by Washington Irving
Washington Irving’s fourth volume in his monumental biography of George Washington picks up during one of the darkest chapters of the Revolutionary War and carries the reader all the way through Washington’s tearful inauguration as the nation’s first President. It is a sweeping, richly detailed account that covers betrayal, military strategy, political intrigue, and the birth of a republic — all filtered through Irving’s admiring but careful eye. For students of American history, this volume is essential reading, and even for the casual reader, it rewards patience with moments of genuine drama and revelation.
The volume opens with the Continental Army once again mired in hardship. Supplies are critically short, and the men Washington commands are poorly clothed, poorly fed, and poorly paid. Irving does not let the reader forget the grinding material reality of this war — it was not won on inspiration alone. The army’s suffering becomes so acute that, at one point, soldiers in the North mutiny outright, determined to march on Philadelphia to demand what they are owed. They are intercepted and an agreement is reached, but the episode underscores just how fragile Washington’s hold on his fighting force was throughout this period.
What makes Washington’s leadership so remarkable, as Irving presents it, is that he kept the army functional and the cause alive despite these relentless pressures. He contended not only with a superior enemy but with interference from Congress, short-term enlistments that constantly eroded his ranks, and organized cabals working against him. That he persevered is, in Irving’s telling, a testament to character rather than mere military brilliance.
The most gripping thread running through the early part of this volume is the story of Benedict Arnold’s treason. Irving traces the arc of Arnold’s descent with considerable depth. Arnold had been a genuine hero in the early war effort, and he leaned on that reputation heavily when controversy found him. He portrayed himself as a persecuted patriot — he was even attacked in the streets of Pennsylvania — and used public sympathy to try to rehabilitate his image.
A court martial brought two specific charges against Arnold. The first related to his time at Valley Forge with Washington, when he granted permission for a vessel to depart from Philadelphia while the city was still under British control. The second involved his appropriation of public wagons belonging to Pennsylvania for personal use during a special emergency. He received a reprimand — a seemingly minor punishment that nonetheless deepened his bitterness.
Irving then follows the full, intricate unfolding of Arnold’s plot. Arnold, burdened by mounting personal debts, opened a secret correspondence with British commander Sir Henry Clinton through the spy John André. His objective was to secure command of West Point so that he could betray it to the British — a move that, had it succeeded, could have been catastrophic. The plot reached its climax as Washington and the French were preparing to move against New York. Arnold met André on neutral territory to finalize arrangements, but the meeting ran long and the two were forced to retreat to a house owned by a man named Smith. When American forces attacked the boat André had arrived on, he found himself stranded in American-controlled territory, forced to travel overland in disguise.
His disguise did not hold. He was captured by Americans who saw through it — a process made easier by the fact that André himself initially declared he was a British officer. Irving notes, interestingly, that the area had been harassed by so-called “Cow Boys” in raids, a detail that gives a curious pre-echo of the American West, despite this book predating the age of the cowboy by decades. André was brought to a nearby fort, and Washington was informed of the betrayal. Men were dispatched immediately to capture Arnold, but he had already learned of André’s arrest and fled to New York City, ultimately receiving sanctuary — and payment — from the British.
André’s fate was sealed. Despite winning the personal sympathies of many Americans through his evident charm and grace, he was judged to be a spy and hanged. Arnold, by contrast, lived on as a Brigadier General in the British Army, despised by both the country he had betrayed and, eventually, by those he had joined.
Irving devotes considerable attention to the war’s southern campaign, and readers who come to this volume familiar with the northern theater will find the contrast striking. In the South, Irving observes, the conflict was not confined to armies and formal campaigns. Whigs and Tories took sides and fought one another directly, resulting in a more diffuse, sustained, and personal kind of warfare rather than the pitched battles more typical of the North.
Several compelling figures emerge from these pages. Colonel Thomas Sumter stands out as one of the more effective American commanders in the region, conducting a fierce resistance against British forces — until a moment of overconfidence led to his men being caught off-guard while at rest. The volume also introduces Johann de Kalb, a French officer fighting for the American cause, for whom DeKalb County is named. And then there is Francis Marion — the Swamp Fox — a name that will excite any reader who has seen the film The Patriot. Irving’s account makes clear that Marion and the antagonist Tarleton are the actual historical figures upon whom the movie’s characters appear to be based, lending the biography the occasional thrill of encountering the real people behind familiar stories.
The British, Irving shows, were consistently dominant in set-piece engagements and steadily advanced in the South. But sustaining that dominance proved far more difficult. Cut off from reliable supply lines and unable to pacify the countryside, they found their position increasingly untenable.
Reading about the role of local militia troops in this conflict prompts reflection on the Second Amendment and its original context. Throughout the war, local militias served as a supplement to the regular Continental forces, called up to defend against local threats and to fill gaps in the army’s ranks. The Second Amendment’s language — that a “well regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free state” — makes considerably more sense when read against this historical backdrop.
The militia, in this era, was understood as a civic institution, not a fringe one. Citizens bearing arms and training together as a community was seen as a practical bulwark against invasion and occupation. Irving’s account of the southern campaign in particular — where irregular forces played an outsized role in wearing down the British — illustrates exactly why the Founders prized this capacity. An invasion would have been considerably harder to sustain against a population with more trained, organized local defense forces.
The final third of the volume is dominated by Washington’s strategic maneuvering in partnership with the French, and it culminates in one of the most consequential moments in American history. Washington’s plan was elegantly designed under pressure: use French troops and the threat of an attack on New York to either take that city or force British General Cornwallis to send reinforcements north, thereby relieving pressure on American commanders Greene and Lafayette in the South.
Cornwallis, already running low on supplies and increasingly boxed in Virginia, became the decisive target. Lafayette had been applying steady pressure. Washington, rather than commit to the assault on New York, made the bold choice to march south with the bulk of the Continental Army and French forces. The French Navy sealed Cornwallis’s escape by sea. Reinforcements from New York arrived too late. On October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered.
Irving frames this victory with clarity and weight. The British had appeared completely dominant throughout most of the war, losing only a handful of key engagements. It was the cumulative cost of those engagements — and the catastrophic loss at Yorktown — that finally turned British public opinion against the war and brought it to an end. The cessation of hostilities was formally announced on April 19, 1783 — eight years to the day after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
What Washington accomplished, in Irving’s view, was not merely military victory. It was the sustained preservation of the American will to fight. By keeping the army alive, by winning when it mattered most — whether to keep hope burning in the American public or to deliver the knockout blow at Yorktown — Washington made the war too costly for the British to continue.
The final section of the volume follows Washington into peacetime, and Irving renders these scenes with genuine warmth. Washington addressed his troops at the war’s end, speaking to men who were anxious about the pay and provisions they had been promised. He then retired to his Mount Vernon estate, surveying new lands he had received and resuming the life of a Virginia gentleman farmer.
He followed the debates over the Constitution closely but deliberately refrained from participating, convinced that his involvement would unduly influence the proceedings simply by the weight of his name and reputation. The decision says much about his understanding of his own stature — and his commitment to the integrity of the process.
Washington did not seek the presidency. He wished to remain in retirement. But the country’s citizens and leaders were united in their desire for him to lead the new republic, and Washington, seeing it as his duty, accepted. The procession from Mount Vernon to New York for the inauguration became a hero’s journey, with crowds turning out at every stop to celebrate him.
One of the most touching passages in the volume describes Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River on this journey — the same river he had crossed in secret and in desperation years before, on Christmas night 1776. This time it was a celebration. Irving notes that Washington himself was reportedly moved by the memory. And when he was finally sworn in as the first President of the United States, he became visibly overcome with emotion at the outpouring of love from the assembled crowd — a man of immense self-control, undone for a moment by the magnitude of what had been achieved.
Washington’s chief anxiety upon taking office, Irving tells us, was not power or politics — it was the fear that the people’s expectations of him were so high that he might fail to live up to them. It is, in retrospect, one of the most human things about him.
Washington Irving’s fourth volume is a rich and immersive read. It goes very deep into individual episodes — the Arnold-André conspiracy receives almost novelistic treatment — and the breadth of figures Irving brings to life is impressive. Readers who enjoy military history, political biography, or early American history will find much to engage them here.
The British in this volume are a fascinating study in the limits of conventional military dominance. They won almost every engagement they fought, and yet they lost the war. Irving helps the reader understand why: the British could win battles, but they could not win the territory, the population, or the political will to keep fighting indefinitely. Washington understood this, and he played the long game with extraordinary patience and resolve.
For anyone working through this biography, Volume 4 is where the long investment pays off. The arc that began with a Virginia planter taking command of a ragtag army reaches its climax here, and Irving carries it forward with the confidence of a biographer who genuinely admires his subject — without, for the most part, losing sight of the complexity of the history around him.