Synopses & Reviews
George Washington's Mount Vernon brings together--for the first time--the details of Washington's 45-year endeavor to build and perfect Mount Vernon. In doing so it introduces us to a Washington few of his contemporaries knew, and one little noticed by historians since.
Here we meet the planter/patriot who also genuinely loved building, a man passionately human in his desire to impress on his physical surroundings the stamp of his character and personal beliefs. As chief architect and planner of the countless changes made at Mount Vernon over the years, Washington began by imitating accepted models of fashionable taste, but as time passed he increasingly followed his own ideas. Hence, architecturally, as the authors show, Mount Vernon blends the orthodox and the innovative in surprising ways, just as the new American nation would. Equally interesting is the light the book sheds on the process of building at Mount Vernon, and on the people--slave and free--who did the work. Washington was a demanding master, and in their determination to preserve their own independence his workers often clashed with him. Yet, as the Dalzells argue, that experience played a vital role in shaping his hopes for the future of American society--hope that embraced in full measure the promise of the revolution in which he had led his fellow citizens.
George Washington's Mount Vernon thus compellingly combines the two sides of Washington's life--the public and the private--and uses the combination to enrich our understanding of both. Gracefully written, with more than 80 photographs, maps, and engravings, the book tells a fascinating story with memorable insight.
Review
"Washington was both the most indispensable and the most inaccessible of all the founders. In most histories he floats above the revolutionary era like a platitude. Here we finally get him grounded, palpable and human, off guard, at home."--Josepth J. Ellis, author of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
"This thoughtful, well-written study casts important light on the evolution of Mount Vernon and the relationship of Washington and his home to the American Revolution. Part of really getting to know Washington will now be to read the Dalzells' book."--Don Higginbotham, Dowd Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"George Washington's Mount Vernon interweaves architectural history, social history, and biography into a complex and entrancing story of a man and his house. That George Washington kept improving Mount Vernon to the end of his life, while laboring to bring the nation into existence, is evidence of architecture's power of the gentry imagination in the eighteenth century. In this illuminating book, we learn about Washington's spats with his workers, how he used the house socially, the problems of directing construction from a distance, and what the house may have meant culturally in the new American nation."--Richard Lyman Bushman, Gouveneur Morris Professor of History, Columbia University
Review
"
George Washington's Mount Vernon, the husband-and-wife collaboration of Robert and Lee Dalzell, is a lovely book...as much about the builder, the foremost Founding Father, as about his house. There are insights in it about the character of George Washington that don't emerge from the rest of the Washington literature, vast as the corpus is."--Eric L. McKitrick,
The New York Review of BooksDescription
Includes bibliographical references (p. 244-288) and index.
About the Author
Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College and the author of
Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made and
Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843-1852.
Lee Baldwin Dalzell is the Head of The Reference Department of the Williams College Library.