| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West. By Joel Achenbach. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. 367 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-684-84857-0.)
The "Grand Idea" of the title is George Washington's persistent dream of opening the Potomac River to navigation and thereby securing political and commercial ties with the West. Just months after resigning his commission as commander of the Continental Army, Washington set off to inspect his western properties and search for routes that would link the upper reaches of the Potomac to the transmontane West. Joel Achenbach crafts a narrative of this arduous trip to explain the centrality of westward expansion to Washington's vision of an independent United States.	1
In the midst of the journey, Washington confronted the modest farmers who had set tled on land to which he claimed title. "This dispute," Achenbach says, "was, in miniature, the conflict of the continent: Who owned the Land? ... Who had power in this young republic?" (p. 87). Washington's eventual legal victory did little to reconcile the perceived squatter and the perceived speculator. On his return, an undaunted Washington sought the collective support required for the ambitious engineering project of opening the river. The Virginia legislature chartered a company for the purpose, and Washington became its first president, but the scarcity of capital and skilled labor limited progress.	. . .

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