The transformation was aided by the inventiveness of 19th-century historians, none more creative than Washington's step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, whose account of the battle was as artistic as Leutze's painting. Custis was inevitably derogatory towards Lee, and Lee's calumny achieved an orthodoxy in such works as Washington Irving's "Life of George Washington" (1855–1859) and George Bancroft's "History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent" (1854–1878). The role Lee had unsuccessfully advanced for the militia in the revolution was finally established in the poetic 19th-century popular narrative, in which the Continental Army was excised from the battle and replaced with patriotic citizen-soldiers.