The relentless pursuit of Judge by the Washingtons after her bold flight from the new US capital in Philadelphia is expertly told by Dunbar.Ģ. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017)ĭunbar’s important book is less a biography of George Washington, Martha Washington, or Ona Judge, the runaway enslaved woman whom the first couple made such extraordinary efforts to recapture, than a look into the power and privilege of a slaveholding elite forcing its way through a new republic rhetorically committed to liberty. They are a mix of biographies, memoirs and reportage which, taken together, represent some of the best writings by and about the small group of powerful people who have occupied the White House.ġ. Of the many works that I have found useful in thinking about the history of the US presidency and for writing my newest book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama, these 10 have been among the most helpful. Nevertheless, they probably could not have guessed that the hard lessons that they had learned about the fragility of democracy would be so fiercely resisted or blithely ignored more than two centuries after they beseeched a patrician general from the Virginia countryside to preside over their fledgling experiment in government by the people. If the founding fathers meant to circumscribe the power of the presidency out of a well-founded fear of kingly abuses, then they would surely comprehend the creeping threat that authoritarianism and political extremism present to the US system of government today. Is the US presidency – indeed, American democracy – equal to the dire challenges of the 21st century? One could certainly argue that it isn’t, based on the ongoing bungling of the Covid-19 response, the horrifying (and presidentially inspired) insurrection of 6 January 2021 and the glacially slow and fickle efforts to address everything from climate change to widening social inequality. Through civil war, economic catastrophes, foreign misadventures, social upheavals and plagues, the presidency has endured, but it – and the 45 men who have occupied the job – has been moulded and often humbled by the promise and perils of the office. The architects of the new republic meant for the president to preside over a citizenry well-endowed with rights, not to rule over cowed subjects.Ĭhief executives from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have been sorely tested by both the responsibilities and the limitations of the country’s highest, loneliest office. Born of Enlightenment theory, settler colonialism and 18th-century warfare, the US constitution gave the chief executive primarily an enforcement role, with the authority to lead armed forces in the event of foreign encroachment or domestic unrest but stripped of the capacity to legislate or issue judicial decisions.

T he US presidency was supposed to be something different, something novel, compared with the fossilised monarchical rule that it supplanted after the American revolution.

Books about us history