Although the framers gave the president little authority, Washington knew whatever he did would set precedents for generations of his successors. To ensure their ability to defend the nation, he simply ignored the Constitution when he thought it necessary and reshaped the presidency into what James Madison called a “monarchical presidency.” Modern scholars call it the “imperial presidency.”

A revealing new look at the birth of American government, “Mr. President” describes George Washington’s assumption of office in a time of continual crisis, as riots, rebellion, internecine warfare, and attacks by foreign enemies threatened to destroy the new nation. Drawing on rare documents and letters, Unger shows how Washington combined political cunning, daring, and sheer genius to seize ever-widening powers to solve each crisis.

In a series of brilliant but unconstitutional maneuvers, Washington forced Congress to cede control of the four pillars of executive power: war, finance, foreign affairs, and law enforcement. Then, in the absence of Congress, he sent troops to fight Indian wars, crush tax revolts, and put down threats of secession by three states.

Constantly weighing preservation of the Union against preservation of individual liberties and states’ rights, Washington assumed more power with each crisis. Often only a breath away from reestablishing the tyranny he pledged to destroy in the Revolutionary War, he imposed law and order across the land while ensuring individual freedom and self-government.

On Thursday, December 16, 1773, an estimated seven dozen men, many amateurishly disguised as Indians–then a symbol of freedom–dumped about +u10,000 worth of tea in the harbor. Whatever their motives at the time, they unleashed a social, political, and economic firestorm that would culminate in the Declaration of Independence two and a half years later.

The Boston Tea Party provoked a reign of terror in Boston and other American cities, as Americans began inflicting unimaginable barbarities on each other. Tea parties erupted up and down the colonies. The turmoil stripped tens of thousands of Americans of their dignity, their homes, their properties, and their birthrights–in the name of liberty and independence. Nearly 100,000 Americans left the land of their forefathers forever in what was history’s largest exodus of Americans from America. Nonetheless, John Adams called the Boston Tea Party nothing short of “magnificent.” And he went on to say that the “destruction of tea is so bold, so daring, so firm…it must have important consequences.”

Ironically, few if any Americans today–even those who call themselves Tea Party Patriots–would be able to name even one of the estimated eighty participants in the original Boston Tea Party. Nor are many Americans aware of the “important consequences” of the Tea Party. The acute shortage of tea that followed the Tea Party, of course, helped transform Americans into coffee drinkers, but its effects went far beyond culinary tastes.

The Tea Party would affect so many American minds, hearts, and souls that it helped spawn a new, independent nation whose citizens would govern themselves.

A gripping, often startling biography of the Founding Father of an America that other Founding Fathers forgot–an America of women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers, indentured workers, the poor, the mentally ill, and war veterans

Ninety percent of Americans could not vote and did not enjoy rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness when our Founding Fathers proclaimed, “all men are created equal.” Alone among those who signed the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush heard the cries of those other, deprived Americans and stepped forth as the nation’s first great humanitarian and social reformer.

Remembered primarily as America’s leading, most influential physician, Rush led the Founding Fathers in calling for abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, improved medical care for injured troops, free health care for the poor, slum clearance, citywide sanitation, an end to child labor, free universal public education, humane treatment and therapy for the mentally ill, prison reform, and an end to capital punishment.

Using archival material from Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Philadelphia, as well as significant new materials from Rush’s descendants and historical societies, Harlow Giles Unger’s new biography restores Benjamin Rush to his rightful place in American history as the Founding Father of modern American medical care and psychiatry.

A compelling new biography of America’s most powerful Speaker of the House, who held the divided nation together for three decades and who was Lincoln’s guiding light

In a little known chapter of early American history, a fearless Kentucky lawyer rids Congress of corruption and violence in an era when congressmen debated with bullets as well as ballots. Harlow Giles Unger reveals how Henry Clay, the youngest congressman ever elected Speaker of the House, rewrote congressional rules and established the Speaker as the most powerful elected official after the president.

During five decades of public service–as congressman, senator, secretary of state, and four-time presidential candidate–Clay produced historic compromises that postponed civil war for fifty years. Lincoln called Clay “the man for whom I fought all my life.”

An action-packed narrative history, Henry Clay is the story of one of the most courageous congressmen in American history.

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was an eighteenth-century French inventor, famed playwright, and upstart near-aristocrat in the court of King Louis XVI. In 1776, he conceived an audacious plan to send aid to the American rebels. What’s more, he convinced the king to bankroll the project, and singlehandedly carried it out. By war’s end, he had supplied Washington’s army with most of its weapons and powder, though he was never paid or acknowledged by the United States.
To some, he was a dashing hero-a towering intellect who saved the American Revolution. To others, he was pure rogue-a double-dealing adventurer who stopped at nothing to advance his fame and fortune. In fact, he was both, and more: an advisor to kings, an arms dealer, and author of some of the most enduring works of the stage, including The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville.

He was a rich, powerful aristocrat, a merchant king who loved English culture and fashion, and, above all, he was a loyal British subject with ambitions of a lordship and a grand retirement estate in England. There simply was no doubt about it: John Hancock was the least likely man in Boston to start a rebellion. How, then, did this Tory patrician become one of the staunchest supporters of the American Revolution?
John Hancock’s overnight transformation from British loyalist to fiery rebel and first governor of the independent state of Massachusetts is one of the least known stories of the American Revolution. Acclaimed author Harlow Giles Unger introduces us to the Founding Father whose name is as recognizable as George Washington’s, but whose thrilling life story is all but untold. Applying his historical expertise and storytelling gift, Unger details the fascinating life of one of our most extraordinary business and political leaders-the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.
As Unger reveals in this unflinching portrait, Hancock was one of the most paradoxical figures of his time. A brilliant orator, he combines his wealth and political skills to unite Boston’s merchant and working classes into an armed might that forced Britain’s vaunted professional army to evacuate Boston, assuring the success of the Revolution.

A soul-stirring biography of John Marshall, the young Republic’s great chief justice who led the Supreme Court to power and brought law and order to the nation

In the political turmoil that convulsed America after George Washington’s death, the surviving Founding Fathers went mad–literally pummeling each other in Congress and challenging one another to deadly duels in their quest for power. Out of the political intrigue, one man emerged to restore calm and dignity to the government: John Marshall. The longest-serving chief justice in American history, Marshall transformed the Supreme Court from an irrelevant appeals court into the powerful and controversial branch of government that Americans today either revere or despise.

Drawing on rare documents, Harlow Giles Unger shows how, with nine key decisions, Marshall rewrote the Constitution, reshaped government, and prevented Thomas Jefferson from turning tyrant. John Adams called his appointment of Marshall to chief justice his greatest gift to the nation and “the pride of my life.”

He fought for Washington, served with Lincoln, witnessed Bunker Hill, and sounded the clarion against slavery on the eve of the Civil War. He negotiated an end to the War of 1812, engineered the annexation of Florida, and won the Supreme Court decision that freed the African captives of La Amistad. He served his nation as minister to six countries, secretary of state, senator, congressman, and president.

John Quincy Adams was all of these things and more. In this masterful biography, award-winning author Harlow Giles Unger reveals Adams as a towering figure in the nation’s formative years and one of the most courageous figures in American history–which is why he ranked first in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage.

For this magisterial biography, Unger makes use of a little-known national treasure: John Quincy Adams’ diary, started at age ten, giving us an eye-witness account of sixty-five years of critical American history.

In this gripping biography, acclaimed author Harlow Giles Unger paints an intimate portrait of the heroic young French soldier who, at nineteen, renounced a life of luxury in Paris and Versailles to fight and bleed for liberty-at Brandywine, Valley Forge, and Yorktown. A major general in the Continental army, he quickly earned the love of his troops, his fellow commanders, and his commander in chief, George Washington, who called him his “adopted son.”
Unger follows Lafayette from the battlefields of North America to the palace of Versailles, where the marquis won the most stunning diplomatic victory in world history-convincing the French court to send the huge military and naval force needed to win American independence. He then returned to America to lead the remarkable guerrilla campaign in Virginia that climaxed with British surrender at Yorktown.
Lafayette’s triumph turned to tragedy, however, when he tried to introduce American democracy in his native land. His quest for a constitutional monarchy unwittingly set off the French Revolution and plunged Europe into more than a decade of slaughter and war. Declared an enemy of the state, Lafayette fled France only to be imprisoned for five years in an Austrian dungeon, while his wife, Adrienne, and her family festered in prison, awaiting the cruel blade of the guillotine.

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War. Henry was one of the towering figures of the nation’s formative years and perhaps the greatest orator in American history.

To this day, many Americans misunderstand what Patrick Henry’s cry for “liberty or death” meant to him and to his tens of thousands of devoted followers in Virginia. A prototype of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American frontiersman, Henry claimed individual liberties as a “natural right” to live free of “the tyranny of rulers”–American as well as British. Henry believed that individual rights were more secure in small republics than in large republics, which many of the other Founding Fathers hoped to create after the Revolution.

Henry was one of the most important and colorful of our Founding Fathers–a driving force behind three of the most important events in American history: the War of Independence, the enactment of the Bill of Rights, and, tragically, as America’s first important proponent of state’s rights, the Civil War.

This biography is history at its best, telling a story both human and philosophical. As Unger points out, Henry’s words continue to echo across America and inspire millions to fight government intrusion in their daily lives.