George Washington and the Genesis of American Command: Learning to Command Such Men

In 1775, the American colonies’ situation called for a different kind of military than the professional British army they faced. An army composed of volunteer citizen-soldiers necessitated changes to traditional recruiting practices, discipline, and motivation—changes, in short, to how George Washington commanded America’s first army. When an officer issued the proper “orders of command” in a European “professional” force, obedience was implicit. Such was not always the case in the developing Continental army, forcing Washington to modify the command methods he knew into an American model. Forged between the hammer of its commanders’ wills and the anvil of New England society, command in the Continental army outside of Boston represented a new departure from Europe’s professional forces. Washington’s methods foreshadowed the rise of the levee en masse, and provided a bridge between the “limited war” of the eighteenth century and the modern armies of the nineteenth century.