in 1777, 1778, almost any other commander probably would have seen his army fall apart. They're hungry, they don't have supplies, the weather is terrible, you know, Congress is losing confidence in them, the men are tempted to mutiny. It's easy to imagine. The different. The different. The different colonial units turning on one another. And if the army had broken up, the Continental Army,

I think it would have been pretty hard to rebuild it. I think the momentum would have been lost, even with French backing. I mean, probably the French would not have joined the war in February. And Valley Forge could have been the end of the war that could have been some sort of compromise, who knows. Now instead, of course, it becomes one of the most mythologized moments of the entire campaign. And Washington, because of his dignity, because of his leadership, because of his glacial self-control, all of which are a bit performative, but of course that's not to criticize them. It's precisely because they're so public that they're so powerful. Washington has set the tone. You know, he's played the Roman commander. He has played his hero, Cato,

and it has absolutely worked. He does the same trick again in December at 1783, so that's when the treaty was signed, and he famously walks into the Confederation Congress, and he resigns his command, and he returns to private life. Back to his plow. Back to his plow. Well, again, he's self-consciously playing a Roman. He's playing Cincinnati, isn't he? And people loved it, and George III said, oh, if he did that, he must be the greatest man in the world. You know, because people love the Romans at this point in the late 18th century. They're obsessed by this idea of honor and duty and stuff. And Republican virtue, that this is what you do in a republic, is that you don't monopolize monarchical power

even if you're given it briefly. Exactly so. And so this will also be important for his role as the first president that he ends up laying down his power. This is why they choose him. They don't just choose him as president in 1789 because he was the victorious commander in chief.

They choose him, I think, because he's the only one of the founding fathers who has the dignity and the self-control and the kind of paternalistic vibe that allows him to do. transcend all the factional and regional differences. The other founding fathers may be more interesting, more spiky, more distinctive in their different ways. But that means that they are, they have enemies. They have people who don't like them. Everybody likes and respects Washington.

But you said that he's got a very memorial quality, that he's like a statue hewn out of marble. And that is an enormous advantage if you have an unstable republic. And you need a kind, I'm literally heavyweight, someone who's hewned out of marble, who will provide the kind of dignity that you need in the head of state in the early years of your infant republic, but who will also serve as a kind of monument to that republic after his death. And they must all be kind of thinking of this. Yeah, I think exactly right. So we've got a bonus episode coming up for our Restis History Club members where I talk to Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker. And he's made this massive series, a billion episodes about the American Revolution. And he says in this, Washington is the

kind of indespent, he's the one indispensable man without which it could not have succeeded, a rare example of a great man of history who lives up to his reputation. However, just in case people are thinking they've gone mad, they've gone native, they're sucking up to the colonial. So I should stress this. Even American heroes have feet of clay, or in Washington's case, teeth of clay, Tom. Because by the time the war ends, George Washington's teeth, which end with this crucial point, are in an absolutely shocking state. By 1781, he was wearing dentures that were held together with his crude wire mesh. In 1784, so a year after the war ended, he bought nine teeth from unknown African Americans, and these teeth were then transplanted into his

gums. And by the time he became president in 1789, for all that George III said he was the greatest man in the world, he had just one working tooth left, which is why, as president, I think, he went on to save almost nothing memorable or interesting whatsoever. And Tom, that, I think, is why, since the dawn of their republic 250 years ago, Americans' terrible teeth have been the cause of so much innocent amusement all over the world, and nowhere more so, of course, of course, course than in our own beloved country in Britain. And so the ultimate lesson of this story is that if you want to have proper teeth, teeth like the British. British teeth, then you should pay your taxes. Thank you, Dominic. And we have more to come. So Benjamin Franklin is next, the great scientist and

diplomat in France. Then we have Alexander Hamilton and his duel with Aaron Burr and then Thomas Jefferson. We also have an amazing couple of American Revolution bonuses. So, as Dominic mentioned, the world's greatest historical documentary maker, the legendary Ken Burns. And then we will be talking to very much friend of the show Conan O'Brien for his views on the founding fathers. And on top of that, of course, there's a massive array of supplementary benefits, including our brilliant newsletter. So to get all this, the rest is history.com. you know what to do. Sign up there. And one other thing we should mention actually, so we are doing our Restless History Festival at Hampton Court this weekend. It's got tons of

exciting events. The Saturday, I'm sorry to say, is sold out. That's disappointing for people who want to get tickets. But the good news is that there are still one or two tickets available, I think, for Sunday. There'll be all kinds of treats, but among them will be the appearance of Friends of the Show, Helen Castor, William Dalrymple, Adam Smith, Katia Hoyer, and very excitingly, Ian Hizlop at the end. editor of Private Eye magazine. And if you'd like to get a ticket, go to the rest is history.com. We will be back in our next episode with Benjamin Franklin. But for now, thank you, Dominic. Thank you everyone for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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