The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "THE MAN WHO could have been king was just a farmer now, at peace with the world..." (more)
Key Phrases: uncollected papers, land portage, federal town, George Washington, Mount Vernon, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A snappy book about a river and horseback trip more than two centuries ago? Hard to pull off, but Achenbach (Captured by Aliens, etc.) has done so with enough authority to satisfy historians and in a lively style sure to please general readers. His tale is about George Washington's fixation with the West-not today's Far West but the lands inland of the Appalachians-and about what that single-minded interest came to mean for the nation. One wouldn't think that chapters devoted to a single horseback trip that Washington, the nation's first great westerner, took inland in 1784 could be of much interest. But the author uses that trip to unroll a large canvas of subjects, chief among them how a single man's "personal issues had a way of becoming national ones." Fleshing out a day-to-day itinerary with lively excursions into the land's geography, politics, farmers and backwoodsmen, Indians and slaves, Achenbach also unwraps Washington's personality, at once magisterial and rough, obsessive yet realistic, accepting of the people but disdainful of those who got in his way. The Potomac, whose successful development as grand route to the interior would greatly benefit Washington, also plays a central role. Achenbach explains how the river's intractable geography kept the nation's capital from becoming the great metropolis of Washington's dreams. Toward the end, the book wanders off into the Civil War and such subjects as today's Potomac and its landscape. Achenbach ought to have stuck close to his opening intent. The story of Washington's fixity on a dream impossible to realize is a good enough tale on its own. 6 maps.
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From The Washington Post

Joel Achenbach's The Grand Idea may be the ideal reading for anyone who's ever floated on, driven over, or merely gazed languidly upon the capital's mighty river and wondered about its history. As Achenbach recounts in this engaging and solidly researched book, George Washington cast his appraising eye on the Potomac and saw a watery highway to the West, a route that would unlock the riches of the Ohio Valley.

The Grand Idea will also make amusing reading for anyone with a few chips in the great game of real estate speculation, which is precisely what Washington was engaged in, despite his denials. The general himself noted the basic, immutable pattern of buy-low-sell-high when he wrote that the largest fortunes in Virginia had been made "by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in [previous] days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess." Through purchases and grants for his service in the French and Indian War, Washington possessed some 49,000 acres in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Ohio. In 1784 Washington, at age 52, went off on horseback to inspect his properties in a journey of 680 miles in 34 days, a trek that forms the spine of Achenbach's narrative.

His intended destination was a 17-mile-long tract (almost 11,000 acres) along the Great Kanawha River near the Ohio, but he got tangled up in an extended squabble over Washington's Bottom -- not an anatomical locale but the seat, so to speak, of his holdings in western Pennsylvania. He came up against a colorful and determined band of back-country squatters who were utterly unimpressed by the Father of Their Country. To them, Washington was just a rich land grabber trying to run them off with a piece of paper.

As the squatters defy the general face-to-face and later in court, it is hard to choose sides. Should we root for George Washington, or for the little guy with "sweat equity"? A bit too briskly, Achenbach summarizes historians' criticism of Washington's land deals, and reveals that a letter was altered by a 19th-century editor to remove Washington's "incendiary" suggestion that Pennsylvania law could "be evaded." Achenbach forthrightly presents evidence of an overweening sense of entitlement embedded in the great man's character, then declares he is "confident" that Washington was an honest man, and moves on. Here, and in the section on placing the capital on the Potomac, Achenbach might have probed more deeply into questions of character.

Washington truly emerges as a visionary in his dogged effort to find a "northwest passage" of the Eastern United States. Through his own travels, by scrutinizing maps and by talking with frontiersmen, he identified promising routes to connect the Potomac to "Western Waters" with a portage of as little as five miles. Furs packed in Detroit could reach Alexandria! All of this depended on gathering the money, the muscle and the know-how to remove miles of stony obstacles from the Potomac or build canals around them. The blasting at Great Falls did not go well, as the demolition men were not exactly experts with black powder: "One Run off [,] the other Blown up." As Achenbach writes, "The river simply could not adapt itself to a business model." But Washington's failure does not detract from the pleasures of The Grand Idea, which mingles history, geography, geology, politics, early American scheming and go-getting, and thumbnail sketches of characters great and small.

Bruce Chadwick's George Washington's War, in contrast, is an exercise in tunnel vision. Chadwick's basic thesis is that George Washington almost single-handedly invented the American system of government, and that his notions of government sprang directly from his experience in the Revolutionary War. Washington's enormous personal influence and the equally enormous impact of the wartime experience cannot be discounted in a history of the founding, but Chadwick's analysis is so simplistic as to be useless. As if the Constitutional Convention were unnecessary, Chadwick flatly asserts that at Valley Forge "Washington considered the future government of the United States, with separate branches and a single president with substantial powers." On page 350, Chadwick states that Washington thought "the key to success" of the new government would be distribution of power; but by page 466 he sees Washington leaning toward dictatorship: "it was better for a country to abide by the wishes of a single leader who knew what was best, just as the army had followed a single commander." The text, the notes, and even the picture captions all have errors, but the main problem is that Chadwick has no sense of how to construct a narrative or develop an argument, and actually manages to diminish the hero by ladling on the treacle.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st ed edition (June 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684848570
• ISBN-13: 978-0684848570
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,043,686 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Grand Idea, June 7, 2004

By	Dr. Karen M. Gray "kmgrayphd" (Hagerstown, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When Joel Achenbach tells the story of Washington?s Potomac journeys and his life-long commitments of money, time, and power to the region?s economic potential, he reveals that Washington was a wilderness adventurer from his days as a callow youth to his final years as a near demi-god. The Grand Idea therefore gives us a window into the sheer physical hardiness of this tidewater planter. Intriguingly, it also enlivens the complex mix of personal and national concerns that drove Washington, his deeply rooted foibles, and his truly-awesome ability to learn and mature in wisdom and ethics. It is no mean task to bring Washington to us neither as the commander of the military effort to win independence, nor as the nation?s first president, but rather as a man with real and intimate familiarity with the western wilderness, a patriot?s dream for its future, and a businessman?s hard-headed realization that a people can?t flourish until certain crucial improvements are in place. Achenbach?s lively and immediate style will bind his readers to the book until it is finished.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Overlooked Example of Washington's Vision, February 6, 2005

By	W. Calhoun "absolute dilettante" (Rhode Island) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Although George Washington made a geographic miscalculation in thinking the Potomac River would be the "front door" on to "the fertile plains of the Western Country"-he was right (as usual) about his vision of the western-oriented destiny that awaited his countrymen.
In the very lively and interesting The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West, Joel Achenbach, a staff writer for the Washington Post and science columnist for National Geographic, tells the story of Washington's western trip soon after the Revolution. He made this journey in 1784: up the Potomac, across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio valley country of western Pennsylvania. The rugged 34-day, 680-mile trip by canoe and horseback was made in part to collect rents on Washington's long-neglected western properties. The trip helped to protect Washington's private interests, but it also crystallized his belief that the Potomac was the natural passage to the continental interior. This belief became somewhat of an obsession, not only because of personal motivation, but also because Washington thought the Potomac waterway would bind the 13 new states with the unsettled West through "the cement of interest." That is, a strong commercial connection that would prevent a possible future split due to emerging political differences and foreign influence.
Achenbach's entertaining book has a fluid and almost conversational style, and its story goes beyond the early attempts to commercially navigate the shallow and fickle Potomac by Washington's envisioned system of canals and locks. His later chapters especially blend biography, geography and history, while examining the importance of the Erie Canal, the coming of railroads, the Civil War as well as the Potomac as it is today. In the end, Washington's Potomac waterway never materialized. The river was not the ideal water route to the west, and was simply not navigable under normal circumstances, and certainly not by nineteenth-century standards. Nonetheless, Achenbach's appealing depiction of Washington smoothly tells the story of a restless entrepreneur and practical visionary who understood better than anyone that the future of the Union he helped to create lay in common national interests and energetic western expansion. After all, while Franklin, Jefferson and Adams had traveled to the salons of London and Paris, Washington had gone to the wilderness at the forks of the Ohio.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable read on an over-looked subject, February 4, 2005

By	JRD (MA USA) - See all my reviews

The title "George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West" is s little misleading. The central narrative certainly the opening of commerce routs to the West, and George Washington's obsession with that objective, but the real story in this book is the survival of the United States as a nation and how Washington's unyielding commitment to keep his dream alive. Washington visited more of the country than any man of his day, and repeated trips to the wilderness as the frontier steadily moved westward. He fully knew the diversity of cultures and values in the different regions of his country, and was acutely aware of how little connection there was between those peoples and regions.

Washington saw a commercial connection to the west as critical to cement the states together. Settlers in Ohio had little access to the market places of the coastal states, and less access to the good available there. Washington feared that if the Spanish opened the Mississippi and the port of New Orleans to American settlers, the westerners would become more attached to Spain than to the Coastal states, possibly to the point of hostility. What I found truly fascinating was the degree which many of the Founders opposed any and all measures proposed to strengthen the union. Independence was barely won, and not yet proven sustainable, and the civil war was brewing. The Southerners opposed allowing the federal government even the authority to build roads and bridges; for fear that a powerful federal government would eventually take on the issue of slavery.

I found this book a truly enjoyable read on a long neglected, but important thread in American history.