“The French ... thought it was an assassination, a war crime, that Washington was a murderer.”
We speak with Peter Stark, author of Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father.
We discuss George Washington’s formative years and character traits, his travels into the Ohio country, and his relationship with lieutenant governor Robert Dinwiddie. We talk about how Washington’s involvement in the Battle of Jumonville Glen touched off the French and Indian War.
As a historian, Stark's writing focuses on adventure and exploration. A traveler himself, Stark is a long-time correspondent for Outside magazine. His 2014 book, Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire, was a New York Times bestseller.
Further Reading
Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father by Peter Stark
Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier by Peter Stark
Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance by Peter Stark
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation by Richard Norton Smith
Washington: The Indispensable Man by James Thomas Flexner
The Life of George Washington by John Marshall
What Would Jefferson Do?
“I would have liked to have had Canada. Twice, we invaded Canada during my lifetime, and failed on both occasions.”
Tune in to your local public radio or join the 1776 Club to hear this episode of What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?
Listen to this week's episode.
…I would immediately erect a column on the Southernmost limit of Cuba & inscribe on it a Ne plus ultra as to us in that direction. we should then have only to include the North in our confederacy, which would be of course in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.
Founders Online: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809
Clay Jenkinson and Lindsay Chervinsky discuss ten things about an event rather than an individual: the crossing of the Delaware River by George Washington and the Continental Army in a surprise attack on Christmas night, 1776.
We're joined by author Joseph Ellis to discuss his work chronicling the Founding Fathers. This week, we're focusing on his 2004 biography, His Excellency: George Washington. The historian Gordon Wood reviewed the book writing that “Ellis's portrait of Washington thus humanizes the man without knocking him off the pedestal where his contemporaries placed him. This Washington is all the greater because he is a real human being with both passions and principles.”
Jefferson tells us that Article Three of the Constitution contemplates a court system, but that it is quite vague and general, so the first Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789 which was intended to create the infrastructure of the Judicial system. George Washington then filled every available seat through appointment.
This week author and White House historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky discusses her new book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. The US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet—the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. The book explores why George Washington created one.
Author Jon Meacham calls the book an “important and illuminating study,” one that “has given us an original angle of vision on the foundations and development of something we all take for granted: the president’s Cabinet.”