The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West [Paperback]

Joel Achenbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 24, 2005

The Grand Idea follows George Washington in the critical period immediately after the War of Independence. The general had great hopes for his young nation, but also grave fears. He worried that the United States was so fragmented politically and culturally that it would fall apart, and that the "West," beyond the Appalachian mountains, would become a breakaway republic. So he came up with an ambitious scheme: He would transform the Potomac River into the nation's premier commercial artery, binding East and West, bolstering domestic trade, and staving off disunion. This was no armchair notion. Washington saddled up and rode west on a 680-mile trek to the raucous frontier of America.

Achenbach captures a Washington rarely seen: rugged frontiersman, real estate speculator, shrewd businessman. Even after his death, Washington's grand ambition inspired heroic engineering feats, including an audacious attempt to build a canal across the mountains to the Ohio River. But the country needed more than commercial arteries to hold together, and in the Civil War, the general's beloved river became a battlefield between North and South.

Like such classics as Undaunted Courage and Founding Brothers, Achenbach's riveting portrait of a great man and his grand plan captures the imagination of the new country, the passions of an ambitious people, and the seemingly endless beauty of the American landscape.

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Thomas Jefferson, with his dream of an "empire of liberty" extending to the Pacific, is generally thought of as the Founding Father most devoted to western expansion. Yet, as this revealing and often fascinating book illustrates, Jefferson was not alone in his hopes and plans for the vast regions beyond the Appalachians. Achenbach, a staff writer for the Washington Post and a monthly columnist for National Geographic, credibly asserts that Washington, from his young manhood, had shown consistent interest, perhaps even an obsession, with the latent promise and possibilities of the West. As a young officer in the Virginia militia, Washington had traversed the frontier to dispute French claims to the Ohio country. Before the American War of Independence began, he had engaged intensely in land speculation there. After independence, Washington claimed his fondest hope was to return to the life of a gentlemen farmer at his beloved Mt. Vernon, but his restless spirit led him to plan an epic journey westward. This is an interesting perspective on Washington's views and personality. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 24, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743263006
• ISBN-13: 978-0743263009
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,572,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Here's my book website:

http://www.aholeatthebottomofthesea.com/


Here's my boilerplate bio:

Joel Achenbach has been a staff writer for The Washington Post since 1990, started the newsroom's first online column in 1999 and the paper's first blog, Achenblog, in 2005. His seventh book, "A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea," an account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its aftermath, will be [whoa, make that WAS] published in April 2011 by Simon & Schuster. His syndicated column Why Things Are (1988-1996), which he began when he worked at The Miami Herald, appeared in 50 newspapers and three collections of the column were published by Ballantine Books. He has been a regular contributor to National Geographic since 1998, writing stories on such topics as dinosaurs, particle physics, earthquakes, extraterrestrial life, megafauna extinction and the electrical grid. Now assigned to the Post's national desk, he writes on science and politics and helped cover the Deepwater Horizon story. A 1982 graduate of Princeton University, he has taught journalism at Princeton and Georgetown University. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Mary Stapp, and three daughters.

In case that's too confusing, here's the basic point: I'm something that used to be known as "a newspaper reporter."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 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)   

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

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.

6 of 6 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)   

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

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable read on an over-looked subject, February 3, 2005

By 

JRD (MA USA) - See all my reviews

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

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.