This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History

This book tries to make sense of them all through a trip into the past—a bit of time travel, through the best method I know. In my journeys, I thought often of Theodore Roosevelt's early-20th-century admonition to "do what you can, with what you've got, where you are." This Land Is Your Land is an attempt to face U.S. history as it is and was in the hopes that we do what we can with it. I hope you'll join me. It's your land too.

CHAPTER 1

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

In April 1789, George Washington set off to see America. He had a good reason—maybe, in fact, the best reason anyone has ever had. The Electoral College had just chosen him unanimously as the first president of the United States. He needed to get from Virginia to New York City, the nation's capital, in time for his inauguration. To do that, he traveled through the states of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, all recently transformed from British colonies into the building blocks of a new republic. In the course of his travels, he found something interesting: He could learn things on the road that he could not discover any other way.

The inauguration went off well enough and Washington settled into life in lower Manhattan, where he was attended in lavish style by enslaved men and women transported north from his Virginia plantation. But the pull of the road remained. He worried that his cosseted life in New York made him too detached from the American people. Indeed, he worried that there was no such thing as the American people at all. Washington understood that the presidency was the one office supposed to represent the nation at large. The nation, though, barely existed. Americans had fought a war under his leadership, but not even half of the colonies' residents actively supported the rebellion. They had passed a constitution, too, but the votes for ratification had been terrifyingly close. When Washington took the oath of office, two states—Rhode Island and North Carolina—still had not approved the document. Was he their president or not? For that matter, what was the presidency? No one had ever done it before.

Washington had some ideas. One involved getting to know the country—not as an abstraction ("We the people" and all that) but as it actually existed out there on the ground, where real people lived. So in October, six months into office, he left New York for another great American journey, this time into the states of New England. Travel was not much fun in those days. Hitting the road meant assembling a team of attendants and horses for his stagecoach, then slogging along on rutted dirt roads, alternately full of dust or mud. Washington made his travel harder than it needed to be. He decided to stay in public inns and taverns rather than in the houses of rich patrons. He wanted to present himself as an American citizen, not a king or nobleman or tyrant. He also wanted to commune with ordinary Americans.

They greeted him with fireworks and parades, declamations and songs composed just for the occasion. Sometimes, their pageantry took place in the pouring rain, with Washington astride his great white charger, trying to look dignified. Though he traveled by coach, he paused near the entrance to each town so he could make a grand entrance on horseback. In addition to being a president and general, Washington was a famed equestrian; portrait painters loved to depict him on his steed. Intensely aware that politics was also theater, he tried to give his audiences what they wanted.

When he set out for New England, Washington was in his late fifties, convinced that he was likely to die sooner rather than later. He had spent the first summer of his presidency bedridden and deathly ill from an infection, a casualty of life in pestiferous New York. But he was committed to his see-America idea, so he kept going. In 1790, he made a quick jaunt up to Rhode Island, which had finally gotten around to ratifying the Constitution. He also ventured east to Long Island, which was technically part of New York but, even then, seemed to be a world unto itself. In 1791, he embarked on the biggest, longest trip of all: a tour through the sprawling lower states of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

The South was Washington's home turf. When he was not busy running a war or a constitutional convention or a would-be country, he presided over Mount Vernon, his imposing plantation on the banks of the Potomac. Still, he thought he had some things to learn about the region as a whole. First among them was whether or not the South had enough in common with the North for the country to hang together. Washington recognized that most Americans identified far more with their town or state or region than with the cobbled-together entity known as the United States. He thought that was fine, but that these United States were going to need a national sensibility too. He figured maybe he was the one thing everyone could agree upon: the great living symbol of America.

Despite all the dust and mud and wretched road cuisine, he came away heartened about the country he had been chosen to lead. He found Americans, on the whole, to be an industrious and aspirational lot, ready to take on the new role of citizen. He was not especially concerned that full citizenship and voting rights were restricted to a small sliver of the population: free, propertied, white men. That was revolutionary for its moment. Like many of his contemporaries, he worried that "faction"—differences of culture, interest, priorities—would someday pose a real problem. For now, though, he declared the nation a "great experiment"—and, thus far, a successful one. Having seen the country firsthand, he decided to settle back in at the nation's capital, which itself had been doing some moving around. In between Washington's trips, the seat of government had moved south from New York to the city of Philadelphia, where the United States of America had first been imagined into being.