George Washington Reconsidered

by Higginbotham, Don

• ISBN13: 9780813920061
• ISBN10: 081392006X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr

Summary

George Washington, heroic general of the Revolution, master of Mount Vernon, and first president of the United States, remains the most enigmatic figure of the founding generation, with historians and the public at large still arguing over the strengths of his character and the nature of his intellectual and political contributions to the early republic. Representing the finest recent scholarship on Washington, these thirteen essays by the leading scholars in the field strike a balance between Washington's personal life and character and his public life as a soldier and political figure. Editor Don Higginbotham provides an introduction about Washington and his treatment by historians, and an afterword devoted to how the American people have viewed Washington, including the 1999 commemorations of the bicentennial of his death. With three essays written specifically for this volume, George Washington Reconsidered is the first collection of its kind to be published in over thirty years.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Washington and the Historians	1	(14)
The Virginia Localist
The English Cleric and the Virginia Adventurer: The Washingtons, Father and Son	15	(23)
Martin H. Quitt
Washington and the Colonial Military Tradition	38	(29)
Don Higginbotham
George Washington, the British Tobacco Trade, and Economic Opportunity in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia	67	(27)
Bruce A. Ragsdale
Interpreting George Washington's Mount Vernon	94	(20)
Robert F. Dalzell Jr.
Lee Baldwin Dalzell
``That Species of Property'': Washington's Role in the Controversy over Slavery	114	(27)
Dorothy Twohig
The American Nationalist
George Washington and Revolutionary Asceticism: The Localist as Nationalist	141	(24)
Don Higginbotham
The Republican General	165	(33)
Glenn A. Phelps
George Washington, the West, and the Union	198	(14)
W. W. Abbot
The Farewell: Washington's Wisdom at the End	212	(38)
Joseph J. Ellis
The Final Struggle between George Washington and the Grim King: Washington's Attitude toward Death and an Afterlife	250	(25)
Peter R. Henriques
Images of the Man
An Uncommon Awareness of Self: The Papers of George Washington	275	(12)
W. W. Abbot
George Washington: The Aloof American	287	(22)
Edmund S. Morgan
The Greatness of George Washington	309	(16)
Gordon S. Wood
Afterword: Washington and the American People	325	(6)
Index	331