In Defense of Washington's Five Rules

Some have suggested that Washington’s Five Rules may have been his attempt to apply vague western ideals of just warfare to this existential threat to the fledgling American nation about to declare its independence. I believe the guiding ideals in Washington’s mind were military ones. His paramount concern was victory. “We have taken up Arms in Defence of our Liberty, our Property; our Wives and our Children,” he had written in his open letter to the people of Canada. “We are determined to preserve them or die." [1] The motivations behind his instructions to Col. Arnold, therefore, sprang not from an impulse of chivalrousness but from military necessity.

The first four rules were each in some measure calibrated to put Arnold’s and General Montgomery’s troops—and, by extension, the American colonial position, in the best possible light. They were clearly aimed at winning support. Canadian support was essential if the Americans were to realize their objective of driving off the British from their northern border, for at Quebec their forces were outnumbered 2-to-1. [2]

It is doubtful whether Washington’s commanders hewed very closely to any of the rules. Number five directed them to withdraw if their objectives could not be met. Instead, they laid siege to the city for more than four months and only retreated in the face of British reinforcements arriving once the spring thaws cleared the St. Lawrence Seaway for shipping. [3] The fact that Montgomery’s and Arnold’s combined forces suffered such a “shattering defeat,” suggests that rules one through four were pretty much ignored also. [4]

Washington seeking
the One whose battle is really was

Author David McCoullough suggests that the defeat at Quebec sapped Washington’s general staff of the nerve required to mount an assault on the heavily fortified British garrison at Boston in early 1776. It was while they were considering such a plan that a rider brought the dispatch to Washington with the news that the mission to Quebec had failed, that Montgomery was dead, that Arnold was severely wounded, and that Quebec instead of falling had been reinforced. Even before this discouraging information reached him, Washington, near despairing, had a just a few days before written to Joseph Reed. Recounting the innumerable disadvantages he labored under and the deplorable state of his army, and marveling that the British seemed totally blind to these facts, else they would have not spared a minute more in launching an overwhelming attack, Washington wrote—

“If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it. To blind the eyes of our enemies; for sure if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.” [5]

Such language, especially prefaced as it was by that gigantic word ‘if,’ tells me that if George Washington ever imagined that his army’s cause was just, in the traditional western idealistic sense, such thoughts were as far from his mind now as they could possibly be.  I don't think anyone who knows anything at all about George Washington would deny that he was a man of honor. And while it's not accurate to say that he cared about winning at the expense of everything else, I don't think he accepted his commission with the intention of losing, however so honorably he might have done so.