Patriarch

Description

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.

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. 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.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Patriarch: George Washington and the New American NationPaperbackHoughton Mifflin1993-01-01
• PatriarchHoughton Mifflin1993