George Washington’s lost papers had been discovered in one of my ancestor’s storage chests. Intrigued by this familial connection, I began to take a keen interest in the first president of the United States, and when I had to write a lengthy research paper to graduate from Yale Law School, it was natural to focus on Washington. Specifically, I aimed to determine what the U.S. Constitution meant when it designated the president as “Commander in Chief.” To me, the answer seemed obvious: the text was referring to the powers exercised by the only commander in chief the nation had ever had at that time, General George Washington.
The subject continued to captivate me long after the school paper was graded. With controversies arising over the ways that successive presidents have invoked their power as commander in chief, I found myself looking to the past for insight into how best to assess these debates. After graduation, I continued researching the topic while practicing as an attorney at a New York law firm, and finally completed this book after I returned to Yale Law School as an Olin Scholar. My goal has always been to show that our nation’s early history is neither dry nor dead. Not only is it fascinating and colorful, it is also relevant to modern concerns. This history has real legal weight that influences how the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court interpret the powers of the presidency in our modern era.
Blood of Tyrants brings long-forgotten episodes from the Revolutionary War back to life with surprising new facts. I wanted this book to be as enjoyable to read as fiction, yet painstakingly researched and factual down to the minute details of weather, food, clothing, and personalities. But most of all, I wanted to get people discussing issues that the American Founders faced while winning independence and creating a new nation—issues that still confront us today.
In this last respect, the book has succeeded far beyond my hopes. Blood of Tyrants has been featured by ABC News, Fox News, the History Channel, C-SPAN, Reuters, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Post, National Review, and many other media outlets. It won the William E. Colby Award, and I have had the chance to speak across the country to lively audiences from Boston to San Diego, Miami to Seattle, and many points in between. I continue to do my small part in encouraging people across the United States and abroad to reflect on our nation’s founding struggles and how they informed the meaning of the Constitution—especially when there are public controversies over the legitimate use of governmental power.
Too often, those disputes are colored by partisanship more than principle. When I see headlines like DANGEROUS DIVISIVENESS: POLITICS GROWS MORE PARTISAN,2 or watch the acrimonious political morass in Washington, D.C., I cannot help but think about how George Washington denounced political faction. He called it a “fire not to be quenched . . . demand[ing] a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.” Our first president urged us to use our votes and civic engagement to fight against “ill-founded jealousies” among politicians and to install principled leaders, as our Founders were.3
The Founders developed an ingenious political system, which Washington described as “nearer to perfection than any government hitherto instituted among men.”4 This government “by the people, for the people” empowered the citizenry to select representatives who would reconcile factions while protecting the liberties that so many had died to defend. Under this system, the United States has prospered beyond the founding generation’s wildest dreams; and I wrote this book to help illuminate the constitutional principles that have enabled us to thrive.
The Constitution of the United States embodies the path on which the Founders set the nation. George Washington wrote in 1795, “the constitution is the guide, which I never will abandon.”5
Neither should we.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1787
A bloodthirsty Congress demands revenge. The commander in chief weighs torture. Politicians clash with generals over war policy. Americans’ liberties come under attack. No, this is not the post-9/11 United States. This is the side of the American Revolution you never knew.
Many hold the mistaken belief that America’s Founders simply divined the answers to antiquated problems that are of little importance today. This could not be further from the truth. Instead of knowing all of the solutions, the founding generation battled the horrors of war as they struggled to define what it meant to be an American. And their definition remains relevant. While much of their correspondence involved horses and bayonets, they nevertheless confronted the same fundamental issues of leadership and government that continue to perplex us. In doing so, the Founders forged the American way. From their triumphs emerged bedrock principles that have direct applicability to contemporary debate. This book tells the story of those American ideals from our humble beginnings.
Long before he was known as the “Father of Our Country,” George Washington was the “Devourer of Villages.”1 The great leader first tasted warfare two decades before the Revolutionary War when he led a peacetime act of aggression against a French diplomatic party. In doing so, he unwittingly sparked a bloody war that spanned two continents.
At the time, the territory inland from the eastern seaboard of the American colonies was a vast wilderness, dominated by the rolling hills of the Appalachians. On a wet May morning in 1754, an abundance of broadleaf trees created a thick canopy that shaded Washington and his troops from the rising sun. The smell of fresh pollen and moist earth permeated the air as the soldiers crouched behind the large, moss-covered boulders thrown haphazardly about the little glen. The natural beauty of the verdant fauna amidst the jagged rock was the least of Washington’s cares, however. He and his regiment were primed for attack.
Washington’s early morning trap consisted of forty haggard colonists along with thirteen semi-naked Native American allies. Ironically, Washington and his soldiers were poised in this foreign land under orders not to destroy, but to build.2 Not yet at war, the age-old blood rivals Britain and France fiercely contested this region, since each viewed the Ohio River basin as the key to dominating the continent. And the young Washington marched headstrong into this international powder keg.
Not yet the regal image now depicted on the dollar bill, Washington was a fresh-faced surveyor-turned-warrior with long, red-brown hair atop his prominent forehead, large gray-blue eyes, long, broad nose, and rippling jaw.3 A muscular six feet and 175 pounds, he was literally a giant among men of the time, although a bit unusually proportioned, with “[h]is shoulders narrow for his height but his hands and feet tremendous.”4 He possessed a commanding presence despite his youth, and “exuded such masculine power as frightens young women.”5 This fearsome young man ached for glory.
When the upper echelons of Virginia society sent Washington to stake Britain’s claim to the Ohio Valley, the twenty-one-year-old Washington was determined to prove himself. But dealing with the French was no easy task. During his first diplomatic attempt to drive them from the region, Washington was cordially received and invited to dine with the French officers. “The Wine, as they dosed themselves pretty plentifully with it, soon banished the[ir] Restraint,” he wrote. “They Told me That it was their absolute Design to take possession of the Ohio [River basin], and by G___ they would do it.”6 Washington used this alcohol-induced intelligence to advocate that the British construct a fort in the area to establish control.
Obtaining approval to do so, the ambitious young lieutenant colonel led his militia through the spring mud of the thick virgin wilderness, lugging along the supplies necessary to construct the stronghold. But what had begun as an adventure quickly deteriorated into a perilous mess. As it turned out, the colonists enjoyed the realities of military service far less than their idealized notions of battle.
Washington struggled to hold his militia together as they grumbled about their low