Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation by Richard Norton Smith

From the Publisher

This critically acclaimed biography of George Washington is published to coincide with the Library of America collection of George Washington's writings. In Patriarch, celebrated biographer Richard Norton Smith takes on the most formidable of American subjects, the Founding Father himself. How does one breathe life into the unsmiling visage that we all remember staring back at us from every American history textbook.

To truly understand the greatness of Washington, contends Smith, we need to understand the daily travails he endured as president of a new nation, not just his Olympian exploits as general of the first American army. Repeatedly during his eight years in office (1790-1797), Washington, through sheer cunning and will, saved the infant republic from the factionalism that threatened its existence. He skillfully moderated the feuds among his Cabinet - especially those between Jefferson and Hamilton - and achieved compromise by seeming to be above politics. His actions and character defined the very nature of the presidency and made the untried system of American government actually work.

Library Journal

George Washington's ascent to the presidency of the new republic was at once a personal triumph and a great gamble with something he held most dear--his reputation. Smith (director, Hoover Library) captures well the bittersweet presidential years, when Washington used the vast capital of his personal prestige to cement the bands of a shaky union. With wonderful use of detail and anecdote, Smith argues that Washington was not the mere figurehead that other historians have portrayed but a canny politician who mastered and controlled his brilliant subordinates, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. In a lively and engaging style, the author describes Washington's world in New York, Philadelphia, and Mt. Vernon and the major policy issues of the 1790s, especially the vituperative politics of the era. If Norton is not always careful with detail and his chronology is sometimes confusing, this is, nonetheless, history painted in broad strokes with vivid characterization, sure to attract a general readership. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/92.-- David B. Mattern, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville

What People Are Saying

Geoffrey C. Ward
... the reader comes away with a vivid sense of what it must have been like for this proud champion of efficiency and self-discipline to preside over the untried government of a raw and resolutely fractitous Republic.

David Willis McCullough
Most of us have little trouble imagining Lincoln or Jefferson as real people, but when it comes to Washington, we fall into cliches, both pious and comic. Patriarch is a healthy antidote to all that. Smith's way of breathing life into Washington is not to tell us once again about those ribbon teeth - we've been through that before - but to treat him for the first time as a political man with a job to do.

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