Travels with George by Nathaniel Philbrick

Author:Nathaniel Philbrick [Philbrick, Nathaniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

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In the spring of 1791, almost exactly 229 years before protesters descended on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the people of Virginia also gathered in the streets—not in anger, but in celebration. President George Washington was coming to town. Melissa and I heard the details from Jamie Bosket, president of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond. He and his staff showed us several documents related to Washington’s southern tour, starting with a diary kept by a lawyer staying in a small Virginia town on the day before the president’s expected arrival. “Great anxiety in the people to see General Washington,” he wrote. “Strange is that impulse which is felt by almost every breast to see the face of a great gentleman.” The next day the lawyer records, “All crowding the way where they expect him to pass, anxious to see the savior of their country and the object of their love.”

Washington was a celebrity, and he used that star power to win as much support as possible for a federal government that many Virginians were predisposed to distrust. It wasn’t going to be easy in the years ahead—just look at the growing tension in his own cabinet—but only Washington could have formed an enduring national government in a country created by a revolution. As a southerner with the political agenda of a northerner, he was uniquely qualified to be the leader both Federalists and Anti-Federalists could abide. It’s a metaphor as tangled as the history of this country, but Washington’s administration was able to hold in suspension (if only for a few years) the combustible mixture that would ultimately erupt into the two-party system. Without Washington there would have been no pause between the upheaval of the Revolution and the more measured chaos of a republic struggling to reach some kind of consensus. If either John Adams or Thomas Jefferson had been our first president—associated as they were with the extremes of the eighteenth-century political spectrum—they would have had little chance of reaching across the Federalist/Anti-Federalist divide to form a sustainable government.

As Jefferson was quick to point out, a certain amount of turmoil is essential in a free society. Protests had sparked the American Revolution, and protests would continue to define the United States as each generation has struggled to live up to the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence. But as Washington had come to appreciate during his first term as president, aspirations alone don’t create workable change.

Washington wasn’t the greatest thinker of his day—we’ll let Jefferson and Hamilton tussle over that crown—but he got things done. When Jefferson became president in 1801, he issued a memo to his department heads explaining that he was going to base the daily work flow of the executive branch along the lines established by Washington, who required his cabinet members to share their official correspondence with him. “By this means,” Jefferson wrote, “he was always in accurate possession of all facts and proceedings in every part of

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