For king and country

For King and Country is a portrait of an ordinary young man enmeshed in extraordinary events: the young George Washington caught up, and striving to excel, amid the bitter rivalry between the French and British for control of the American colonial frontier in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing heavily on Washington's own diaries, letters, and dispatches, the author follows the future president's remarkable rise from a callow young man with no inheritance, no trade, and few prospects to the respected commander-in-chief of the military forces of British America's foremost colony. The book reveals that this progress was not preordained by Washington's steadily growing qualities of leadership, courage, and devotion to liberty and justice but also involved conniving, conspiracy, fawning on superiors, badmouthing subordinates, covering up disastrous mistakes, and the occasional outright lie. The author also details the things Washington should have known but did not - about the frontier, the Indian traders, the French, and especially the Native Americans who were essential to his purposes. Previous biographies of Washington have focused primarily on his revolutionary and presidential years and have glossed over the contradictions and shortcomings of Washington's youth, tending to present him as a flawless paragon practically from birth. For King and Country shows clearly and in unprecedented detail that Washington struggled constantly, as all men do, with his own limitations and flaws. The greatness he achieved in later life shines all the brighter when we learn that in his early years he consistently failed to achieve it.