Volume 46, Number 17 · November 4, 1999
Washington the Liberator
By Eric L. McKitrick
George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America
by Robert F. Dalzell Jr., by Lee Baldwin Dalzell
Oxford University Press, 300 pp., $30.00
George Washington's Mount Vernon, the husband-and-wife collaboration of Robert and Lee Dalzell, is a lovely book. It ought to be widely read and generally praised, but it may not be, inasmuch as its title—the only title it could possibly have—unavoidably sends all the wrong signals. It looks like a specialized monograph well outside the mainstream of general interest, a book about a house. But this is deceptive; it's a great deal more, and is as much about the builder, the foremost Founding Father, as about his house. There are insights in it about the character of George Washington that don't emerge from the rest of the Washington literature, vast as the corpus is, because they aren't to be perceived except with refer-ence to a specific place from which Washington was absent for long periods on those occasions which established his primary claim on the nation's memory.
Review, 2501 words
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