George Washington

By Atlas MeyersThe 1st Presidency (1789–1797)

Length1h 4m

Summary

When George Washington took the oath of office, the United States existed only on parchment. There was no bureaucracy, no treasury, no precedent for a head of state who was neither a monarch nor a prime minister. We examine the years 1789 through 1797 not as a victory lap for the Revolutionary War, but as a precarious experiment in survival. The central tension of this volume is the struggle to convert a theoretical union into a functional nation-state while surrounded by predatory European empires. This is the story of how a man who wished only for the silence of Mount Vernon was forced to invent the noise of American governance.