Product Description

This book brings together--for the first time--the details of Washington's 45-year campaign to build and perfect Mount Vernon. Here we meet the planter/patriot who also loved building, a man passionately committed to impressing the stamp of his character and personal beliefs on the physical world around him. Architecturally, as the authors show, Mount Vernon blends the orthodox and the innovative in surprising ways, just as the new American nation would. Equally interesting is the light their book sheds on the process of building at Mount Vernon, and on the people--enslaved and free--who did the work. Washington was a demanding master, and his workers often clashed with him. Yet, as the Dalzells argue, that experience played a vital role in shaping his hopes for the future of the nation--hopes that embraced the full promise of the American Revolution.

George Washington's Mount Vernon thus compellingly combines the two sides of our first President's life, the public and the private, and uses this combination to enrich our understanding of both. Gracefully written, and with more than 80 photographs, maps, and engravings, it tells a fascinating story with memorable insight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84748 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Inheriting Mount Vernon in 1754 at the age of 22, George Washington called it home for the remaining 45 years of his life. Even amid the turmoil of the Revolution, he spent most of this time busily expanding and remodeling the house on the Potomac a few miles south of what became the District of Columbia. Here he was neither general nor statesman, but paterfamilias and gentleman planter. Washington left no formal memoir of either his public or private life, but Robert Dalzell and his wife Lee (respectively, a professor of history and a reference librarian at Williams College) find Washington's personal history writ large in the home he loved so much. Rich in detail mined from Washington's personal papers, this beautifully illustrated volume chronicles not only the architectural facts of Mount Vernon (a house that "mixes its classicism with some decidedly nontraditional elements"), but also the human ones, most especially Washington's complicated relationships with his slaves, all of whom he instructed to be freed in his last will and testament, thereby breaking (if posthumously) with "the system that had so long held his own independence hostage to the denial of liberty to other human beings." The Dalzells fail in their attempt to force an unlikely analogy between Washington's evolution as a political thinker and the concurrent architectural evolution of his mansion, but they nevertheless provide a superb history?including ample notes and an appendix on 18th-century house-building techniques?of Mount Vernon as a place and Washington as proprietor. Photos, illustrations and blueprints.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Americans seem to view historical sites either as patriotic shrines or mere vacation locales. Seldom have places such as George Washington's home at Mount Vernon been analyzed for a deeper understanding of the past. The authors use Mount Vernon to present readers with a course in Colonial and early national history. Robert F. Dalzell Jr. (history, Williams Coll.) and Lee Baldwin Dalzell (head reference librarian, Williams Coll.) accomplish a fine balancing act, integrating the story of George Washington's home with the public and private life of its longtime occupant. Mount Vernon became significant as the residence of the famed planter, general, and president?albeit with long periods of absence?but also due to his taking personal responsibility for altering and expanding the mansion. Without being overly mechanistic, the Dalzells portray Mount Vernon as a sort of metaphor for the changes in Washington's own life and career. This approach necessitates considerable attention to the social, political, and architectural context of Washington's time and provides significant insight. For larger public and academic libraries.?Charles K. Piehl, Mankato State Univ., MN
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
If the homes of the rich and famous tend to be extensions of their self-perceptions as well as revelations of their flaws, then there is much to be learned by examining the abodes of our Founding Fathers. Certainly, Jefferson's Monticello captured his optimism and questing spirit, and its construction by slave labor indicates the tragic paradox of the man. Robert Dalzell is professor of American history at Williams College, and Lee Dalzell heads the Reference Department of the Williams College Library. In this ambitious and generally engrossing survey, they have attempted to link Washington's family home and plantation with his political evolution from an aristocratic republican to a politician whose vague democratic sentiments allowed him to keep Alexander Hamilton's elitist plans at bay. This is part family history, part biography, and part travelogue. The Dalzells are skillful writers and researchers who fluidly mesh the parts, although some scholars will undoubtedly question a few of their conclusions. Jay Freeman

Customer Reviews

This book enriches our understanding of Washington.
Mount Vernon was both architecturally innovative and a true mirror of Washington's feelings and mind. He never wrote an autobiography and his diaries consist largely of farm accounts, but in Mount Vernon, the authors write, "he produced a text from which it is possible to coax a remarkably full sense of his political convictions and of how, over time, they changed." The book, George Washington's Mount Vernon, combines the public and the private sides of his life and uses the combination to enrich our understanding of both.

Washington understood as an architect for democracy
For an Architect practicing in any era since Monticello was built, it has always been easy to enter into Jefferson's process--to commune with the models and the methods he sat down with as he designed (time and again) the house that he built as a monument to his ideas and his place in history. In part, this has been because he planned and drew much as we do today. We have the drawings. We know (and can quickly avert our eyes from) the form of labor. We can hold these two-dimensional maps up to the brilliant artifact, and be satisfied, with ourselves, that we have made a connection to the past. Mount Vernon, however, has had to wait for the Dalzells to read, for us, the full and fully three-dimensional process of its becoming. This beautifully written book brings to George Washington's home, a context of meaning and National symbolism that time and distance had almost obliterated. The book is a restoration project: and as such, it is a key compliment to the preservation work so ably executed over the years by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. I heartily recommend this book to architects (amateur and professional), their clients (who may find comfort in learning that building has always been a trial), architectural historians, or anyone at all who is curious about the faithfulness of our democracy to the designs of one of its primary draftsmen.

A Successful Mix
Knowing Professor Dalzell and Mrs. Dalzell personally, I was incredibly curious to see how they blended the two seemingly connected but perhaps contrasting topics of George Washington and his home. Essentially, they were connected very successfully. The entire history of the home itself is told vividly with photographs, anecdotes, and objective descriptions of its development. Following, Washington's own personal, military, and political history is told in light of the times, and in the book's shining ability, in relation to the home itself. The Dalzell's cleverly-melded arguments and discussions leads the reader to a full knowledge of Mt. Vernon and its inspiring owner.