Nell sigland biography of george washington

Celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation and the first president of the United States. After leading the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War, George Washington shocked the world: he retired. In December , General Washington, the most powerful man in the country, stepped down as Commander in Chief and returned to private life at Mount Vernon.

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Yet as Washington contentedly grew his estate, the fledgling American experiment floundered. Under the Articles of Confederation, the weak central government was unable to raise revenue to pay its debts or reach a consensus on national policy. The states bickered and grew apart. When a Constitutional Convention was established to address these problems, its chances of success were slim.

Jefferson, Madison, and the other Founding Fathers realized that only one man could unite the fractious states: George Washington. Reluctant, but duty-bound, Washington rode to Philadelphia in the summer of to preside over the Convention. Although Washington is often overlooked in most accounts of the period, this masterful new history from Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward J.

To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed.

Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet.