First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

Washington certainly was aware of such sentiments, and may have shared some of them himself. A naturally aggressive commander, he would always be a reluctant Fabian. “He was a fighter,” states the British scholar Marcus Cunliffe. “He erred not through timidity, which would have proved fatal in the long run, but through pugnacity.”75