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

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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.

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.

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.

Joel Achenbach's The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West is an elegant fusion of American business history, presidential biography, and geography, told as a good and gripping story. Achenbach does a remarkable thing in this book: he explores an important theme - George Washington's ambitions for what the young republic should become when it grew up -- without the weighty tone of scholarship typical of such treatments. The book has a charming, almost conversational style which reveals the contradictions, ambiguities and tensions in the life of Washington and his peers in their messy humanity and the rough social reality of their contemporary context. Achenbach is a witty, insightful and incredibly competent sherpa through this landscape and history; he never lets his prose eclipse the inherent drama of the story. And he stops the narrative now and then to chat with the reader on the matter at hand, as in this passage on historical interpretation:

.... All of which is a reminder that history is not an exact science and at moments is more like a séance, a desperate attempt, in the mist and fog, to channel the voices of the dead.

The story is fascinating at several levels: the description of the young country as so fractured that any assertion of Federal authority threatened to drive states out of the Union; the tensions between the first President's private and public agendas; the inability of investors and policy makers to know when a new technology (the railroad) had made another (the canal) obsolete. These are all themes that resonate through American history; it is as if Achenbach has discovered their headwaters in this brilliant and highly readable book.

Anyone interested in American history, the presidency, the history of the city of Washington, or economic history will love this book. Buy it and read it!

"The Grand Idea -- George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West" is a must read for any student of the Founding Fathers, Lewis and Clark, and any native Washingtonian. Revealing anecdotes generally unknown to casual history buffs, "The Grand Idea" is classic Achenbach, filled with entertaining vignettes of the General's life between the end of his tenure as Commander in Chief of the revolutionary forces and his election as the first president of the United States.

Binding the short stories together by focusing on Washington's plans to open the "near West", that area generally thought of today as the Ohio River Valley, Achenbach weaves a thoroughly readible volume, enteraining to the last, and full of his wit and ever-philosophical bent. It seems as if every second or third paragraph ends with yet another analytical barb, moving the reader to seek out the next great line, often accompanied by an out-loud chuckle.

Mixing history, with "story" and analysis is what made this book so much fun to read. A classic example of Achenbach musing is contained in a short diatribe on alcohol and its role in the early western life:

"Alcohol is a recurrent element of frontier writing. The settlers are drunk, the Indians are drunk, ther travelers soon become drunk. Whiskey cost 3 cents a glass. Wagoners would dance to a fiddler, drink all night, and would never repair to their room, since they had no room, only a claim to a few square feet on the barroom floor. They smoked crude cigars that emitted a mephitic stench and were priced at four for a penny. That such twists of tobacco were smoked by drivers of Conestoga wagons gave the cigars their enduring name: Stogies."

Not content to leave the description there, Joel adds, "We can imagine what this world smelled like. But what did it look like?"

Well, Mr. Achenbach proceeds to tell us what it looked like, in grand fashion. Pick it up; read it; and you'll know what George Washington's Potomac looked like.

In The Grand Idea, Joel Achenbach not only examines Washington's lofty vision of the Potomac River as a major trade route to the west, but introduces the reader to a grand idea of his own: a serious examination of history written in easy, compelling prose. In fact, Achenbach's great gift as a writer is his ability to break down and explain a complicated topic in an interesting and absorbing manner. This nuanced and relatively un-examined period in George Washington's life is an excellent vehicle for such a skill. The reader is drawn along effortlessly with anecdotes and insights and is almost surprised to realize when it's all said and done how much he has learned about George Washington and his vision for the country, life in early America and the origin of the national character.

Running throughout the narrative is the idea that history is by no means inevitable. American destiny was not necessarily destined, but was rather shaped and defined and set into motion by the ideas and plans and schemes of people, both as individuals and as a nation. The serves as more than a history lesson to the modern reader but as a warning and responsibility as our decisions affect the current course of society. Diplomacy may have taken the place of a paddle, but today?s leaders are still forced to negotiate tricky trade routes. And the decisions made today will be history tomorrow.

It is 1784. The war was won. He had retired to pursue farming his "fig tree and vine" life along the banks of the Potomac River.

Yet George Washington's mind could not remain fallow. Watching the lazy tidal waters of the Potomac lap shores of his Mount Vernon plantation, he developed what author Joel Achenbach calls his Potomac Scheme. The retired warrior planned a trip up the Potomac, over the Appalachians and into the frontier. The excuse was to collect back rents on his properties. The objective, however, was to lay the ground work for a plan that would transform the Potomac into a major commercial artery that would link the 13 newly established states with the unsettled West.

There was a method to Washington scheme. Achenbach, who describes himself as an explanatory journalist as opposed to an historian, details Washington's concern that the newly established country would fracture into separate nations. The Potomac, Washington envisioned, could effectively bind the two regions.

The book paints an insightful portrait of Washington. Set between periods of public service, the reader sees a relaxed man, predisposed towards action. A man who loves the outdoors; a man with an unquenchable entrepreneurial drive; a man who believes the country's destiny lays to the west.

Achenbach took three years to research and write this largely uncovered period of Washington's life. He spices his account with descriptions of the land's geography, politics, farmers and backwoodsmen, Indians and slaves.

Thanks to Achenbach well-written "explanatory journalism," Washington emerges as an engaging visionary not the stiff, aloof figure portrayed in history books.

It's easy to view George Washington's attempt to make the Potomac River the country's first great east-west highway as a small story, almost a footnote, but Joel Achenbach understands that it's no such thing. Much more than the command of the Continental Army or the presidency, the river was Washington's passion. The Potomac excited Washington, shattered his reserve, and sometimes even drove him--in many ways the most practical of men--to fantastical and near delusional thinking.

Achenbach's book is a great book because Achenbach is writing as much about his own fascination with the Potomac as he is about Washington's. It's for this reason that the final chapters of The Grand Idea leave Washington's story and move through the Civil War and into the present day; far from diffusing the narrative, these sections allow Washington's vision of the river as a great and important place to reverberate across two centuries. It's a difficult authorial feat, but Achenbach pulls it off with panache.

Very highly recommended.

In "The Grand Idea" Joel Achenbach has given us a deft portrait of George Washinton not as a giant among the founding fathers but as he was for most of his life: Often fretful farmer and absentee landlord, reluctant slave owner, intrepid traveller under arduous conditions and western-looking visionary of almost obsessive proportions. In 300 briskly paced pages Achenbach recounts Washington's vision to tame and canalize the Potomac River into a link with the Misssissippi River via the Ohio River Valley and open up the vast potential of the West. That the resulting Cheasapeake & Ohio Canal project would turn out to the the engineering equivalent of the Edsel in no way diminishes Achenbach's achievement in shining an affectionate light on an important aspect of Washington's amazing life. Readers who find most history boring will love this book.

Joel Achenbach has found his genus: History. With an extensive amount of research and effort, he has knitted together an extraordinary saga of American historical development and how it extended from efforts to make the Potomac the route for commerce with the western frontier. In doing so, he has revealed a remarkable episode of George Washington's life from the period between the end of the revolutionary war and the beginning of his presidency of which this reader had been ignorant. The story continues through and after Washington's presidency, narrating the daunted struggle to tame the rowdy and shallow waterway, and while most cities that are centers of human power have evolved over centuries as a result of common human interests, this book details how the capital of the most powerful nation was born in wetlands of the Potomac as a result of the desires of its most famous founding father.

Achenbach's writing style is informal and entertaining without belying the scholarly nature of his subject. His style is a wonderful model for future historians to follow.