The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2: Commander in Chief of the American Forces During the War: Which Established the Independence of His Country and First: President of the United States

John Marshall's monumental biography, written in the first decade of the 19th century, offers an intimate portrait of the man who became America. Marshall, who would later serve three decades as Chief Justice, composed this five-volume work with access to Washington's correspondence and with memories still fresh from the Revolutionary generation. This second volume traces Washington's transformation from Virginia planter to Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, through the desperate winters at Valley Forge, the strategic victories at Trenton and Yorktown, and finally to his reluctant acceptance of presidential power. The prose carries the measured gravity of early Republican prose, formal, moralistic, sometimes grand, occasionally dry, but it illuminates Washington's character with an authority no later biographer can match. Here Washington is not yet the marble monument of popular memory but a flesh-and-blood commander wrestling with incompetent officers, mutinous troops, indifferent politicians, and the crushing weight of a nation's survival. For readers who want to understand how the Revolutionary generation understood its greatest figure, and how early American historians crafted the founding narrative, Marshall remains indispensable.