It seems that biographies of Charles Lee come in pairs. After long decades of scholarly neglect, two biographies of this unusual and often overlooked Revolutionary figure appeared in the 1950s: John R. Alden's General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? and Samuel White Patterson's colorful, if perhaps less academically useful, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee. After many decades more, we have Dominick Mazzagetti's Charles Lee: Self before Country, published late last year, and now Philip Papas's Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of General Charles Lee.

Beyond simply presenting an engaging narrative of Lee's life, Papas uses Lee's ambitions and experiences to explore broader questions: “What kinds of institutions knit together a nation? And what is the price of creating those institutions?” (14). This is a story of two distinct but related internal conflicts. The first, personified in the opposing figures of Lee and Washington, is the battle over how the nascent Continental Army, and ultimately the United States itself, should be organized and structured. The second occurs within Lee himself and pits his intelligence, ambition, and martial ability against his temper, vanity, and tactlessness. In the end, Lee finds himself unable to win either of these struggles.

Though Lee himself had been a member of the British gentry, Papas presents him as a champion of the common man's Revolution and an advocate of guerilla warfare and local militias. Unlike Washington, who aspired to create and lead a regular army in the European style, Lee believed that the frontier style of combat, with its many ambushes, terrors, and Fabian retreats, played more closely to American strengths and British weaknesses. Moreover, Lee believed that locally controlled militias better reflected the ideals of the Revolution. In spite, or perhaps because of, his own history as a professional soldier, Lee joined many eighteenth-century Whigs in distrusting professional armies, viewing them as tools of oppression and authoritarianism.

Here one finds Papas's most valuable contribution to the broader historiography of Revolutionary America: recognition that warfare shapes society and that the differing visions held by Lee and Washington reflected political as well as military ideals for the new republic. Lee's preference for small bands of locally controlled militia and universal conscription arose from his beliefs in the importance of local democracy and social equality. Washington's desire for a professional Continental Army made up of men from across the colonies mirrored his commitment to national unity and social order. These conflicting conceptions of the proper American army in the 1770s foreshadowed divisions over the proper structure of the American nation a decade later. In both the Revolutionary and the constitutional conflict, the more restrained, Washingtonian model would eventually triumph over more radical visions held by men like Charles Lee.

Intriguingly, Lee's aspirations for what the Revolutionary War and the American republic should have been mirror some modern misconceptions about what they in fact were. The romanticized story of farmers-turned-militiamen defeating the world's most powerful empire in order to create a nation founded on the principles of small government is one Lee would have made a reality, had he been able. His inability to do so arose from his misreading of the American people, who were not quite so politically radical or anti-British as his sort of revolution required, and from his own personal rough edges and instability. Though Papas is certainly not writing psychohistory, he early on asserts that “Lee evidenced classic signs of what modern psychiatry would classify as manic-depressive disorder (or bipolar disorder)” (3) and periodically attributes Lee's unpredictable and self-defeating choices to episodes of mania or depression.

Overall Papas comes across as a sensitive biographer and leaves the reader feeling sympathy, though not always respect or admiration, for his subject. Like Alden and Patterson, and unlike Mazzagetti, he defends Lee's behavior at the battle of Monmouth Courthouse, asserting that he acted properly in all respects except in failing to keep Washington informed as events developed (256). In contrast to his lengthy and generally convincing explanation of Monmouth, Papas says very little about Lee's potentially treasonous decision to offer the British Army advice on how to defeat the Patriots while he was a prisoner in New York. This is a curious omission given the prominence of that subject in the historiography, and this reviewer would have welcomed more of Papas's perspective on what it signified about Lee's changing view of the war and the Revolution. Such minor demerits aside, however, this is an enjoyable, balanced biography of an often overlooked Revolutionary figure which highlights not only what the Revolution was but also what it might have been.