More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 7 - May 27, 2018
On an earlier trip to the region, Washington described some settlers “as Ignorant a Set of People as the Indians,” and always retained that view of frontiersmen.23 He might respect their knowledge of the region and their ability to survive in it, but he never saw them as his equals and always remained aloof from them. And they recognized it.
On a journey undertaken with the levelheaded purpose of inspecting his frontier land holdings, Washington abruptly transformed the return leg into a starry-eyed hunt for possible water routes.
Adventurous type, it would seem...
“The motives which predominate most in human affairs is self-love and self-interest.”65 In Washington’s mind, the Potomac River project was a viable and worthwhile enterprise precisely because it benefited private investors and the country as a whole. That was how he had seen the American Revolution and that would be how he would see the Constitution: viable and worthwhile because they served both common and individual interests.
“By a plan of this kind, we should blend the advantages of a monarchy and a republic,” Hamilton had written in 1780.
(to use an Indian phrase) endure ‘while the sun shines, and the rivers flow.’”45
Le Moyer specialized in the risky procedure of tooth transplants, which involved extracting a diseased tooth from a patient and replacing it with a healthy tooth obtained from a donor. Washington resorted to this procedure during the 1780s, with the healthy teeth coming from his slaves, who received thirteen shillings per tooth, or about one-third of what Le Moyer typically paid on the free market.
Say again?
“In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law,”
Don’t we know it today!
Through state-issued paper money, he observed, debtor factions had devalued property rights. Religion, too, he warned, especially when “kindled into enthusiasm,” is a “force like that of other passions” and “may become a motive to oppression.”
Disapproving of her son’s choice in a wife, Mary skipped his wedding and never visited Mount Vernon.
The hardship of Washington’s relatively short trip through such a long-settled region of the country exemplified one of the challenges to forging a national government. Physically, America remained a string of separate states or groups of states.
The roads were so bad farther south that delegates traveled to the Convention from the Carolinas and Georgia by ship.
Massachusetts made it a capital offense for priests to proselytize or say Mass.
The executive will always be increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy.”
“The universal popularity of General Washington,” Hamilton said at the time, was the strongest factor in the federalists’ favor going into the ratification contests.
Washington saw public opinion as a formidable but fickle foundation for political power and tried to cultivate it.
