Nathaniel Philbrick - Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy

I like to probe the darkness at the edges of our nations history. Instead of the triumphs, Im most interested in the struggle. Whether its the twenty crew members of a whaleship thats just been rammed by a whale or a group of religious refugees left on an unfamiliar coast by an old leaky ship called the Mayflower, Im compelled to explore what happens to people in the worst of times, especially when it comes to issues of leadership.

Given my predilection for mayhem and moral ambiguity, I had, until about ten years ago, little interest in George Washington. What could be more boring than a stuffed shirt known as the father of his country? Then I started to write a book about Boston in the American Revolution.

The story was going just fine through the Battle of Bunker Hill; there was plenty of torment and suffering as the incredible pressures of a revolution descended on the citizens of Boston. But then, a few weeks after that epic confrontation on a hill in Charlestown, a new commander of the American forces showed up: George Washington. This was not the stern old man who stares at us from the one-dollar bill; this was a surprisingly young and aggressive leader with reddish-brown hair and a need to prove himself after a checkered career as a provincial officer in the Seven Years War. How was someone so impulsive and inexperienced going to evolve into the leader who won the Revolutionary War? I needed to find out what happened to Washington next, and two more books were the result.

By the end of my American Revolution trilogy, I had come to realize that Washington did not win the war so much as endure an eight-year ordeal that would have destroyed just about anyone else. In the early years of the conflict, hed been repeatedly second-guessed by the Continental Congress, even though that legislative body proved powerless to provide the food and supplies his army desperately needed. After the entry of France into the war, Washington spent three frustrating years pleading with his obstinate ally to provide the naval support that ultimately made possible the victory at Yorktown. And then, in the months before the evacuation of the British from New York City, Washington was forced to confront a group of his own officers who threatened to march on Philadelphia and demand their pay at gunpoint. By persuading his officers to remain at their encampment on the Hudson River, Washington prevented the military coup that would have destroyed the Republic at its birth. When he surrendered his generals commission to Congress in 1783, Washington did not declare, Mission accomplished. He knew that an even greater challengeestablishing a lasting government that fulfilled the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independencelay ahead. Once again I needed to find out what happened to Washington next, never suspecting he would lead me into a world as fraught and contentious as our own.

By the time I finished my third book about the Revolutionary War, I was desperate for a change. For more than thirty years my wife, Melissa, and I had lived on Nantucket, an island thirty miles off the coast of southern New England. It was on Nantucket, once the whaling capital of the world, that I, an English major in college, had first fallen in love with history. But now, ten books later, the island that had served as my conduit into Americas past was beginning to feel isolated and cut off from the giant land to the west.

I had grown up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where (thanks to summer vacations at my grandparents house on Cape Cod) Id developed an improbable love of sailing. Being effectively landlocked meant that I needed to travel just to find a place to sail. First there was the little lake about an hour outside Pittsburgh. By the time I turned eighteen, I was car-topping my Sunfish to races all over the country. I loved the sailing, but I also loved the drivingthe interstates, the back roads, and especially the maps.