8/8: THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE: Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 19 June 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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8/8: THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE: Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-George-Search-Washington-Legacy/dp/0525562176/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
When George Washington became president in 1789, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans.
In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife, Melissa, and their dog, Dora, Philbrick follows Washington’s presidential excursions: from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York; a monthlong tour of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island; a venture onto Long Island and eventually across Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batch with Nathaniel Filbert. The new book is Travels |
| 0:09.8 | with George in search of Washington and his legacy. At one point, Nat makes it clear that |
| 0:16.7 | the original travels with Charlie by Steinbach had a phrase, you don't take a trip. The trip |
| 0:21.8 | takes you while we're about to take a trip to Washington, DC. Nat, it's a swamp in the |
| 0:27.2 | summertime. It was a swamp in the 19th century literally. It was not healthy to remain in town |
| 0:33.6 | when Lincoln was in the White House because of the perfume coming from the cattle yards. However, |
| 0:41.0 | Washington wanted the seat. What is the District of Columbia? 10 by 10 miles as the capital. Why? |
| 0:48.0 | What did he see? Well, he was convinced and had been for years as his father had been before, |
| 0:56.0 | as his brother had been before him, that the Potomac was destined to be what the Erie Canal would |
| 1:05.1 | become. The waterway that would connect the American West with the East. He was just his |
| 1:14.2 | experience during the French and Indian War had confirmed it in his own mind and it seemed it |
| 1:19.6 | was in the midpoint of the country, halfway between Kittery Point and Savannah. He felt that all |
| 1:27.3 | imperatives pointed to the Potomac River. It would also happen to be just a few miles up the river |
| 1:34.3 | from Mount Vernon. He decided to not see it as an act of self-interest, but as something that was |
| 1:44.7 | essential for the good of the country. It's tough. You can accuse Washington of an insider deal here, |
| 1:54.7 | and yet I think he really felt mistakenly so because the Potomac never turned out to be the great |
| 2:00.7 | thoroughfare of trade he had hoped. But he felt this swamp at the edge of a river was where the |
| 2:11.0 | country's capital should be. Back in Philadelphia while Washington has been south, the argument is |
| 2:16.5 | deepening between Thomas Jefferson who sees himself as cautious about where the country is going |
| 2:25.0 | and worried about monarchial instincts, especially John Adams, who is affectionately called his |
| 2:31.0 | rotundity of Massachusetts. Alexander Hamilton, who has the idea of making national the debt that is |
| 2:40.4 | borne by the states and concentrating the money power in a bank. And George Washington, who wants |
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