Books in Brief: George Washington and the New Nation

George Washington and the New Nation: (1783-1793), by James Thomas Flexner (Little, Brown, 466 pp., $12.50). If George Washington’s historic stock has fallen low over the past few decades, it is largely because he never did much trumpeting on his own behalf. Unlike the Adamses, Jeffersons and Hamiltons, he was not a verbose propagandist or a facile apologist; hence no feverish cheering section of latter-day scholars. When the infant nation occasionally gave Washington a breathing spell, he immersed himself in the role of agrarian patriarch, and did it quite well. In public life he was usually a towering eagle in the midst of a squabbling brace of peacocks, popinjays, bantams and screech owls—a firm, thoughtful commander and administrator whose basic, almost instinctive belief in the principles of personal freedom was perhaps deeper than the fulsome preaching of the ideologues. How like his love for the Virginia soil was his quiet, unrelenting labor for a unified, functioning nation, achieved despite the tugging and shoving of rival factions. It gave him a satisfaction that needed no posturing or speechifying, and viewing it was like surveying the ordered, spreading fields of his own Mount Vernon, where, “to see the work of one’s own hands, fostered by care and attention, rising to maturity,” was the truest reward. In the third volume of his four-part life of George Washington, Mr. Flexner, an accomplished art historian as well as a gifted biographer, has produced a full-length portrait of the Father of Our Country during his brief years of peacetime retirement, the crucible of the Constitutional Convention, and his early years as President. This is a well written, scrupulously documented work, with an admirable reliance on Washington’s own written and spoken words, and those of the men and women who knew him. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is the best life of Washington yet written.

AB

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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George Washington and the New Nation: (1783-1793), by James Thomas Flexner (Little, Brown, 466 pp., $12.50). If George Washington’s historic stock has fallen low over the past few decades, it is largely because he never did much trumpeting on his own behalf. Unlike the Adamses, Jeffersons and Hamiltons, he was not a verbose propagandist or a facile apologist; hence no feverish cheering section of latter-day scholars. When the infant nation occasionally gave Washington a breathing spell, he immersed himself in the role of agrarian patriarch, and did it quite well. In public life he was usually a towering eagle in the midst of a squabbling brace of peacocks, popinjays, bantams and screech owls—a firm, thoughtful commander and administrator whose basic, almost instinctive belief in the principles of personal freedom was perhaps deeper than the fulsome preaching of the ideologues. How like his love for the Virginia soil was his quiet, unrelenting labor for a unified, functioning nation, achieved despite the tugging and shoving of rival factions. It gave him a satisfaction that needed no posturing or speechifying, and viewing it was like surveying the ordered, spreading fields of his own Mount Vernon, where, “to see the work of one’s own hands, fostered by care and attention, rising to maturity,” was the truest reward. In the third volume of his four-part life of George Washington, Mr. Flexner, an accomplished art historian as well as a gifted biographer, has produced a full-length portrait of the Father of Our Country during his brief years of peacetime retirement, the crucible of the Constitutional Convention, and his early years as President. This is a well written, scrupulously documented work, with an admirable reliance on Washington’s own written and spoken words, and those of the men and women who knew him. In the opinion of this reviewer, it is the best life of Washington yet written.