The Grand Idea

Joel Achenbach. The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Achenbach rightly notes that historians have generally paid little attention to the western trip George Washington took in 1784 for the purposes of visiting his own western properties and determining the viability of using the Potomac as the western highway for commerce between the Eastern seaboard and the trans-Allegheny West. The result is a very readable account that brings the flesh-and-blood George Washington to life, but largely fails to make the case that this little-remembered trip was as important as Achenbach claims.

He is correct that Washington's concerns regarding communication and commerce with the West were deeply felt and played an important role in events ultimately leading to the Constitutional Convention. For general readers, the connection between concerns about the fragile new nation in the post-Revolutionary age and what were then called internal improvements are surely interesting. And there is real poetry in Achenbach's account of how Washington's "grand idea" would eventually diminish in scale with the Louisiana Purchase and further westward expansion and exploration. Within a few short years after his death, Washington's vision would seem provincial and quaint, even as the Potomac faded from his notion of a 'national' waterway to a mere Eastern seaboard river.

However, there is very little substance underlying these insights; it may be that the reason historians had paid little attention to Washington's westward trip was simply due to the fact that it mattered not very much in the long run. Even his own book suggests that Washington's mind was already made up about the potential the Potomac had as the basis of a trans-Allegheny waterway. In fairness, as a work of popular history--one which does shed a little more light on the character and personality of our first President--this book delivers the goods.