A History of the American People: The Founding of the Government (3)

Washington felt very keenly the sharp power of the hot criticism to which his course towards France had subjected him. It was a heady current to stem. Unmeasured abuse beat upon him. He seemed for a little the leader of a party, and of a minority party at that, instead of the leader of the nation. He was made to seem for a time nothing but a Federalist, the head of a party which meant to make the federal government the people’s master and then use its mastery to serve England, whom they hated, and to humiliate France, whom they loved. —from Chapter III: “A Nation in the Making” Before he served as the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921, before he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, THOMAS WOODROW WILSON (1856–1924) was a lawyer and an academic: a university professor of history and politics, and president of Princeton University. It was during his tenure at Princeton that he penned this five-volume history of the United States, and it reflects many of the biases he later brought to national politics, from racial prejudice to anti-immigration attitudes. In Volume III, Wilson delves into the expansion of the United States in the early 19th century in the western frontiers, tells the story of the founding and development of the federal government in the first quarter century of its existence, and explores contentious tariff matters and other divisive issues that challenged the new nation in its early years. Appendices feature the full text of the 1783 Treaty of Peace with England, the 1787 ordinance for the government of the Northwest Territory, the 1787 Constitution of the United States, the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, and the Virginia Resolutions of 1798. This beautiful replica of the 1902 first edition features all the original halftone illustrations. Students of Wilson and of the ever-changing lens through which history is told and retold will find this an enlightening and illuminating work.