Travels with George by Nathaniel Philbrick

A wonderful, sprawling, and informative book that follows the author, his wife, and faithful dog as they trace the long and winding carriage journey of George Washington through New England and the Deep South after his inauguration as the first President of the United States. Mr. Philbrick is a widely renowned and accomplished author, and although this book is really a travelogue of the places that Washington slept, ate, danced, schmoozed, and captivated audiences with his presence in the early 1790’s, Philbrick mixes in a ton of historical narrative, fact-checking, and interpretation of trends and events — the bulk of which are my focus on the below notes. This is such a breezy, fascinating read — Mr. Philbrick is a really fun storyteller and narrator — and it seems that he, his wife Melissa, and their dog, Dora, really had a fantastic time on their travels, so much so that it makes me want to hop in my RAV4 and check out a handful of historical sites in Massachusetts, just for fun. The impetus for Philbrick’s book was, naturally, the trials and tribulations that we are experiencing nowadays in this country — especially during the turbulent Trump years — and how a deeper understanding of Washington can help make sense of what we are going through today. As always, history is the best teacher, and Philbrick takes pains to point out that, however flawed he was, Washington was only truly interested in preserving the Union, achieving compromise, and working together with others to ensure that the government — and the nation — could survive without him. Despite our differences, the nation has in fact survived, and although Washington might not necessarily like what he sees in 2022, his Union has preserved — and he would be plenty proud of that fact.

• Washington did not win the war so much as endure an eight-year ordeal that would have destroyed just about anyone else
• Washington needed to unify this loose amalgam of virtually independent states into a nation — hence, a tour of New England, and then the south
• 2K mile, three months journey in the south
• a struggle was being waged outside Washington between his ideological aspirations and his financial and familial commitment to slavery at Mount Vernon
• tortured soul — a leader whose troubled relationship with slavery embodied the contradictions and denials of our own conflicted relationship with the country’s past
• even in his own time, Washington courted more controversy than most Americans knew about today
• travel was essential to Washington
• in 2014, 1M people visited Mount Vernon
• Washington gathered together a group of his enslaved workers and had at least one of their teeth, maybe all nine of them, inserted into his jaw — he had really bad teeth
• did everything he could to keep his embarrassing tooth problems private
• he was land rich and cash poor
• Mount Vernon lost more and more money every year
• wasn’t much of a conversationalist and had absolutely no talent for small talk, but he had a genius for the seemingly spontaneous gesture or remark that could win over even the most stalwart skeptic
• Statue of Liberty had been inspired by the abolition of slavery during the Civil War — gift from the people of France
• at his inauguration, a number of historians have faulted him for not doing then what he would do at his death — free his slaves
• other historians dismiss such speculation as historically naive
• he was terrified of what lay ahead, both for himself and for his country
• he knew that trying times were coming, why he shook like a leaf while reading his inaugural address
• fascinated by experimental plows and intricate timepieces and knew that the only way America was going to end its dependence on British imports was by creating its own technological revolution
• Britain named Samuel Slater opened America’s first cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island
• factories of New Haven, Beverly, Boston, Hartford, Haverhill were the country’s future
• Artemas Ward, first officer to propose the strategy that ultimately allowed the Americans to prevail: fortification of Dorchester Heights, a move Washington initially rejected in favor of attacked British occupied Boston directly
• by touring New England, Washington wasn’t just learning from the American citizenry about what was happening in their towns and states; he was also instructing them in the reality of the new federal government
• requested that the treasury department contact the Portsmouth collector of customs to retrieve one of his slaves, Ona Judge
• what mattered most to Washington was not that Ona was a victim of a brutal and inhuman system of bondage but that she had been disloyal to his wife
• cold pocket of horror within him — the Washington who was capable of punishing an enslaved worker who repeatedly attempted to escape by selling him to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean
• he knew slavery was wrong and immoral and wished to communicate that message in his will
• but his intimate connection to the institution — through his marriage, his grandchildren, his position in Virginia society, and his financial bottom line — prevented him from recognizing the cruelty and injustice of pursuing a 20 year old woman who had dared to pursue her own freedom rather than wait around to see if the president and his family would someday grant it to her
• Hamilton had put forward a plan by which the federal government would assume each state’s debt from the war
• Madison decided to side with his state’s interest rather than the economic needs of the federal government, and he denounced the plan
• it was the beginning of the political divide that would soon consume the country as rancor and partisanship quickly rose to the fore
• ducking the Quaker call for abolition, Washington had made it easier for future generations of Americans — north and south — to turn a blind eye to slavery
• rode on horseback for two hours most mornings — once he started doing this, he was never again afflicted during the last 7 years of his Presidency with any near fatal rounds of illness that gripped him in his first year in office
• Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison had dinner and Hamilton got his budget proposal and the southerners got the capital on a ten mile square of land on the Potomac River
• by transferring ultimate taxing power from the states to the federal government, Hamilton had laid the economic groundwork for the nation we have today
• balance of power had been permanently shifted in a national direction, and the southerners, who were becoming increasingly distrustful of Hamilton’s alignment with the northern commercial interests, didn’t like it
• Jefferson and Madison ultimately (and surreptitiously) took up the banner of the opposition
• Republicans, a “standing rebuke” to what they perceived as the increasingly monarchical pretensions of Washington’s presidency
• Newport is all about religious toleration and slavery (historically)
• Roger Williams founded the colony as a place where people from all religious backgrounds could worship as they pleased
• Rhode Island was the last to join the Union, first to declare its independence from Great Britain
• charter granted all “persons” religious freedom
• Newport today, homes were built with profits associated with slavery
• estimated that 60 percent of the slave trading voyages launched from North America originated in Rhode Island
• in some years as high as 90 percent
• Moses Seixas, Newport Jewish congregation, wrote a letter to Washington at one point, and Washington replied by noting that in a country based on the principle that everyone is created equal, mere tolerance of others is not enough; we must honor their innate right to freedom
• unclear who wrote the response — might have been Jefferson
• more than any other northern state, Rhode Island served as “the commissary of the Atlantic plantation complex”
• Negro cloth, quickly became a Rhode Island specialty, as did the cloth used to make slave blankets and the sacks used for collecting cotton, known as bagging
• contradictions that might seem obvious more than a century later were by no means so troubling at the time, especially when people’s livelihoods were involved
• in essence a northern outpost of southern slavery
• every state in the Union depended on goods produced by enslaved workers in the South and the Caribbean
• Washington, it turns out, did not wait until the very end of his life to make his views on slavery public — he did it during his second term as President, and Moses Brown (Brown University) helped to make it happen
• history doesn’t sit on its pedestal like a statue, it’s ongoing, it’s dynamic, it keeps breaking ice
• America was born in a revolution and will continue to be defined by that revolution as each generation renews the struggle to measure up to the ideals with which this country began — that all of us are created equal
• by venturing south, Washington was heading into terra incognita, and not just in a geographic sense
• was up to him to see the Potomac construction
• with luck, the tour might help bring southern states into the fold but lay the groundwork for the Federal City
• 1800 mile, three month marathon
• by voluntarily handing in his commission as General, Washington had done his best to prevent some dictator from seizing power in America
• Potomac was at the almost precise midpoint between Maine in the north and Georgia in the south
• all convergences led to the Potomac
• obsession blinded him to the impropriety of a president’s overseeing the construction of a city in the virtual backyard of his home — a city built with slave labor on land bought and sold by his friends and relatives
• creation of a city on the Potomac “raised the value of Washington’s property and that of his family a thousand percent at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune” = Adams
• river had opened a chink in the once impenetrable armor of his reputation
• U.S. has become what Hamilton — not Jefferson — envisioned: a commercial superpower where the credit based economic system Jefferson so distrusted is an accepted part of daily life
• history isn’t being lost when a statue is toppled to the ground; history is being made
• Washington was uniquely qualified to be a leader, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists could abide
• without him there would have been no pause between the upheaval of the Revolution and the more measured chaos of a republic struggling to reach some kind of consensus
• was in constant search of “all facts and proceedings in every part of the Union”
• Confederacy was founded on Washington’s birthday — not really an accident
• wishful thinking on Jefferson Davis’ part to think that Washington would have supported the Confederacy
• Washington effect: positive impact his immense popularity had on even the most skeptical of citizens
• Tar Heel: might have been coined during the Civil War, when it was said tenacious Carolina solders put tar on their heels to make them stick better in the next fight
• oak: as a result of the shipping industries voracious appetite for the wood, Congress would enact legislation in 1817 prohibiting the unauthorized felling of live oak on federal land — first instance of government mandated environmental protection in U.S. history
• Yazoo lands — a huge tract stretching west all the way to the Mississippi River
• Georgia legislation authorized the sale of 40M acres — legislation had been bribed — law was repealed
• created a legal mess that ultimately forced Georgia to cede what became the states of Mississippi and Alabama to the federal government
• before they invented Florida, northerners came to Augusta, GA; one of the reasons why Augusta National is in the vicinity
• Jefferson first emerged as the country’s most visible Anti-Federalist — an exceedingly strange position to be in, given that he was a member of Washington’s cabinet
• Washington’s only interest was in establishing a federal government that was strong enough to survive without him
• what is remarkable is how long he continued to tolerate Jefferson’s insubordinate behavior
• reluctantly Washington agreed to run a second time, only to immediately regret the decision when an Anti Federalist majority was elected to Congress
• to please both groups, Washington and L’Enfant had had to put a mile and a half between the Capital and the White House
• that’s one of the reasons why D.C. is such an expansive city — to please the original landowners
• Lincoln greatly admired Washington
• movingly compared the challenge Washington had faced in 1776 with what awaited the country in 1861
• rolled up his sleeves and helped build a government designed to transcend the ego of any single individual
• was intended to be buried in a mausoleum beneath the rotunda of the Capital — a calculated move to force subsequent administrations to complete the still unfinished Capitol and keep the Federal City on the Potomac
• never happened — America is a system of laws, not a cult of personality
• Jefferson probably helped to ensure that Washington’s corpse ended up at Mount Vernon
• delivered famous farewell address in 1796 — ghostwritten by Hamilton
• if this country of different states was going to stay together people needed to focus on what they had in common, not their differences
• Washington, with Hamilton’s help, had seen with startling clarity where his country would be in more than 220 years — as in now
• most of what he saw and did was never written down
• that would have revealed too much — he reserved it all for the locked vault within
• Martha burned both his letters to her and her letters to him after his death
• he failed to anticipate was that instead of making the last year’s of Martha’s life easier, the delay in emancipating his slaves would only add to her anxieties
• by freeing his slaves after his death, Washington did something that not a single other slaveholding founding father felt obliged to do — he had come a long way
• what bothered him were not the philosophical differences between his two warring cabinet members but their unwillingness to work cooperatively
• unlike Hamilton and Jefferson, Washington didn’t need to be right all the time — he just wanted to make things work
• road ahead is full of compromises if life is actually going to get better — Jefferson didn’t care
• Jefferson wrote the Declaration, Washington translated words into something real
• founders never claimed to have created the ideal political system, but no one over the course of the last 244 years has come up with a better form of government
• our first president: a slaveholder, land baron, general, politician, who believed with all his soul in the Union