How with a handful of troops he turned the tide of defeat by attacking at Trenton and Princeton is too well known to need recital.  At Germantown, too, though having but a few days before suffered defeat, he attacked and well-nigh won a brilliant victory, because the British officers did not dream that his vanquished army could possibly take the initiative.  When the foe settled down into winter quarters in Philadelphia Laurens wrote, “our Commander-in-chief wishing ardently to gratify the public expectation by making an attack upon the enemy ... went yesterday to view the works.”  On submitting the project to a council, however, they stood eleven to four against the attempt.

The most marked instance of Washington’s un-Fabian preferences, and proof of the old saying that “councils of war never fight,” is furnished in the occurrences connected with the battle of Monmouth.  When the British began their retreat across New Jersey, according to Hamilton “the General unluckily called a council of war, the result of which would have done honor to the most honorable society of mid-wives and to them only.  The purport was, that we should keep at a comfortable distance from the enemy, and keep up a vain parade of annoying them by detachment ...  The General, on mature reconsideration of what had been resolved on, determined to pursue a different line of conduct at all hazards.”  Concerning this decision Pickering wrote,—­

“His great caution in respect to the enemy, acquired him the name of the American Fabius.  From this governing policy he is said to have departed, when” at Monmouth he “indulged the most anxious desire to close with his antagonist in general action.  Opposed to his wishes was the advice of his general officers.  To this he for a time yielded; but as soon as he discovered that the enemy had reached Monmouth Court House, not more than twelve miles from the heights of Middletown, he determined that he should not escape without a blow.”

Pickering considered this a “departure” from Washington’s “usual practice and policy,” and cites Wadsworth, who said, in reference to the battle of Monmouth, that the General appeared, on that occasion, “to act from the impulses of his own mind.”

Thrice during the next three years plans for an attack on the enemy’s lines at New York were matured, one of which had to be abandoned because the British had timely notice of it by the treachery of an American general, a second because the other generals disapproved the attempt, and, on the authority of Humphreys, “the accidental intervention of some vessels prevented [another] attempt, which was more than once resumed afterwards.  Notwithstanding this favorite project was not ultimately effected, it was evidently not less bold in conception or feasible in accomplishment, than that attempted so successfully at Trenton, or than that which was brought to so glorious an issue in the successful siege of Yorktown.”