Patriarch: 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 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.