Waubonsee Community College

Patriarch, George Washington and the new American nation, Richard Norton Smith

eng

Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-399) and index

individual biography

index present

non fiction

Patriarch

bibliography

26054847

Richard Norton Smith

George Washington and the new American nation

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 pagesas 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 heldthe 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, andhow both were essential to the birth of the American RepublicRepeatedly 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

Prologue : The man in the Macomb house -- New York 1790. "Summoned by my country" -- Washingtonopolis, D.C. -- Caunotaucarius and his cabinet -- Philadelphia 1790-1797. Town and country -- To see and be seen -- Rough waters -- Curse of duty -- Highly favored age -- Philadelphia fevers -- "Dash to the mountains, Jersey blue" -- Down from Olympus -- "The good citizen" -- Honorable discharge -- Farmer Washington 1797-1799. At the bottom of the hill -- Potomac twilight -- Epilogue : "Our Washington"