Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy - Nathaniel Philbrick

Nathaniel Philbrick’s Travels with George is one of those books that appeals to readers on multiple levels. In my case, it particularly appeals because it recounts a modern road trip that exactly mimics the one taken by George Washington in 1789 only six months after his inauguration as America’s first president. But, in addition to being a book about identical road trips separated by centuries, Philbrick also explores Washington’s intimate involvement in the enslavement of Africans and their descendants for the benefit of himself and his wife’s family. 

Washington knew in 1789 that the country he had been elected to help govern could fall apart much more quickly than it had been created. Governors of the thirteen former colonies, to a man, still considered their state boundaries as the “country” in which they lived. Two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not even ratified the Constitution by the time that Washington’s inauguration came. And that is precisely why Washington hit the road.

The brand new president decided it was time for him to make himself available to ordinary citizens so that they could express their concerns about the new government directly to him. At the same time, Washington hoped to convince the people he spoke with that they now had a new identity in common with everyone else in the former colonies: they were Americans. Some 229 years later (in 2018), Nathaniel Philbrick decided to follow in Washington’s tracks to see if the people in America were any more united today than they were when Washington first embarked on his own travels. 

Washington began his trip by traveling through the New England states, but he bypassed Rhode Island until that state finally ratified the Constitution. The president would only, in fact, visit Rhode Island after the state’s ratification of the document, and he combined that portion of his road trip with a tour of Long Island where it is believed he spent time with several of the anonymous spies who were instrumental in key military victories over the British. A second, even longer, road trip was undertaken a few months later during which all of the Southern states were visited. Washington was happy to learn during this portion of his tour of America that the expected opposition from Southern leaders was not as common as he had feared it to be. 

It is unlikely that any other national figure could have united the former colonies as quickly or as securely as George Washington managed it through his reputation, words, and action. During his travels, the purposely accessible new president stayed in public inns rather than in the much more comfortable, and private, homes of political allies who would have been happy to offer him shelter. He also despised all the pomp and ceremony that so many local dignitaries wanted him to sit through, and despite being a very private man, he made sure that everyone at least got a look at him if they wanted one. 

Washington, though, was far from perfect. He owned slaves, his wife owned slaves, and the family’s profiteering from slavery cannot be glossed over. Philbrick, to his credit, takes an approach to the past that I appreciate: he hides nothing, but he never forgets that:

“A reckoning is going on in which many Americans have come to wonder whether anything from our country’s history is worth saving. People from the past — even from just a few decades ago — will inevitably fail to meet the evolving standards of the present. That does not mean they failed to meet in their own imperfect way, the challenges of their own time as best they could.” (Page 171)

I wish more people, historians included, would keep this in mind.

Bottom Line: I thoroughly enjoyed the comparisons that Philbrick makes between what he and his wife encounter on the road and what Washington saw in the same locations two centuries earlier. This country may be just as divided today as it was during Washington’s first term as president but the union held then, and what Philbrick heard from strangers during his own travels gives me confidence that the same will be true today. George Washington was a remarkable man, someone who came along at precisely the moment he was needed most. Washington sensed that he had the power and the charisma to make the United States into whatever he wanted it to be, even into a dictatorship if he chose to do so. But as Philbrick says, “…his (Washington’s) only interest was in establishing a federal government that was strong enough to survive without him.” And he did it.

Nathaniel Philbrick