March 2017

Historian David McCullough tells a story about teaching an honors seminar to 25 history majors at Dartmouth College. When he asked the students if they knew who George Marshall was, nobody raised their hand. After a long silence, one student inquired, “Did he have something to do with the Marshall Plan?”

"Yes, I said," replied McCullough. "And that’s where we started talking about the general who supervised the U.S. Army during World War II and later received the Nobel Prize as Secretary of State."

We should not be surprised that young people are largely ignorant of one of the most important leaders who helped win the Second World War, since military history has so rarely been taught in schools and universities in recent years. But that's another topic. 

The North started winning the Civil War in January 1862, but nobody knew it yet. Hindsight hadn’t had time to kick in. Plus, it happened out in the middle of America, far from the conflict’s media-massed Virginia front yard. And the man who would lead the victory, from western Appalachia all the way to Appomattox in 1865, was the unlikeliest candidate then imaginable.

The West Point credentials of President Lincoln’s top commanders in late 1861 belied any intent of attacking the enemy. In front of Washington City, egocentric General-in-Chief George McClellan preened in dread, training and equipping the already first-rate Army of the Potomac while studiously avoiding combat with the undermanned Confederate States of America. He was outnumbered, he claimed.

I sometimes felt like I was swimming against a very strong tide when doing research for my book on the men of the USS Mason. Very few people had ever heard of the first ship in the U.S. Navy manned by African-American sailors.

"A black crew took a warship into combat?" a friend who writes regularly on naval subjects said incredulously. "I don't think so."

"Aren't you confusing this story with that of the Tuskegee airmen or that tank division?" an African-American historian asked. "The Navy was the worst! There was a whole separate steward's branch for black sailors; they were servants or laborers. They only went to sea as cooks."

The claim that “Washington slept here” is so ubiquitous in the historical community that it has become something of a running joke. But plenty of evidence exists that our first president was indeed a frequent traveler -- often rushing over muddy, pot-holed roads in a great white coach two centuries before Air Force One. During the last year, American Heritage has been conducting a survey of Revolutionary War taverns to be published later in 2017, and we've already found 38 establishments which claim that Washington stopped by, from Abbott Tavern in Andover, Massachusetts, to the William Pitt Tavern in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Reasons for the pirst president’s peregrinations have become much more clear with H.R. Breen’s new book, George Washington's Journey, excerpted here. 

--The Editors

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