Patriarch : George Washington and the new American nation

The Resource Patriarch : George Washington and the new American nation

Label

Patriarch : George Washington and the new American nation

Title remainder

George Washington and the new American nation

Statement of responsibility

Richard Norton Smith

Language

eng

Summary

When George Washington agreed to take on the presidency of his new nation, he inspired gratitude and adulation on a scale almost impossible to imagine today. In the years that followed, he would need every ounce of his countrymen's affection as he presided over a government threatened by internal dissension and foreign war. This is the story of Washington under political siege, a trial no less demanding than the Revolutionary War. George Washington emerges in these pages
as a necessary hero. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the survival of the young republic without him. We watch him preside over the bitter quarrels within his brilliant Cabinet - enduring the historic feud between Jefferson and Hamilton while struggling successfully to keep the nation out of European conflict. On the personal level, this moving biography confirms Henry Knox's judgment that it was Washington's character, and not the recently signed Constitution, that held
the infant Union together. In a supremely readable history, Richard Norton Smith gives us vivid descriptions of stagecoach travel, the capital's yellow fever epidemic of 1793, and life at Washington's beloved Mount Vernon. This George Washington, vastly more human than our inherited image, is a fallible man subject to vanity and disappointment, yet all the greater for his vulnerability. Patriarch tells not only what Washington did but, memorably, what he was like, and
how both were essential to the birth of the American Republic
Repeatedly during his eight years as president, George Washington saved the infant republic from the factionalism and the involvement in foreign wars that threatened its existence. He skillfully moderated the feuds among his cabinet -- especially those between Hamilton and Jefferson -- and achieved his own political ends by seeming to be above politics. His actions and character defined the very nature of the presidency and, even more than the Constitution itself, made the new American government work. Better than any biographer before him, Richard Norton Smith gives us the "living" Washington, a working politician beset by crises, a masterly manager of men and events, anything but the time-worn marble monument. - Back cover

Biography type

individual biography

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

973.4/1/092
B

Index

index present

LC call number

E312.29

LC item number

.S65 1993

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Context

Context of Patriarch : George Washington and the new American nation

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Waubonsee Community College. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.

Context

Work of