History repeatedly demonstrates the difficulties faced by large conventional powers confronting decentralized resistance movements. From the American Revolution to Vietnam and Afghanistan, weaker forces have often offset military inferiority through mobility, dispersion, decentralization, local support, and the avoidance of decisive engagements.
While George Washington and the American Patriots are often credited with defeating the British Empire through asymmetric warfare, Washington arrived at that strategy belatedly and embraced it only partially. His instinct was to fight as a state—with a professional army, centralized administration, and conventional military institutions.
Charles Lee, on the other hand, recognized much earlier that America’s greatest strengths lay in decentralized resistance, militia warfare, and making British occupation prohibitively expensive. The distinction mattered not only militarily but politically, as conventional warfare demanded many of the fiscal and administrative measures that accompanied the Revolution. In reality, Washington gradually moved toward a strategy of exhaustion, avoidance, and attrition, while Charles Lee had recognized from the beginning that America’s greatest military advantage lay in avoiding the sort of conventional contest Britain wanted to fight.
The Continental Congress had the option between both men—George Washington and Charles Lee. In Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard wrote regarding the choice between Washington and Lee, “What Congress decided to do about that army would determine what it would do about the entire Revolution.” These men had entirely different strategies as to how to fight the British and maintain independence. Obviously, Washington was chosen over Lee, however, this article seeks to explore the little-known alternative: What if Charles Lee and his strategy had been chosen instead?
At the outset, a word of caution is necessary. We always have to be careful with speculation from counterfactual history and not overstate unverifiable conclusions. There are limits on the conclusive power of available evidence and there were negatives of Lee’s strategy. Human decisions, unforeseen circumstances, and countless variables make definitive conclusions impossible. Moreover, Lee’s proposed approach was not without risks or drawbacks of its own.
We can, however, examine what did happen, the available evidence, appreciate Lee and the logic behind his proposed strategy, and recognize some of the drawbacks of Washington’s strategy. Such an exercise helps guard against historical determinism—the assumption that the course of events was inevitable—or that Washington’s state-centered approach to warfare was the only realistic option. The American Revolution could have been fought differently. Charles Lee believed it should have been, and his arguments deserve closer examination.
This key decision of the Continental Congress matters because the way a war is fought affects the outcomes. It is the contention of this article that the choice to fight like a state means either losing or winning like a state.
Who Was Charles Lee?
In a seemingly bold statement, Rothbard writes,
If the choice of commander-in-chief of the Continental Army had been made on the basis of ability, genius, military experience, erudition, ardor for the cause of liberty, or for a combination of these qualities, this crucial appointment would have gone not to Washington but to one Charles Lee. But political considerations ruled, and Lee, a native of Britain, had no political base. Mere merit was submerged, though some delegates did favor Lee for the job.
Rothbard also titled a chapter “Charles Lee: Champion of Liberty and Guerilla War.” This might seem like contrarian, overly-confident language, however, Rothbard was not the only one with high praise for Charles Lee. George Washington himself confessed in a letter to his brother (March 31, 1776), “General Lee. . .is the first Officer in Military knowledge and experience we have in the whole Army” (p. 5). John Adams claimed that he “had read as much on the military Art and much more of the History of War than any American Officer” except Charles Lee (p. 6). Indeed, Lee was the “most experienced officer in the Continental Army” (p. 6).
Charles Lee was one of the earliest supporters of American independence and who served as George Washington’s second-in-command and military confidant during the early years of the Revolution (p. 1). He saw extensive action in America during the French and Indian War and later in Europe after the conflict expanded into the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and he also served as aide-de-camp to Poland’s King Stanislaus (p. 5). He was appointed a major general in the Continental Army by Congress in June 1775 (p. 5). In Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of Charles Lee, Phillip Papas writes (p. 12),
Lee reached his zenith as a revolutionary and as a hero of American liberty between June 1775 and September 1776. During that fifteen-month time span, he served as Congress’s main military troubleshooter, assigned to wherever the need for his military expertise seemed most critical.
Thus, while largely overlooked by his contemporaries and historians, Charles Lee was an experienced military expert and both he and his strategy are worth some attention.
The State-Centered Approach vs. Guerilla Warfare
In terms of strategy for the American War of Independence, Washington favored a state-centered approach that required a professional army and centralized administration, whereas Charles Lee advocated a decentralized form of warfare that sought to exploit America’s comparative advantages in terrain, local support, and militia resistance, resembling what would later be called asymmetric or guerrilla warfare.
Lee believed that America’s greatest military advantages were not professional soldiers or centralized military institutions, but rather its armed and self-reliant citizenry. In a 1774 pamphlet entitled Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans, Lee wrote,
The Yeomanry of America have, besides infinite advantages, over the peasantry of other countries; they are accustomed from their infancy to fire arms; they are experts in the use of them:. . . The Americans are likewise, to a man, skillful in the management of the instruments necessary for all military works;. . . Taking, therefore, all circumstances into consideration, there will be no rashness in affirming, that this continent may have formed for action, in three or four months, an hundred thousand infantry. . .
Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel summarizes in “The Constitution as Counter-Revolution: A Tribute to the Anti-Federalists,”
Military conservatives, such as Washington, wanted to fight the Revolution according to the conventional principles of eighteenth-century warfare, with a sizeable and costly professional army. Some military radicals, such as Charles Lee, pointed toward a less orthodox military-oriented strategy along the lines of what today is called guerrilla warfare, which would have been more decentralized and less expensive. The American fear of standing armies, stemming from the well-established threat that standing armies posed to liberty, as well as each state’s jealous regard for its own prerogatives, prevented the military conservatives from implementing their entire programme. But they did induce Congress to focus the Revolutionary effort upon a regular Continental Army commanded by Washington.
The Continental Congress’s Critical Choice: Washington or Lee?
As the section above indicates, the choice was not simply between one man or another, but between two strategies and their consequences. Writes Patrick Newman in Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1706–1849,
More ominously, the delegates decided how to conduct the current hostilities: conventional instead of guerrilla warfare.
Conventional military planning referred to the ancient practice of organizing a formally trained conscript army to fight the enemy in pitched battles. This method required a war machine to furnish supplies and invasive financing measures (e.g., taxes, debt, inflation, and outright confiscation of supplies), which lead [sic] to cronyism. On the other hand, guerrilla warfare, a new and still developing strategy, advocated for informal militiamen and volunteers to ambush, harass, and disrupt enemy supply lines. This persistent snipping [sic] at the opposition complemented the colonists’ comparative advantage since they knew their own terrain, and did not formally train for pitched battles, and could not match Britain’s military resources.
However, the Continental Congress chose the first option, appointing the conventional George Washington of Virginia instead of the guerrilla strategist Charles Lee of Great Britain as commander in chief. . . .
While Washington adopted the Prussian method and turned the army into a standard, regimented, and hierarchical system, Congress turned to finance. Recognizing that the colonists would not tolerate taxes, the landed oligarch Gouverneur Morris of New York, a supporter of reconciliation and grandson of a former royal governor, pushed for soft-money financing. As a result, Congress started to issue Continental dollars that it promised to redeem in specie sometime in the future (a promise quickly dropped).
Strategies & Consequences
While debatably misusing the word “nation,” Papas writes truthfully, “The American nation was born in war. And, reflecting Lee’s arguments, this war shaped the kind of nation that emerged from it” (p. 13). By choosing Washington and his state-centered military approach, the choice was made that would eventuate a state and centralization.
This was a conflict from the beginning. Rothbard writes about the awareness that following the state-centric model posed a danger to true liberty and state independence,
Here the Massachusetts radicals were in a cruel dilemma; any army under the Continental Congress would mean, in contrast to a guerilla army, the inevitable buildup of a central state apparatus, and of a high expensive and burdensome state army, which would inevitably saddle all Americans with heavy taxes, inflation, and debt. The Massachusetts radicals can hardly be blamed for their decision to press for a statist continental army; the theory of revolutionary guerilla warfare had yet to be fully developed. . . (emphasis added)
Hummel, again, explains the connection between the way the war was waged and national centralization,
. . .the military strategy adopted by Congress necessitated large expenditures. . . . with a sizeable and costly professional army. . . .
Congress was thus faced with the enormous task of acquiring the resources to raise and maintain the Continental Army. To this single, fateful decision [choosing a state-centric war model and appointing Washington] can be attributed almost the entire panoply of war-time excesses. An unfunded government debt, paper money, skyrocketing inflation, price controls, legal tender laws, direct impressment of supplies and wide-spread conscription. . . Those excesses naturally aroused resentment, and they played into the hands of the nationalists, who contended that only stronger central authority could alleviate them. (emphasis added)
Washington’s strategic vision carried costs beyond the battlefield. Maintaining the Continental Army required massive expenditures, borrowing, requisitioning, inflationary currency emissions, and various forms of economic intervention. Price inflation became a persistent problem, and Congress struggled to finance the war without resorting to measures that many Americans viewed as violations of the very liberties they sought to defend. A less centralized military strategy might not only have reduced costs but also diminished pressures for inflation, price controls, and other emergency wartime expedients.
The real significance of Charles Lee is not that he was a forgotten military genius who certainly would have outperformed Washington. Rather, Lee represents an alternative revolutionary tradition—one that sought to exploit America’s strengths as a decentralized society rather than overcome them through the construction of increasingly national institutions. Whether such a strategy would have produced a quicker victory is unknowable. What can be said is that it may have achieved independence with fewer of the fiscal, administrative, and political consequences that accompanied Washington’s more conventional approach.
The war and post-war consequences that emerged from the state-centered approach arguably laid the groundwork for increasing centralization and consolidation, eventually leading to the counter-revolution of the Philadelphia Convention and the ratification of the Constitution. Whether beginning from state ratification or ultimately achieved through the Civil War, state liberty and independence—the very point of the war—were ultimately subsumed by a centralized American state. If you fight like a state, you tend to win or lose like a state.
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