Title: The Contest for Liberty Pdf Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775
In the summer of 1775, a Virginia gentleman-planter was given command of a New England army laying siege to British-occupied Boston. With his appointment, the Continental Army was born. Yet the cultural differences between those serving in the army and their new commander-in-chief led to conflicts from the very beginning that threatened to end the Revolution before it could start. The key challenge for General George Washington was establishing the standards by which the soldiers would be led by their officers. What kind of man deserved to be an officer? Under what conditions would soldiers agree to serve? And how far could the army and its leaders go to discipline soldiers who violated those enlistment conditions? As historian Seanegan P. Sculley reveals in Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775–1783, these questions could not be determined by Washington alone. His junior officers and soldiers believed that they too had a part to play in determining how and to what degree their superior officers exercised military authority and how the army would operate during the war. A cultural negotiation concerning the use of and limits to military authority was worked out between the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army; although an unknown concept at the time, it is what we call leadership today. How this army was led and how the interactions between officers and soldiers from the various states of the new nation changed their understandings of the proper exercise of military authority was finally codified in General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s The Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, first published in 1779. The result was a form of military leadership that recognized the autonomy of the individual soldiers, a changing concept of honor, and a new American tradition of military service.
An Important contribution to both Revolutionary War studies and the nature of American leadership Contest for Liberty is an important book. It skillfully explores the development and employment of military leadership in the Continental Army in an entirely fresh and pioneering manner. For this accomplishment it deserves to be studied and included in any early American scholar’s collection as well any anyone interested in developing leaders in challenging times. This alone makes it deserving of five stars. Contest for Liberty is far more than that.Far too often books on leadership concern themselves with the behaviors and actions of a few key figures such as a Washington, Lee, Patton, or Eisenhower. The success or failures of great enterprises are too often attributed to the nature and abilities of a few remarkable individuals and the study of leadership confined to those well-known and extensively documented characters. As a professional soldier who has served both in the ranks of the enlisted and as a commissioned officer, the author accepted the challenge to look far beyond the obvious and well-worn examples of senior officers in the Continental Army to examine the extremely complex factors that comprise leadership in large and diverse organizations.Complementing his extensive experience as a soldier, Sean Sculley employs his skills as a professional scholar to examine primary sources, prior scholarly analysis, and his own understanding of the American military. He describes the unique way in which Continental leaders and soldiers negotiated what became the legitimate authority to command and the subordinate’s subsequent willingness to follow that authority. This is an entirely distinctive and useful way with which to understand the complex dynamics at work within the nascent American forces and illuminate factors that continue to this day. An understanding of this negotiation will well serve any modern leader building effective organizations in business, government or the military.Leadership is not only extremely complex, it is sublime. The author recognizes this by taking a systems approach to examine leadership at the soldier, junior leader, field grade and general officer levels. This is a challenging undertaking given a dearth of primary sources for most of these levels. Undaunted the author conducts a brilliant analysis by addressing the effects and outcomes of leadership in chapters on officership, recruiting, discipline, training and morale. In this manner he is able to present the reader with a broad picture that substantiates his description of a “negotiation of authority.”Soldiers of a free nation agree to risk their lives and future based upon explicit promises of adequate sustenance, clothing, equipment, shelter, pay, and competent leadership. The Continental Congress failed to provide most of these and left it up to the leadership in the field to hold the army together. The failure of the central government to live up to the basic expectations of its army raises the most interesting question of the revolution: what kept the army functioning in the field? In the most comprehensive manner to date, Sculley has managed to describe how the leadership of the Continental army, at all levels, dealt with these Congressional failings to provide the army with the barest of necessities, failings that often led to understandable mutinous behavior. These leaders forged unit cohesion through their personal dedication, shared suffering and by providing soldiers with examples of republican virtue thereby giving them a cause for which they were willing to serve. The result was the first institution that could be considered national in scope and it exhibited a distinctly American ethos.Contest for Liberty makes an invaluable contribution to Revolutionary war scholarship by illustrating that the Continental Army was ultimately successful not solely because of remarkable leaders such as Washington, but because of thousands of NCO’s and junior officers that kept the army effective in the face of almost insurmountable odds. This in no way detracts from the more famous leaders but rather acknowledges in an exceptional way, the nameless and unrecognized leaders that made the army. As a soldier/scholar the author creates a masterful description of the process that transitioned regional, small unit militias into an effective national military culture.This is not an entry level book into either the study of the Revolution or the nature of leadership. Its 162 pages of text is densely packed with detail and analysis that deserves close study. My copy is covered with highlights and notes and his footnotes and bibliography worthy of study in their own right. I will re-read it many times.
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