the veto of his generals steered the discussion to a second plan that turned into one of the war's inspired maneuvers.”As eager as you are to read again of that 'inspired maneuver,' Boston bookseller Henry Knox's heroic hauling of Fort Ticonderoga's 120,000 tons of guns and heavy artillery through snowstorms and over mountains in order to have them ready for secret nighttime installation on Dorchester Heights, forcing the British to evacuate the city at last, you still want to stop the narrative and shake it a little. You study the words to see if you've missed any – surely this is an unusual impasse, a commander vetoed by his generals on purely practical grounds? But the narrative blankly continues: “.

And … had he done this intentionally? Or was he just bad at his job, worse (in other words) than they were themselves? He was unanimously overruled in his plan by men without conspicuously more military experience than his own – not a single hold-out sided with him. It's almost there at the surface, you can almost see it … Washington's generals suspected he'd underrated British forces and overrated his own strength – not that they all might have done those things, but only their commander-in-chief. They also believed that Washington had overstated the size of the American forces and underrated British strength. Hence on February 16 he convened a war council to present a plan for “a bold and resolute assault upon the troops in Boston.” His skeptical generals unanimously voted it down, finding the plan flawed because they were short of gunpowder and couldn't soften up the British beforehand with heavy bombardments.

On February 13, at Lechmere Point, he determined the ice had sufficiently thickened to freeze the channel all the way to Boston. General George Washington, now in command of the fledgling Continental Army, is impatiently waiting for the channels around the peninsula to freeze over: The scene will be familiar to Bostonians: their town, having taken the first principled stand against the commercial tyranny of distant London, had been blockaded and garrisoned for years.

Repeatedly in Ron Chernow's new 900-page biography of George Washington, it happens, a nagging little tickling at the back of the reading mind, an almost visceral urge to go back and start over, to scrutinize the argument – in short, to read the fine print.

George washington ron chernow