Series:

The Papers of George Washington: Confederation

4 total works

Cover of The Papers of George Washington Confederation Series, v.1: January-July 1784
This is part of a series which begins on 1 January 1784 with the hero of the American Revolution back at Mount Vernon under his own ""fig tree and vine"", and ends in September 1788 on the eve of his return to public life as president under the new Constitution. The Confederation Series is composed almost entirely of personal letters and includes very few official documents. Documents printed in Volume 1 reflect Washington's main concerns during the first months of peace. Many letters related directly to his resumption of the management not only of his house and farms at Mount Vernon, as well as of his tenanted land in Frederick and Berkeley counties and in Pennsylvania, but also of his vast holdings on the banks of the Great Kanawha and Ohio. Other letters deal with such things as the settlement of his military accounts, his activities as both president and determined reformer of the Society of the Cincinnati, and his preliminary notions about making the Potomac the connecting link between the East and the transmontane West.

Cover of The Papers of George Washington Confederation Series, v.2: July 1784-May 1785
This is part of a series which begins on 1 January 1784 with the hero of the American Revolution back at Mount Vernon under his own ""fig tree and vine"", and ends in September 1788 on the eve of his return to public life as president under the new Constitution. The Confederation Series is composed almost entirely of personal letters and includes very few official documents. Volume 2 documents Washington's emergence as the extraordinarily active leader of the move to open the upper reaches of the Potomac to navigation and to use it to tie the fast-settling West to the seaboard states. Besides documents relating to Washington's presidency of the Potomac River Company and to the routine managment of his private affairs, there are letters dealing with such things as the famous Spanish jacks, the plight of both Patrick Henry and Nathanael Greene, histories by Jeremy Belknap and William Gordon, Lafayette's visit, William Byrd's letters, and David Humphrey's poetry.

Cover of The Papers of George Washington Confederation Series, v.6;Confederation Series, v.6

Beginning with the decision made early in 1787 to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer, Washington's papers in volume 6 of the series reveal him as once again a public figure no longer standing outside and above the fray as he had been seeking to do with some success since leaving the army at the end of 1783. In the first nine months of this year Washington continued to give meticulous attention to his personal affairs at Mount Vernon as he had done before, but his correspondence, particularly that with James Madison, makes it clear that his overriding concern had become the ratification of the new Federal Constitution and that his mind was turning to the role he should, and must, play in establishing the new government.

Cover of The Papers of George Washington v.3; Confederation Series;May 1785-March 1786

Volume Three of the Confederation Series of The Papers of George Washington spans the year between May 1785 and April 1786, described by Washington's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman as a year of "drought and distraction." Washington spent most of these months at Mount Vernon, continuing to wrestle with the problems of restoring the plantation and his personal fortune after years of neglect while serving as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army -- efforts hampered by a long summer drought. During these months Washington was distracted by national affairs, particularly the impotence of the Confederation government, and by a constant stream of visitors. His principal concerns, however, were close to home.