Washington's Heir

Washington's Heir PDF Author: Gerard N. Magliocca
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190947047
Category : Judges
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The first biography of George Washington's extraordinary nephew, who inherited Mount Vernon and was Chief Justice John Marshall's right-hand man on the Supreme Court for nearly thirty years. George Washington's nephew and heir was a Supreme Court Justice for over thirty years and left an indelible mark on American law. Despite his remarkable life and notable lineage, he is unknown to most Americans because he cared more about establishing the rule of law than about personal glory. In Washington's Heir, Gerard N. Magliocca gives us the first published biography of Bushrod Washington, one of the most underrated Founding Fathers. Born in 1762, Justice Washington fought in the Revolutionary War, served in Virginia's ratifying convention for the Constitution, and was Chief Justice John Marshall's partner in establishing the authority of the Supreme Court. Though he could only see from one eye, Justice Washington wrote many landmark decisions defining the fundamental rights of citizens and the structure of the Constitution, including Corfield v. Coryell--an influential source for the Congress that proposed the Fourteenth Amendment. As George Washington's personal heir, Bushrod inherited both Mount Vernon and the family legacy of owning other people, one of whom was almost certainly his half-brother or nephew. Yet Justice Washington alone among the Founders was criticized by journalists for selling enslaved people and, in turn, issued a public defence of his actions that laid bare the hypocrisy and cruelty of slavery. An in-depth look at Justice Washington's extraordinary story that gives insight into his personal thoughts through his own secret journal, Washington's Heir sheds new light not only on George Washington, John Marshall, and the Constitution, but also on America's ongoing struggle to become a more perfect union.

Washington's Heir

Washington's Heir PDF Author: Gerard N. Magliocca
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190947047
Category : Judges
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first biography of George Washington's extraordinary nephew, who inherited Mount Vernon and was Chief Justice John Marshall's right-hand man on the Supreme Court for nearly thirty years. George Washington's nephew and heir was a Supreme Court Justice for over thirty years and left an indelible mark on American law. Despite his remarkable life and notable lineage, he is unknown to most Americans because he cared more about establishing the rule of law than about personal glory. In Washington's Heir, Gerard N. Magliocca gives us the first published biography of Bushrod Washington, one of the most underrated Founding Fathers. Born in 1762, Justice Washington fought in the Revolutionary War, served in Virginia's ratifying convention for the Constitution, and was Chief Justice John Marshall's partner in establishing the authority of the Supreme Court. Though he could only see from one eye, Justice Washington wrote many landmark decisions defining the fundamental rights of citizens and the structure of the Constitution, including Corfield v. Coryell--an influential source for the Congress that proposed the Fourteenth Amendment. As George Washington's personal heir, Bushrod inherited both Mount Vernon and the family legacy of owning other people, one of whom was almost certainly his half-brother or nephew. Yet Justice Washington alone among the Founders was criticized by journalists for selling enslaved people and, in turn, issued a public defence of his actions that laid bare the hypocrisy and cruelty of slavery. An in-depth look at Justice Washington's extraordinary story that gives insight into his personal thoughts through his own secret journal, Washington's Heir sheds new light not only on George Washington, John Marshall, and the Constitution, but also on America's ongoing struggle to become a more perfect union.

George Washington's Hair

George Washington's Hair PDF Author: Keith Beutler
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Mostly hidden from public view, like an embarrassing family secret, scores of putative locks of George Washington’s hair are held, more than two centuries after his death, in the collections of America’s historical societies, public and academic archives, and museums. Excavating the origins of these bodily artifacts, Keith Beutler uncovers a forgotten strand of early American memory practices and emerging patriotic identity. Between 1790 and 1840, popular memory took a turn toward the physical, as exemplified by the craze for collecting locks of Washington’s hair. These new, sensory views of memory enabled African American Revolutionary War veterans, women, evangelicals, and other politically marginalized groups to enter the public square as both conveyors of these material relics of the Revolution and living relics themselves. George Washington’s Hair introduces us to a taxidermist who sought to stuff Benjamin Franklin’s body, an African American storyteller brandishing a lock of Washington’s hair, an evangelical preacher burned in effigy, and a schoolmistress who politicized patriotic memory by privileging women as its primary bearers. As Beutler recounts in vivid prose, these and other ordinary Americans successfully enlisted memory practices rooted in the physical to demand a place in the body politic, powerfully contributing to antebellum political democratization.

Founding Friendships

Founding Friendships PDF Author: Cassandra A. Good
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199376174
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Elite men and women in America's founding era formed friendships with one another that were vibrant, intimate, and politically significant. These relationships put women on equal footing with the founding fathers and other prominent men. Such friendships, Cassandra Good shows in Founding Friendships, enriched both the lives of individuals and the political fabric of the new nation.

The Cabinet

The Cabinet PDF Author: Lindsay M. Chervinsky
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet—the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. So how did George Washington create one of the most powerful bodies in the federal government? On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries—Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph—for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the US Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and constitutional challenges—and finding congressional help lacking—Washington decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to. He modeled his new cabinet on the councils of war he had led as commander of the Continental Army. In the early days, the cabinet served at the president’s pleasure. Washington tinkered with its structure throughout his administration, at times calling regular meetings, at other times preferring written advice and individual discussions. Lindsay M. Chervinsky reveals the far-reaching consequences of Washington’s choice. The tensions in the cabinet between Hamilton and Jefferson heightened partisanship and contributed to the development of the first party system. And as Washington faced an increasingly recalcitrant Congress, he came to treat the cabinet as a private advisory body to summon as needed, greatly expanding the role of the president and the executive branch.

Heirs of the Founders

Heirs of the Founders PDF Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385542542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
From New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery. They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart. Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.

The Widow Washington

The Widow Washington PDF Author: Martha Saxton
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374721335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
An insightful biography of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of our nation's father The Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, based on archival sources. Her son’s biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her oldest child. But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned young and grew up working hard, practicing frugality and piety. Stepping into Virginia’s upper class, she married an older man, the planter Augustine Washington, with whom she had five children before his death eleven years later. As a widow deprived of most of her late husband’s properties, Mary struggled to raise her children, but managed to secure them places among Virginia’s elite. In her later years, she and her wealthy son George had a contentious relationship, often disagreeing over money, with George dismissing as imaginary her fears of poverty and helplessness. Yet Mary Ball Washington had a greater impact on George than mothers of that time and place usually had on their sons. George did not have the wealth or freedom to enjoy the indulged adolescence typical of young men among the planter class. Mary’s demanding mothering imbued him with many of the moral and religious principles by which he lived. The two were strikingly similar, though the commanding demeanor, persistence, athleticism, penny-pinching, and irascibility that they shared have served the memory of the country’s father immeasurably better than that of his mother. Martha Saxton’s The Widow Washington is a necessary and deeply insightful corrective, telling the story of Mary’s long, arduous life on its own terms, and not treating her as her son’s satellite.

Washington's End

Washington's End PDF Author: Jonathan Horn
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501154249
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Popular historian and former White House speechwriter Jonathan Horn “provides a captivating and enlightening look at George Washington’s post-presidential life and the politically divided country that was part of his legacy” (New York Journal of Books). Beginning where most biographies of George Washington leave off, Washington’s End opens with the first president exiting office after eight years and entering what would become the most bewildering stage of his life. Embittered by partisan criticism and eager to return to his farm, Washington assumed a role for which there was no precedent at a time when the kings across the ocean yielded their crowns only upon losing their heads. In a different sense, Washington would lose his head, too. In this riveting read, bestselling author Jonathan Horn reveals that the quest to surrender power proved more difficult than Washington imagined and brought his life to an end he never expected. The statesman who had staked his legacy on withdrawing from public life would feud with his successors and find himself drawn back into military command. The patriarch who had dedicated his life to uniting his country would leave his name to a new capital city destined to become synonymous with political divisions. A “movable feast of a book” (Jay Winik, New York Times bestselling author of 1944), immaculately researched, and powerfully told through the eyes not only of Washington but also of his family members, friends, and foes, Washington’s End is “an outstanding biographical work on one of America’s most prominent leaders (Library Journal).

First Family

First Family PDF Author: Cassandra A. Good
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 0369733088
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Award-winning historian Cassandra A. Good shows how the outspoken stepgrandchildren of George Washington played an overlooked but important role in the development of American society and politics from the Revolution to the Civil War. While it’s widely known in America that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised numerous children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure, as well as meet the children he helped raise and trace their complicated roles in American history. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye. Raised in the country’s first “first family,” they remained well-known as Washington’s family and keepers of his legacy throughout their lives. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war—all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making. First Family brings new focus and attention to this surprisingly neglected aspect of George Washington’s life and legacy. As the country grapples with concerns about political dynasties and the public role of presidential families, the saga of Washington’s family offers a human story of historical precedent.

Heirs of an Honored Name

Heirs of an Honored Name PDF Author: Douglas R Egerton
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 154169970X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
An enthralling chronicle of the American nineteenth century told through the unraveling of the nation's first political dynasty John and Abigail Adams founded a famous political family, but they would not witness its calamitous fall from grace. When John Quincy Adams died in 1848, so began the slow decline of the family's political legacy. In Heirs of an Honored Name, award-winning historian Douglas R. Egerton depicts a family grown famous, wealthy -- and aimless. After the Civil War, Republicans looked to the Adamses to steer their party back to its radical 1850s roots. Instead, Charles Francis Sr. and his children -- Charles Francis Jr., John Quincy II, Henry and Clover Adams, and Louisa Adams Kuhn -- largely quit the political arena and found refuge in an imagined past of aristocratic preeminence. An absorbing story of brilliant siblings and family strain, Heirs of an Honored Name shows how the burden of impossible expectations shaped the Adamses and, through them, American history.

Secession on Trial

Secession on Trial PDF Author: Cynthia Nicoletti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415520
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
This book explores the treason trial of President Jefferson Davis, where the question of secession's constitutionality was debated.