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Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence
General Clinton was Commander in Chief of the British forces. This biography includes an analysis of the strategy leading to their defeat. In Portrait of a General this man and his role - heretofore neglected by historians - are fully examined for the first time. Drawing on Sir Henry's voluminous private papers as well as many other firsthand sources, William Wilcox has reconstructed his life and character and analyzed his part in the British war effort.
548 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1964
32 people want to read
About the author
William B. Willcox
17 booksWilliam Bradford Willcox was an American historian. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1928, a B.F.A. (1932) and Ph.D. (1936) from Yale University, where he won the John Addison Porter Prize.
not to be confused with W. Bradford Wilcox
not to be confused with W. Bradford Wilcox
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 8, 2016
An excellent biography of Sir Henry Clinton, the longest-serving British general during the Revolutionary War. Wilcox shows how the constant feuds between Britain’s generals contributed to their defeat. He also gives a good narrative of the war from the British perspective.
We get a good sense of Clinton’s personality, his intelligence, his love of nature, and his grief over the death of his wife. Clinton was stubborn, vain and argumentative, and he always had something to contribute to the feuds between the British command. Clinton got into feuds with almost every British commander serving in America, except for Admiral George Rodney, who played him like a fiddle.
Wilcox’s biography is heavy on psychoanalysis, and that can get a little tedious. many shortcomings are blamed on Clinton’s childhood in New York. Clinton was fine as a planner, but as a field commander he was next to useless because of his unwillingness to take risks.
In Clinton's time, the British Army's officers were made up of aristocrats. They had no training or military education in a modern sense. This amateur quality explains why so many officers behaved in such fantastically insubordinate ways. Clinton, as an example, was always quarreling and threatening to resign. The concept of a chain of command had yet to be invented.
The book is also useful because it allows the reader to see the war from the British perspective(for two excellent general studies of Britain’s war effort see The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire and The War for America, 1775-1783). Britain’s generals were basically free agents and did little to coordinate, and Lord George Germain often played them off against each other.
Willcox also debunks several myths about the American Revolution: the Americans did not win through "the Spirit of '76" or by any great leadership on George Washington's part: this combination more often than not proved disastrous. The notion that Britain waged a European-style war in a frontier war is also a myth: the British had ample experience in frontier- and wilderness-warfare, and actually followed European tactics less so than the Americans.
We get a good sense of Clinton’s personality, his intelligence, his love of nature, and his grief over the death of his wife. Clinton was stubborn, vain and argumentative, and he always had something to contribute to the feuds between the British command. Clinton got into feuds with almost every British commander serving in America, except for Admiral George Rodney, who played him like a fiddle.
Wilcox’s biography is heavy on psychoanalysis, and that can get a little tedious. many shortcomings are blamed on Clinton’s childhood in New York. Clinton was fine as a planner, but as a field commander he was next to useless because of his unwillingness to take risks.
In Clinton's time, the British Army's officers were made up of aristocrats. They had no training or military education in a modern sense. This amateur quality explains why so many officers behaved in such fantastically insubordinate ways. Clinton, as an example, was always quarreling and threatening to resign. The concept of a chain of command had yet to be invented.
The book is also useful because it allows the reader to see the war from the British perspective(for two excellent general studies of Britain’s war effort see The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire and The War for America, 1775-1783). Britain’s generals were basically free agents and did little to coordinate, and Lord George Germain often played them off against each other.
Willcox also debunks several myths about the American Revolution: the Americans did not win through "the Spirit of '76" or by any great leadership on George Washington's part: this combination more often than not proved disastrous. The notion that Britain waged a European-style war in a frontier war is also a myth: the British had ample experience in frontier- and wilderness-warfare, and actually followed European tactics less so than the Americans.
September 30, 2022
William Wilcox delivers a definitive take on the life of Sir Henry Clinton, the general who presided over the loss of America during the War of Independence. Exhaustively researched, this book pieces together Clinton's at once fruitful strategic insights as second-in-command and frustrating lapses in energy as commander-in-chief, ascribed to the general's own repulsiveness at seeing his plans on paper thwarted in reality. Clinton, it seems, was never armed with the resources to win the war, either from a perspective of materiel or the stuff of energy and vigor which has separated great commanders from forgotten ones.
December 22, 2024
Fortunately the only biography we have of Clinton is a good one.
The one thing I dislike about it is the psychological assessment of him at the end, which is very much based in 1960s psychoanalysis, so they decide that the ultimate source of Clinton's problems is that he had an overbearing mother and a distant father. (I mean, it sounds like his mother may have been seriously mentally ill, and I would buy that as the reason for his multiple issues, but there's a big difference between "mentally ill parents screw you up" and the classic mid-20th century "mothers who aren't meek enough cause mental health problems in their children".)
The one thing I dislike about it is the psychological assessment of him at the end, which is very much based in 1960s psychoanalysis, so they decide that the ultimate source of Clinton's problems is that he had an overbearing mother and a distant father. (I mean, it sounds like his mother may have been seriously mentally ill, and I would buy that as the reason for his multiple issues, but there's a big difference between "mentally ill parents screw you up" and the classic mid-20th century "mothers who aren't meek enough cause mental health problems in their children".)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews