Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Print this page

The Indian World of George Washington: The first president, the first Americans, and the birth of the nation by by Colin G. Calloway

by
December 2018, no. 407

The Indian World of George Washington: The first president, the first Americans, and the birth of the nation by by Colin G. Calloway

Oxford University Press, $53.95 hb, 640 pp, 9780190652166

The Indian World of George Washington: The first president, the first Americans, and the birth of the nation by by Colin G. Calloway

by
December 2018, no. 407

As a young man, George Washington (1732–99) worked as a surveyor. Looking at a landscape, he could plan its division into orderly tracts. These skills would prove useful when he became the first president of the United States in April 1789. At the time, Americans widely believed that new territory was vital to securing ongoing independence, in large part because small parcels of land could be sold to European settlers, expanding the American polity and helping pay down crushing Revolutionary War debts. As a result, President Washington made the fledgling country’s territorial expansion his chief focus. It was a perfect fit between man and mission, between a surveyor and a country that would grow from a set of colonies perched on the east coast of North America to a continent-spanning empire. Of course, this growth was far from inevitable. What would become the United States was already inhabited by as many as a million American Indians, and expanding west beyond the Appalachian mountains would be far messier than reorganising a landscape along a surveyor’s grid.

Joshua Specht reviews 'The Indian World of George Washington: The first president, the first Americans, and the birth of the nation' by Colin G. Calloway

The Indian World of George Washington: The first president, the first Americans, and the birth of the nation

by by Colin G. Calloway

Oxford University Press, $53.95 hb, 640 pp, 9780190652166