George Washington, Chapters 26-28

Somewhere in the clutter, I lost George Washington, The Indispensable Man, when I had only read less than half of it. But a few days ago I found it. It's a long book, crammed with essential stuff you can't just scan or skip, but must go back over, some of it to savor. It makes you proud, not only of Washington but of all the superstitious, cowardly, self-serving, greedy, ordinary PEOPLE who established this nation and this unique government. On the bones of the rightful owners/original inhabitants, of course. But, as the colonists' ancestors had done the dark deed of dispossession, two hundred years earlier, they thought they owned the place.

Chapters 26-28 tell about the writing and establishment of the U.S. Constitution. Unbelievable, but it happened.
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Anyway, it's a great book, by James Thomas Flexner. As the servant girl told Ripsie in China Court, "He must have all of he names." He died in the first decade of this century, just a few years short of a hundred, one of these long-lived Capricorns--if I am permitted to claim that much of a relationship. George Washington was originally a four-volume National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, and he himself boiled it down to the one-volume paperback that I'm reading. It will have taken me at least two weeks, all told, to read it, so I'll never impose it on our book club, if we continue to have a book club. Although I agree with more than one reviewer who said that every American should be required to read it.
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Abigail Adams said of Washington, "This same President has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point, that, if he was not really one of the best-intentioned men  in the world, he might be a very dangerous one. He is polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good."