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The Louisiana Purchase dominates the months covered in this volume. Jefferson departs for Monticello to enjoy a needed respite after the busy three and a half months he has just spent in the nation's capital. Shortly before leaving Washington, he has a last meeting with his cabinet, after which he issues a proclamation to reconvene Congress on 17 October, three weeks early. It is the "great and weighty" business of the French government’s stunning offer to transfer all of the Louisiana Territory to the United States that necessitates this important gathering. The event brings Jefferson enthusiastic congratulations from his friends and fellow Republicans. With Jefferson’s great success, however, comes the reality of getting the agreement with France approved and implemented. The boundaries of the territory ceded are not even clear. In private letters to his trusted advisers, Jefferson discusses the proper course of action. Should both houses of Congress be called to consider the French offer? Is it prudent to make the substance of a treaty public? And perhaps most vexing, does this executive action require an amendment to the Constitution? Some Federalists criticize the plan, but an expansion of the nation’s territory, proponents argue, will raise America’s stature in the eyes of the world. With the widening of the country’s borders, Jefferson’s project to send an exploratory party westward seems even timelier. William Clark accepts Meriwether Lewis’s invitation to join the expedition, and on the last day of August Lewis begins his journey down the Ohio River, the building of his boat finally complete.
This biography of Britain’s spy chief during the Revolutionary War sheds new light on his conspiracy with Benedict Arnold—and his mysterious capture. John André was head of the British Army’s Secret Service in North America as the Revolutionary War entered its most decisive phase. In 1780, he masterminded the defection of the high-ranking American general Benedict Arnold. As the commander of West Point, Arnold agreed to turn the strategically vital fort over to the British. André and Arnold also conspired to kidnap George Washington. The secret negotiations between Arnold and André were protracted and fraught with danger. Arnold’s wife Peggy acted as go-between until September 21st, 1780, when the two men met face to face in no-man’s-land. But then André was captured forty-eight hours later, having broken every condition set by his commanding officer: he was within American lines, wearing civilian clothes, and carrying maps of West Point in his boots. When he announced himself as a spy, the Americans had no recourse. Tried by a military tribunal, he was convicted and hanged. André’s motives for his apparent sacrifice have baffled historians for generations. This biography provides a provocative answer to this mystery—explaining not only why he acted as he did, but how he wished others to see his actions.
This book challenges the widely held myth that the American national state was weak in the early days of the republic. William H. Bergmann reveals how the federal government used its fiscal and military powers, as well as bureaucratic authority, to enhance land acquisitions, promote infrastructure development and facilitate commerce and communication in the early trans-Appalachian West. Energetic federal state-building efforts prior to 1815 grew from national state security interests as Native Americans and British imperial designs threatened to unravel the republic. White Westerners and Western state governments partnered with the federal government to encourage commercial growth and emigration, to transform the borderland into a bordered land. Taking a regional approach, this work synthesizes the literatures of social history, political science and economic history to provide a new narrative of American expansionism, one that takes into account the unique historical circumstances in the Ohio Valley and the southern Great Lakes.
How did an unlikely group of peoples--Irish-speaking Catholics, Scottish Highlanders, and American Indians--play an even unlikelier role in the origins of the American Revolution? Drawing on little-used sources in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution places these typically marginalized peoples in Ireland, Scotland, and North America at the center of a larger drama of imperial reform and revolution. Gaelic and Indian peoples experiencing colonization in the eighteenth-century British empire fought back by building relationships with the king and imperial officials. In doing so, they created a more inclusive empire and triggered conflict between the imperial state and formerly privileged provincial Britons: Irish Protestants, Scottish whigs, and American colonists. The American Revolution was only one aspect of this larger conflict between inclusive empire and the exclusionary patriots within the British empire. In fact, Britons had argued about these questions since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when revolutionaries had dethroned James II as they accused him of plotting to employ savage Gaelic and Indian enemies in a tyrranical plot against liberty. This was the same argument the American revolutionaries--and their sympathizers in England, Scotland, and Ireland--used against George III. Ironically, however, it was Gaelic and Indian peoples, not kings, who had pushed the empire in inclusive directions. In doing so they pushed the American patriots towards revolution. This novel account argues that Americans' racial dilemmas were not new nor distinctively American but instead the awkward legacies of a more complex imperial history. By showcasing how Gaelic and Indian peoples challenged the British empire--and in the process convinced American colonists to leave it--Samuel K. Fisher offers a new way of understanding the American Revolution and its relevance for our own times.
This book investigates Thomas Paine's social and political thought in both its British and American moments. It examines the ways in which Paine's ideas were understood. The book restores him to the position his contemporaries accorded him, that of an important writer on politics and society.
The untold story of how America’s beloved first president, George Washington, borrowed, leveraged, and coerced his way into masterminding the key land purchase of the American era: the creation of the nation’s capital city. Contrary to the popular historical record, Thomas Jefferson was not even a minor player at The Dinner Table Bargain, now known as The Compromise of 1790. The real protagonists of the Dinner Table Bargain were President George Washington and New York Senator Philip Schuyler, who engaged in the battle that would separate our financial capital from our political seat of power. Washington and Schuyler’s dueling ambitions provoked an intense decades-long rivalry and a protracted crusade for the location of the new empire city. Alexander Hamilton, son-in-law to Schuyler and surrogate son to George Washington, was helplessly caught in the middle. This invigorating narrative vividly depicts New York City when it was the nation’s seat of government. Susan Nagel captures the spirit, speech, and sensibility of the era in full and entertaining form—and readers will get to know the city’s eighteenth-century movers, shakers, and power brokers, who are as colorful and fascinating as their counterparts today. Delicious political intrigue and scandalous gossip between the three competing alpha personalities—George Washington, Philip Schuyler, and Alexander Hamilton—make this a powerful and resonant history, reminding us that our Founding Fathers were brilliant but often flawed human beings. They were avaricious, passionate, and visionary. They loved, hated, sacrificed, and aspired. Even their most vicious qualities are part of the reason why, for better or worse, the United States became the premier modern empire, born from figures carving their legacies into history. Not only the dramatic story of how America’s beloved first president George Washington created the nation’s capital city, Patriotism & Profit serves as timely exposé on issues facing America today, revealing the origins behind some of our nation’s most pressing problems.