Was it true that Washington was... ...cold, cautious, and obsequious—unapproachable even to his friends? ...a man of vital passion and towering dignity—admired and loved by his soldiers? ...a bumbling general forced into victory by the incompetence of his enemies? ...a brilliant military leader, adept at the new ways of guerrilla warfare? ...egocentric, with the dangerous pretensions of a Caesar? ...a humble, modest man, sacrificing his own pleasure in his devotion to public duty? What was the myth?...What was the man? Step by step, author Marcus Cunliffe traces the ancestral background, the childhood, the growth, the failures and achievements of George Washington. He shows us a real person—fallible, ambitious, impatient of criticism, but of iron integrity—maturing from an eager youth to a wiser man. Cunliffe portrays the destiny of America, as it was mirrored for all time in the man who fought ambitions, uncertainties, and loneliness...who lived through Valley Forge and longed for home...who accepted the Presidency and desired peaceful retirement...who had a tender love for children, but childless, became to a young and needy nation the Father of his country...a man, with all his humanity, triumphant over the monument. “A terse and highly readable biography.”—Harrison Smith, Saturday Review “Fascinating and stimulating.”—N.Y. Herald Tribune “A scholarly, a brilliant, and an illuminating book.”—London Times Literary Supplement
Marcus Cunliffe, whom the Washington Post and Times Herald calls "a master historian capable of seeing his subject whole," has written a cogent and revealing study of America's first half-century under the federal Constitution. Bounded by the first Washington Administration and the last Jackson Administration, this is the period in which democracy grew and shaped the nation. It witnessed the launching of the federal government; the expansion of the frontier; the establishment of a party system; the enunciation of a foreign policy; the manufacture of the symbols of nationalism; and the forging of the arguments of sectionalism. Most important, Mr. Cunliffe writes, "the American character seems to have been formed in essence within a generation of George Washington's accession to the Presidency." "An urbane, stimulating, and admirably proportioned analysis. . . ."—Alexander DeConde, Wisconsin Magazine of History "What [Mr. Cunliffe] has done is to weave together and show the fertile interplay of the American dream and the American reality—and show how much the dream modified the reality. . . . an acute and elegant performance."—Times Literary Supplement
This book begins with a provocative paradox: George Fitzhugh of Virginia, one of the most eloquent defenders of Southern chattel slavery, appealed to a New York abolitionist for support. How can this be? The abolitionist in question, Charles Edwards Lester, had confessed that "he would sooner subject his child to Southern slavery, than have him to be a free laborer of England." Lester was in fact referring to the "white" or "wage" slavery of the mother country. In a three part study, Cunliffe explores the context of chattel and wage slavery in Britain and the United States. He first outlines the evolution of the concept of wage slavery in Europe and the United States, demonstrating how this concept bore upon opinions about chattel slavery in America. In his second section, Cunliffe discusses the precariousness of Anglo-American relationships during the period of 1830 to 1860. In their resentment of British rebukes aimed at the persistence of slavery in a democracy, Americans retaliated by claiming that British wage slavery was worse than American plantation slavery. Cunliffe concludes by charting the career of Lester, the seemingly atypical New York abolitionist. Lester displayed a conviction that Britain was a corrupt and brutal society, most of whose leading citizens detested America. Cunliffe maintains that Lester's opinions were shared by many of his countrymen during the antebellum decades; in this sense he may have been more truly representative of American attitudes than either Southerners like Fitzhugh or Northerner abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.
The author discusses the genesis of the American military tradition, its growth, its champions and opponents, its effects on civilian life, its more significant or flamboyant manifestations, and its role in the history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War.
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