Books: Shaping the New Republic

GEORGE WASHINGTON, PATRIOT AND PRESIDENT (Volume VI, 529 pp.)—Douglas Southall Freeman—Scribner ($7.50).

This is the sixth volume of the monumental seven-volume life of Washington planned by Richmond’s late eminent Historian Douglas Southall Freeman (R. E. Lee, Lee’s Lieutenants). Dr. Freeman died last year, on the day he finished the concluding chapter of Volume VI.

This book takes General Washington from his triumphal return to planter’s life at Mount Vernon in 1783 to his 61st birthday and the end of his first term as President in early 1793. Long established as first in war biography, Historian Freeman marshals his facts as massively and meticulously as ever in his first study of the mature Washington in peacetime. Washington shines clearly in the hearts of his countrymen as he moves north through a veritable tunnel of rustic triumphal arches to take his first presidential oath at New York City’s Federal Hall. By this time “the quenchless ambition of an ordered mind” disclosed in Freeman’s portrait of the early years has mellowed to massive, benevolent prudence.

“Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair,” observed Washington while presiding over the 1787 Constitutional Convention. As President, he set all sorts of standards to which Americans have ever since repaired. When Bushrod Washington, 27, wrote calmly asking appointment as U.S. district attorney for Virginia, his uncle wrote sternly: “My political conduct in nominations, even if I was uninfluenced by principle, must be exceedingly circumspect and proof against just criticism, for the eyes of Argus are upon me . . .”

By sheer force of character, Washington established that he, not Congress, would name his Cabinet, and that he, with the Senate consenting only afterward, would make treaties and direct foreign policy. At book’s end, the hero reluctantly decides to accept a second term to avert a widening split between Hamilton and Jefferson and thus save the new republic. And at that point, Historian Freeman’s stiff-backed prose comes to a halt. Scribner is now looking for a suitable historian to write the concluding Volume VII, bringing George Washington through his last six years.