A Syllabus for War

NARRATOR: If you stepped into Washington's personal library during his presidency, many of the books you would see would have been gifts given to him by well-wishers, admirers, and more than a few ambitious writers. One of those ambitious writers was John Anderson, a professor in Scotland known to his students as Jolly Jack Phosphorus. When Anderson sent Washington a copy of his Essays on Field Artillery in 1793. He was looking for more than just a rave review. He was looking for a job. And who better to work for than the first President of the United States?

Today on the Secrets of Washington's Archives, we're talking about the military, leadership, and George Washington's collection of tactical field guides. We'll learn about how Washington taught himself to become a professional soldier and what lessons he has passed on to us today. 

And now your host, Dr. Anne Fertig. 

ANNE FERTIG: Welcome to the Secrets of Washington's Archives. In this podcast, we're celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Washington Presidential Library by exploring George Washington's life through his books. In this episode, we're talking about George Washington, the general, by taking a look at one of his military field guys. The book, Essays on Field Artillery, is our newest acquisition here at the Washington Presidential Library, a testament to our continuing mission to recreate the library of George Washington.

And here today to talk about George Washington, the military and leadership is none other than Dr. Joseph STOLTZ, Director of Leadership Programs here at the Washington Library. So if you've been here before on a company retreat, if you've done one of our leadership programs, it was Joe here at the helm. So welcome, Joe, we're glad to have you here today. 

JOSEPH STOLTZ: Yeah, thanks Anne, good to be here. 

FERTIG: So you are the head of the Leadership Institute.

STOLTZ: Can you tell us more about what that is, and how does that tie into the Washington Library's mission? So the George Washington Leadership Institute is a specialized portion of our library programs division. We specifically do adult education programs for corporate, government, military, higher ed, anyone that wants to sign up. But it is normally through a group. Our programs look at the leadership of George Washington through his life and times. My background is as a military historian, so I tend to focus in the courses I do on Washington's military leadership, but we have other faculty that are more political historians, economic historians. And so what we try and do is use the past as a case study to give people a chance to reflect on leadership in the past, but also then by extension, give them a toolkit they can use to reflect on their own leadership and management skills.

FERTIG: And what is it about George Washington in particular that lends itself so easily to the leadership program? What kind of lessons do you usually teach from his life and times? 

STOLTZ: I think with Washington, one of the things that's helpful for us is he's just involved in so many things throughout his life. If we're working with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy's office, well, George Washington did a lot of defense policy throughout his life. If we're working with folks from the Treasury Department, Washington helped stand up the first federal banking system in the United States. So being here in the DC area We work a lot with trade associations and various forms of associations cause there's an association for everything including an association for associations. That was my weird thing I learned when I moved here. 

The thing that's helpful with Washington is just he's involved in so many topics that you can find ways to make these aspects relevant and I think what makes him an attractive figure for looking at some of this stuff is that he became, emphasis on became, very good at strategic thinking and as we phrase it in our program Strategic Vision. So taking again, this is a process. He was not always good at this one I wanna emphasize that but that's probably for a whole other podcast He eventually became quite good at really learning to take the time to think through What is it I want to accomplish or what is it the organization I'm leading is being asked to accomplish?

And then think through all the nuances and the subtleties of what do I need to do to accomplish that mission or goal, but almost more importantly, what do I need to make sure I don't do? What are the possible counterfactuals that could hurt me? And are there ways that I can go about accomplishing my mission or goals that might actually be harmful to my goals? Things that maybe seem like they'd be easy or sort of the obvious thing to do, but actually risk larger goals.

So, very quick example is that for the Continental Army, when Washington is commander in chief of it, it is not just being asked by Congress to act as a military in the sense of defeating the British in some sort of hard power conflict. They're also being asked as an organization to help establish some flavor of democratic republic on the backside of the war. And so how the military interacts with that civilian government and with the average American citizen, I would argue is going to be just as important of whether on any given day the Continental Army is more or less effective at shooting British soldiers. How they win is as important as whether they win or not in the first place if under the specific circumstances that they're operating for.

FERTIG: I think its so interesting too that you place this emphasis on becoming a great leader and how that is a process. Of course, in this podcast, we're focusing specifically on his books and books that he started collecting when he was just a teenager that he continued collecting through his life and the different types of things that he could have possibly learned from these books. Now I understand that Washington owned quite a few books on military tactics and military guides. Can you give us a brief overview of what other military books he was reading at this time?

STOLTZ: So it kind of depends on which time. Washington, to be perfectly frank, did not take his professional military education seriously when he was a young man, which is a little ironic, or disappointing maybe would be the better word, given in his early years he placed such an emphasis on trying to get a military commission, but he's very much focused on landing the job, not necessarily doing well at it. And that all will become cripplingly, painfully, apparent during his first time out as a military officer in what's called the Fort Necessity Campaign where he'll end up taking about 250 British and Virginia soldiers out into Western Pennsylvania and just completely get his teeth kicked in by the Native Americans and their French allies. 

To his credit, Washington will come back from that mission realizing basically he got a free pass. And that's when you really start to see his book buying and book acquisition pattern begin, I would argue, because he writes to a friend in London. He says, basically go get me the syllabus for British Infantry Officer 101. I don't wanna screw up at this again. And so you'll see him just buy a flurry of military art and science manuals. Will serve throughout the war and then thinks he's done. And so then he'll end up inheriting Mount Vernon, think he's not doing anything with war anymore. Fast forward to, oh, wait, there's this whole American Revolution thing brewing up. And you'll start to see him once again acquiring military art and science manuals to see what new innovations are out there. And this particular period that the American Revolution occurs in is really, for geeky military historians like me, interesting period for the theories surrounding military art and science, because this is where most Western European style militaries are moving from, I'll try and be as neutral as possible here, dilettante aristocratic play acting at being a military officer, and moving into a much more professionalized 19th century style of leadership, and really a professionalization of what it means to be a military officer, but also general notions of what war is, the legitimate use of force, who that force should be used against, how you go about conducting campaigns. 

All of that is being questioned repeatedly throughout the 18th century. And in some ways, what can make the American Revolution interesting from a military history standpoint is that the American colony has really become a testing ground for a lot of these different reforms that are being proposed in books that Washington is reading, whether it's the Americans, the British, eventually the French, everyone is using the North American battlefields of the Revolution as a laboratory to put these different theoretical ideas that are bubbling up into practice, and they don't know it yet, but they'll all have everything tested out by the time the Napoleonic Wars come along, and then things get really bad. 

FERTIG: Yeah, it sort of touches upon something we've discussed in other episodes of this podcast of the ways in which Washington would learn these different processes, whether it's his agricultural techniques or his military techniques, this idea of almost experimentation, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work, and learning from that and moving forward. Which in this case, of course, the stakes are much higher. 

STOLTZ: To bring it back to discussions of what we're doing now with leadership programs at Mount Vernon, this is sort of stuff that resonates with a lot of modern corporate groups because there's been this whole idea recently of moving fast and breaking things. Like, let's innovate as fast as possible to try and get the best results we can. And failure is fine. It's almost encouraged to experiment and move around. And so that's something you see throughout the war, but you asked about the specific books. So Washington actually receives a letter in 1776 from a Virginia colonel that's gonna be a regimental commander in the Virginia line. He writes to Washington, he says, “Hey sir, you might not remember me, but I served under you in the French and Indian War.” He was just a junior officer then. “I have no clue what I'm doing with this whole Colonel thing. I was in charge of 30 people, now I'm in charge of 600 people. What do I do?”

And Washington will actually send him a brief reading list on books he would recommend. And what's interesting is it's not necessarily the books you would expect. They're definitely books with more of a mindset of how to fight in disorganized terrain. Books that are encouraging individual initiative out of officers. You'll sometimes hear historians talk about, you know, Washington's trying to create a professional military force out of the Continental Army and one that looks like the British and maybe aesthetically with the same sort of uniforms but blue, yes, they'll look like the British. But Washington and the leadership of the Continental Army seemed to definitely, from fairly early on in the war, want a professionalized force, one that takes its professionalization seriously but not one that's just aping British tactics and strategies because those were developed to operate in Northwestern Europe, which is not North America. So how are they adapting it to the local terrain? 

FERTIG: So let's talk then about this particular book, Essays on Field Artillery, which as I just mentioned is a recent acquisition here at the Washington Presidential Library. This was a military book that he didn't buy for himself. It was given to him, correct? 

STOLTZ: Yeah, so the book is sent to him by a guy named John Anderson, later in Washington's life. So he's president by this point. And in that period, he gets a lot of books sent to him. So this is not one that Washington saw on the bookshelf at Barnes and Noble is like that one. That's the one that's gonna help me win wars. 

FERTIG: Everyone wanted George's signature on their books. They wanted all to dedicate to him and to have his endorsement. 

STOLTZ: Well, and this book's interesting in some ways because of basically how unimportant it is. It's basically a sales pitch by Anderson, who was a professor of let’s call it chemistry. 

FERTIG: Natural philosophy, I think, was the term used back then. But yeah, I guess that's the closest to what it would be today. 

STOLTZ: Yeah, it would be more like chemistry, material science.

FERTIG: Just to give you an idea, he's best known in Scotland today because he founded the Institute of Physics and what's known as the Anderson Institute, which is today Strathclyde University in Scotland. So that's his big claim to fame. 

STOLTZ: Yeah, so he's a professor of, again, we'd probably today call a professor like chemistry and material science. And he thinks he has developed a newer, better way to mold cannon barrels. And specifically what he was trying to do was create a metal that was lighter and more efficient than had been used before. In part, that will help cannons have less recoil. One of the big problems with artillery in the 18th century was that they took so long to load and aim.

So if you had a very well-trained crew and were doing everything safely and weren't skipping any steps for the sake of expediency, you'd be lucky to get off around one round a minute. A lot of which has to do with re-aiming the gun because normally what would happen is this big giant gun goes off, it moves, and then you've got to re-sight it. And so if you could have a weapon system that was lighter, and wouldn't jump around so much, it would be easier to move back into position, you would in theory be able to put more rounds on target and do more good things for your side. 

So Anderson felt like he had developed a better system for this. He actually takes it as one would expect for a Scottish professor, first takes it to the British army. The British army is less than impressed, probably in fairness to Anderson more because of nepotism within the British Army than it was that his system didn't really work. And so the British Army will pass on it. The French are in need of a lot of cannons because this is as the French Revolution is kicking off and they're increasingly being invaded by continental European powers. And so Anderson will take his ideas to the French government. The French government is not uninterested. They'll toss him honorary French citizenship, which is a little awkward if you're a British subject at this point. 

And that's how Anderson meets the Marquis de Lafayette, who says, hey, this seems promising. You should talk to my boy George Washington, because the Americans are trying to set up a nascent armaments industry of their own so that they don't have to keep buying stuff from Europeans. And that's what will sort of spur Anderson to reach out to President Washington with basically a sales pitch, sort of early military industrial complex lobbying effort. Washington's not uninterested again, but now he's a couple thousand miles away. And so he will basically say, I'm not saying no, I wanna hear more about it. 

FERTIG: I believe one of his offers too, was that he would train 11 young American men in how to create these. So not only sending the book, but offering to give these practical skills to young American men who might need that kind of specialized training in creating artillery. 

STOLTZ: Yeah, there was actually an earlier sort of the standard British artillery mainly at this time was written by a guy named Mueller, with a very German spelling. And the British had basically been a little too open in their manual about how one goes constructing artillery. So much so that during the American Revolutionary War, the Americans are able to take Mueller's treatise on artillery and set up what becomes the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. The British never make that mistake again, right, so think like, early version of classification systems. They'll make sure they're hiding trade secrets. But that's a concern for the Americans, right? As that means now they're gonna have to actually try and do this themselves. They know how to make cannons that are now basically 40 years old, and they want to learn newer systems. So importantly for Anderson's sales pitch is I won't just give you the instructions, I'll show you how to build the IKEA furniture myself. 

FERTIG: And he wanted something very specific in exchange for this, which I love. He wanted a salary to be certain, but he also wanted the title of Engineer or Field Artillerist of the United States. 

STOLTZ: Yeah, so if you actually are really bored and look into James Anderson, he was a professor at this point at the University of Glasgow and apparently was despised by his peers because he was just so curmudgeonly and never felt like he was getting enough credit for anything, which is why he goes off and founds his own university. So yeah, he's definitely someone that's not afraid to market himself.

FERTIG: And you said Washington wasn't uninterested. What steps did he take after this gift of this book was given to him to try to fulfill what Anderson had requested? 

STOLTZ: So Washington will send Tobias Lear, who had been his secretary during the presidency and then post presidency. Lear was going to England anyway on a bunch of other business for the US government and for Washington personally. And so Lear arranges to meet with Anderson. Lear writes back to Washington and basically says, yeah, I mean, it sounds pretty good. It's not going to cost us very much. The guy's asking to basically have us pay his relocation fees and probably set him up with a house. Washington will approach Congress about it. And the sort of Democratic-Republican Congress is not terribly interested in spending money in general, much less for this. And eventually, the whole project sort of peters out. 

FERTIG: I think it was Knox who was like, I don't know if Congress is going to pay for this. 

STOLTZ: Yeah, I mean, it's one of those that Anderson's ideas were very much in keeping with the time. And what I mean by that is that he might have been brilliant, and he might have come up with these ideas independently. But the point is, a lot of people were coming up with these sort of similar ideas at the same point, because they're all trying to solve the same problems. In fact, for as much as the French give Anderson's ideas some play, they'll actually end up adopting their own system that uses his ideas, but it's really not clear that they're ripping him off, if that makes sense. French engineers are coming up with a lot of the same notions. And for Anderson and sales pitch to the French, it doesn't help that in only a few years from all this the guy that's gonna end up taking over France, Napoleon Bonaparte, was by training an engineer and really doesn't need some random Scottish professor to tell him how artillery should be operating. I believe Washington did write very complimentary as this great quote, "'I wish most sincerely that some inducement could be offered Professor Anderson, 'which would bring him to the country.” But in the end, I think it was just decided it was too expensive and Anderson was too old by this point as well to actually bring him over. So the whole idea collapsed, as it were. 

So this combines a few things that we know about Washington in this time. One, that as president, he's receiving a lot of books, and books in particular, with people asking them to endorse his ideas or to offer some sort of patronage. And it's interesting, too, that people are using their books, their ideas, their publications to do that. But two, it's also playing into what is, as we know, a larger expertise and interest of Washington. And he knows military tactics and he's read a lot of military tactics and he knows what these problems are and is interested in solutions for them. 

STOLTZ: It's ironically for the British market, being able to get Washington's premature isn't nothing because he's actually the one that's recently beaten the British army and handed them strategically one of their biggest defeats since the Hundred Years War. And so Washington is someone that they would like to get the stamp of approval on these ideas for. There's also the potential for the US to be a mass market for these sort of things. It's just geographically the United States is very large. It's not clear to a lot of Europeans that the United States will or will not be getting great power status sooner rather than later, just given their ability to move into the continent, or if they do want to move into the continent, they're probably gonna need some tools to go do that. And so for a lot of these folks that are pitching these new ideas, especially when it's technology or something where money can be made from, the US is an attractive up and coming market to be trying to get those real investments in. 

The other interesting thing is that the Duke of Richmond who had been essentially the person that oversaw weapons acquisition for the British Army, tells Anderson, yeah, if you could get somebody else, you know, especially the Americans to buy it, then I'll take a second look at your stuff, right, but we don't want to be an early adopter. Right, you sort of, when your iPhone pops up and says, do you want to do the update right away? And some people maybe wait a little bit to let version, like, 10.1 rather than 10.0 occur. Before the Duke of Richmond signs some big arms deal, maybe let the Americans go pilot that one for us. 

FERTIG: It gives a new meaning to the term, the Great Experiment. 

STOLTZ: Yeah, well, this is an era where as much as they're quickly learning and refining the science of these things, there's no way to test any of it until someone actually goes out there and sets off a couple pounds of black powder inside a tube that may or may not be structurally sound. Especially when you start messing around with the different alloys that are used to create the tube. Someone's got to go out there and actually set the darn thing off and the more you set it off, the more you can have a chance for structural failure. And so it's not surprising in many ways that the British, especially the British are like, why don't you go let the Americans put a number of rounds through these things just as test case then we might start mucking around with our own. 

FERTIG: And it seems Washington was open to it so long as he could get Congress to fund it. 

STOLTZ: Congress kind of balks at the money. I mean realistically even the US budget in that period in the grand scheme this would not have been that much money. I'm not sure that it's really so much the cost per se that was the issue more than I think some of the folks probably weren't terribly happy about the idea of bringing someone British over to show them how to do this. Frankly for some of Hamilton's friends, some more of the more federalist side of the aisle, they probably prefer some native developments in arms. Why pay this British guy to come over and do it? Give us a chance to develop the technology domestically. 

FERTIG: So going then back to this idea of leadership. Can we learn any leadership lessons from this text or this incident in particular or anything that tells us something interesting about the ways that Washington led during his presidency? 

STOLTZ: In terms of the book itself, probably not. Just because it is a very technical treatise. It was only basically self-published, if you will. It was a very limited run that was really just used as marketing materials for Anderson's pitches. There's nothing that gets to larger ideals of application of military force or anything. It's literally just a better way to pour cannon barrels when you really, pun intended, reduce it down. Now I think in terms of what it speaks to with Washington as president and sort of bigger picture, is we were talking about sort of before, someone that's willing to move fast and break things, someone that's willing to experiment. And from an industrial standpoint, for the young United States, that's really important.

Because they have no industrial base to speak of. Or by Washington's presidency, they have a very infant industrial base, largely one that was built in wartime, which I think is maybe part of why Congress wasn't particularly concerned about this guy's better, cheaper way to make cannons. Because if you're Congress, you're really kind of hoping to not have to do this anytime soon. And so hey, if somebody wants to come in and teach us better, faster ways to do crop rotation and increase agricultural output, heck yeah. But blowing things up, we kind of just did that for eight years. Maybe let's not plan on doing it any time soon. 

FERTIG: And I'm sure Washington would have been just as interested in the newer, faster ways of crop rotation. 

STOLTZ: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That might have been one he would have been like, well, Tobias, you were going to take that trip to England. But maybe I'll just do that. No, he wasn't going to go to England. Who am I kidding? Probably stay away from there for a little while longer.

FERTIG: So to finish us off here, in all of your leadership programs and everything that you've written and read about Washington's leadership, what aspects of his leadership do you personally admire most? 

STOLTZ: Yeah, there are two. And I think they come from the same source. The first is a commitment to lifelong learning, both for himself and organizations he led. And the other is a comfort with knowing what you don't know and being willing to seek out advice. And I think in both cases, it frankly comes from his lack of a formal education. He is not invested in basically by his family. He's a spare adult son. And so he's never sent to university. There's never any intention of sending him to university. And he's very much a punk when he's in his younger years.

But that experience I mentioned at the beginning at Fort Necessity, that really seems to mellow him out, or at least begin the process of a mellowing out as a leader. By the time of the Revolutionary War, so there's still a 15-year gap, because we know what happened. It's a 15-year mellowing period. By the time of the Revolutionary War, I think you see a much more mature leader that, because of his lack of formal education, almost tends to be pathologically unsure of himself. And I actually mean that in a good way. Someone that is constantly trying to find more information, you see that in his book buying patterns. Someone that seems very comfortable asking for advice, you see that throughout the war with his councils of war, the presidency, he'll bring the council of war model to the presidency, in what's going to become his presidential cabinet, right? Something that Lindsay Chervinsky, one of our former fellows, has written extensively on. 

Contrast that to some of the other, quote, founding fathers, big personalities that are very impressed with their own educations. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, very well-educated, very formally educated people that know they're smart. And with Washington, I think it really helps him at times that he tends to come in with a softer touch by the time he's gonna be Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. And I think that's really important for his effectiveness. And I don't even know that this is something intentional necessarily at first, but something really useful for his effectiveness as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, because there was an assumption from a lot of elected officials that a general would wanna throw their weight around. General would want to be the subject matter expert and wanna tell Congress. what to do or how to conduct the war. And there's a lot of concern about what the implications of that might be. And so even if it's something he just accidentally becomes good at, it's something you see him pick up and run with throughout the war and then the presidency. And I think that helps him a lot with his relations with Congress both during the war and the presidency. And plus, for all of us, just being able to have that humility to be comfortable with not knowing something and trying to find out better answers for it, whether it's just doing more research yourself or whether it's bringing in subject matter experts. 

FERTIG: So you've brought up that he has read so many of these books encouraged by his own experiences in the military. How did he encourage others to also embrace this commitment to learning?

STOLTZ: So I mentioned that he has this one correspondence with one officer, Virginia officer, for initial training. But this is something that you see throughout the war with the Continental Army, and that's not me saying it, that's the people that were shooting at them saying it. So one of the fun things with the American Revolutionary War is the German participation, because the British are short of soldiers, they'll bring over a lot of Germans from the Palatinate region there along the Rhineland. To be clear, they're not mercenaries. They're soldiers in their own nation state armies. The nation state ruler is being paid for these soldiers. These soldiers are just sent to go do their job, just like they're serving anywhere else. But my point being, they don't have a dog in any of the hunts of politics going on of the American Revolution. They are just there as third party observers stuck in the middle of this whole thing. So if you go look through German soldiers' letters and journals, so you can really get a fun perspective on the conflict because they don't care. About any of it. 

And the German soldiers talk about that if British officers had taken their professional development as seriously as the American officers were, the war would have been over in a matter of years in the British favor. And I think that's something for a lot of our listeners and Americans in general, we tend to think of the British army as the more professional one. And it was, organizationally it's much more mature. But the British Army was also resting on a lot of laurels it had achieved in previous conflict. And so a lot of their officers were professionally atrophying, if you will, and sort of taking for granted. Whereas the Americans, Washington's really trying to instill in the officer corps of the Continental Army a comfortability with not knowing, and therefore trying to explore more. So these Germans write about that they could capture an American officer. And there might not be any food in their haversacks or knapsacks. They're little bags that they're carrying on themselves. 

But there's books. There's military art and science treaties. These are officers that know that their profession, a year or two before, had been a doctor or a lawyer or just a simple merchant. But now they are responsible for other people's lives, and they're trying to learn as quickly as they can. And so it's really something you see not just with Washington himself, but really with the organizations leading, trying to develop that sense of professionalism, but that sense of lifelong learning and that sense of being comfortable with what you don't know and trying to solve it. He did attempt to bring that to the federal government when he was president, though similar to Congress balking on James Anderson, Congress was not keen to pay for a lot of professional development exercises for the nascent federal government workforce. And so Washington just verbally encouraged them to do it, but couldn't actually help in any sort of tangible sense, which is an irony. And I think something that Washington could see as a happy irony that now for our leadership Institute here at Mount Vernon, so many of our groups that come in are with the federal government.

So in some ways, it's almost kind of Washington getting the last laugh against the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans that now the federal government not only pays for professional development, in a way they kind of pay George Washington for professional development. 

FERTIG: Well, may George Washington continue to encourage us all to read and professionalize ourselves. 

STOLTZ: Yeah, there's always more books to be read.

FERTIG: I think that's such a wonderful lesson to end off with, especially as all of our listeners here today are also joining that commitment to lifelong learning just by hitting play on this podcast. So thank you for joining us again. For all of you out there who are listening who would like to see our newest acquisition, Essays on Field Artillery by John Anderson, you can check out our video companion to this podcast at georgewashingtonpodcast.com or through the Mount Vernon YouTube channel. Thank you and have a good day.

NARRATOR: The book featured in today's podcast is Essays on Field Artillery by John Anderson. This book is currently held by the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Its purchase in 2022 was made possible by a grant from the H.W. Wilson Foundation and funds from the David H. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscripts Endowment.

The Secrets of Washington's Archives is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and CD Squared. Hosted by Dr. Anne Fertig. Researched by Dr. Joseph Stoltz and Dr. Fertig. Narration and audio production by Kurt Dahl at CD Squared. The music featured in this podcast is from the album No Kissing Allowed in School, produced by the Colonial Music Institute. You can listen to more from this album and other productions of the Colonial Music Institute on Spotify.