The national government under the Federal Constitution effectively began its reign on April 6, 1789, as an invisible and unremarkable presence in the lives of most ordinary Americans.[1] The army boasted about 750 men stationed mainly on the western frontier, there were no national buildings, roads or even construction sites, while few federal bureaucrats and […]
History is frequently more complicated than it initially appears, and accordingly, it may be surprising to discover that when George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States, he was constitutionally ineligible for office. Similarly, when John Adams became the first Vice President nine days earlier, he too was constitutionally ineligible for […]
On Friday morning, December 30, 1792, Archibald Robertson, an ambitious painter from Aberdeen, Scotland, arrived at the doorstep of the executive mansion at Philadelphia.[1] David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan, entrusted him to deliver a wooden box to President George Washington.[2] Yet this was no ordinary box and Robertson’s call no ordinary visit. For […]
Scholars typically cast the outcome of the second presidential election as either a forgone conclusion or a non-event.[1] After all, George Washington ran unchallenged and once again received unanimous support from the Electoral College.[2] Shifting academic focus from the first magistrate to the second, however, reframes the 1792 contest as a struggle for the soul […]
After seven years of fighting in the Revolutionary War, Otho Holland Williams returned home. It was the Spring of 1782. When he left Frederick, Maryland, in 1775 he was the first lieutenant in a company of riflemen; now he was back from a long campaign in the Carolinas and was receiving a commission as a […]
There are many, many founding fathers in the story of America’s Revolution and unfortunately only a few are really known to the general public. Yet without those who are less known, there would have been no revolution. One of those men was the official secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson. He was the sole […]
In the fall of 1796, just months before George Washington’s presidency ended, thirty-six-year-old Revolutionary War veteran Johnson Cook (1760-1848), a Connecticut native, petitioned the president for financial assistance and entreated him to spare Cook from living out his final days “neglected.” In his two-page manuscript letter to Washington, written on October 1, 1796, from Marietta […]
BOOK REVIEW: Ill-Fated Frontier: Peril and Possibilities in the Early American West by Samuel A. Forman (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2021) Samuel A. Forman, author of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty, was asked if he was related to Samuel S. Forman, who chronicled a trek to the western […]
The Whiskey Rebellion often falls into the background of the Federalist Era, overshadowed by the rise of a divisive two-party political system. This armed uprising in 1794, over taxation by the fledgling new government, threatened to destroy the new union within six years of the Constitution’s ratification. Regardless of the outcome of the military confrontation, […]
On the morning of Saturday, July 14, 1804 the funeral cortège for Alexander Hamilton proceeded northward to Trinity Church where the former Revolutionary War officer and treasury secretary would be interred. Fittingly there was a substantial turnout; in addition to family, friends and the curious public were members of the Society of the Cincinnati, the […]
Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency edited by Ben Lowe (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2021) In Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency, historian Ben Lowe of Florida Atlantic University has assembled an attractive collection of scholarly essays that began as presentations to the university’s 2019 Alan B. and […]
The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution by Lindsay M. Chervinsky (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2020) In his slim volume on George Washington’s presidency, Forrest McDonald concluded that Washington had actually “done little in his own right, had often opposed the best measures of his subordinates, and had taken […]
On the afternoon of April 30, 1789, George Washington stepped onto the balcony of the freshly-renovated and renamed Federal Hall on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan and took the presidential oath of office. Then, stepping into the Senate chamber, now-President Washington gave his inaugural address. He began plaintively, admitting in his opening line that “Among […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews White House historian and author Lindsay M. Chervinsky about her new book on George Washington and the creation of the Cabinet of the United States. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is a free podcast that puts […]
In 1813, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from Marguerite Brazier Bonneville, a French emigre and Thomas Paine’s former caretaker. Bonneville asked the former president if she could publish Paine and Jefferson’s correspondence. Paine had left most of his estate including all of his personal papers to her in his will when he died in 1809. […]
