Volume 5 covers the first half of 1790 and focuses on Washington's continued concentration on the problems facing the new government. North Carolina had ratified the Constitution in late 1789, and Rhode Island held its ratifying convention in early 1790. Many documents in this volume reflect the president's concern with the establishment of ties to the federal government in both states, especially in the matter of appointments to the federal civil service. Also treated in detail in the volume are Washington's near-fatal illness in May 1790 and his difficult recovery. The heavy incoming...

During the period covered by volume 6, Washington's attention was devoted to several matters of great national significance. He signed the Residence and Funding Acts, authorizing a permanent new Federal City on the Potomac, establishing the seat of the federal government at Philadelphia until 1800, and creating a national debt by assuming the Revolutinary War debts of the states. Washington's official correspondence also shows his concern with Indian affairs, particularly his frustration with Brigadier General Josiah Harmar's punitive expedition in the Northwest Territory. Secretary of War...

Volume 7 documents the dramatic events of the New York campaign and the ensuing New Jersey campaign, a seemingly endless string of American reverses and retreats terminated by surprising victories at Trenton and Princeton. The volume opens with Washington's withdrawal of most of his army from Manhattan Island north to White Plains, where on 28 October British and Hessian troops routed the American right wing on Chatterton hill. Although Washington subsequently succeeded in blocking any further British advance to the north, his indecisiveness about ordering the evacuation of Fort...

The extensive correspondence regarding Shays' Rebellion and widespread alarm over the state of the Union continues in this volume, and there are the usual letters numbering in the hundreds which deal with his more personal concerns: farm and family, slave and tenant, tradesman and artisan. But the main focus of this volume is the Federal Convention in the summer of 1787 and the fight for ratification of the Constitution beginning in the fall of 1787. About these and other matters of importance Washington wrote to and heard from such Americans as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James...

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...

Volume 7 of the series presents documents written during the final sessions of the First Congress, a period of intense activity for Washington and his administration. Between December 1790 and March 1791, Congress passed legislation that established a national bank and a dederal excise, incresed the size of the army, and provided for the admission of Vermont. Filling the offices created by these and other acts occupied much of Washington's attention; the excise service alone was one of the largest bureaucracies created during the Early Republic. The Indian war on the northwest frontier...

In the early months of 1798, Washington's correspondence relates mostly to such private concerns as the management of his Mount Vernon estate, his tenants in Virginia, his lands in the West and in Pennsylvania, and the education of Washington Parke Custis and the marriage of Nelly Custis, but he continues to correspond with friends and strangers, the low and the mighty, throughout America and abroad. By late spring James Monroe's attacks and the furor over the XYZ affair are drawing Washington back into the political arena. The letters in the latter part of this volume are in large part...

Volume 8 documents Washington's first winter at Morristown. Situated in the hills of north central New Jersey, Morristown offered protection against the British army headquarters in New York City yet enabled Washington to annoy the principal enemy outposts at Newark, Perth Amboy, and New Brunswick. To discover Howe's intentions for the next campaign, Washington refined his intelligence-gathering network in New Jersey and New York during the winter months and kept a watchful, if distant, eye on the British armies in Rhode Island and Canada.

Most of the remainder of Washington's time...

n the period covered by volume 8 of the Presidential Series, the spring and summer of 1791, Washington completed a tour of the southern states, traveling almost 2,000 miles through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. During his journey the heads of executive departments regularly reported to him from Philadelphia on preparations for a major military expedition against hostile Indian nations along the northwestern frontier, a boundary dispute with the British on Lake Champlain, the negotiation of American loans in Amsterdam, and other affairs of state. Washington was also informed of the...

Volume 9 covers the spring of 1777, a period when Washington's resourcefulness and perseverance were tested as much as at any time during the war. Instead of opening the new campaign by taking the field with a reinvigorated Continental army as planned, Washington was obliged to spend much of his time pleading with state authorities to fill their recruiting quotas and with officers to bring in the men whom they had enlisted. He was further hampered by a high desertion rate, which he blamed on the failure of many officers to pay their men regularly.

Painfully aware of the weakness of...