Title

Patriarch : George Washington and the new American nation

Description

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.

Identifier

445324

395524423

Creator

Smith, Richard Norton

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

1993

Program air date: February 21, 1993.

Publisher

Houghton Mifflin

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Front end sheets, mentions sickness, death of Martha's two infants, 19000 letters, education, breakfast routine, 10 newspapers, yellow fever, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., in retirement back to lead military? Who's a republican, federalist, list of names. Notes/underlining: Washington's mindset, personality, census population, debt, Federal city, Hamiltonian, temper, first veto, Latrobe. "Farewell address", Interest, political parties.

Subject

"Washington, George, 1732-1799."

"Presidents--United States--Biography."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

This work may be protected by copyright laws and is provided for educational and research purposes only. Any infringing use may be subject to disciplinary action and/or civil or criminal liability as provided by law. If you believe that you are the rights-holder and object to Mason’s use of this image, please contact speccoll@gmu.edu.