For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748-1760

Lewis ( The Guns of Cedar Creek ) examines young George Washington as a figure illustrating the tension in the developing American character: the aristocratic ideals of the East Coast vs. the action-oriented pull of the West. Depicting early Easterners as valuing status and Westerners as drawn to change, Lewis suggests that Washington's work as surveyor of lands west of the Blue Ridge mountains, begun in 1748, altered his earlier goals of patterning himself on the English aristocratic tradition. While Lewis's negative assessment of Washington's ethnocentricity and treatment of land as a commercial commodity seems reductive and excessively colored by today's accepted moral views, his portrait successfully demonstrates the actions and events at play in his subject's evolution into an archetypal American. (Feb.)