THE VIRGINIA DYNASTY

An edifying introduction to the lives of four presidents of the U.S.

On Christmas night in 1776, George Washington and his Continental Army scored a much-needed victory over Hessian mercenaries, a triumph captured by German American artist Emanuel Leutze in his 1851 painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. It depicts 12 men in Washington’s boat, including an 18-year-old lieutenant named James Monroe. This dramatic moment, suggests Cheney, foreshadowed the “Virginia Dynasty” (1789-1825), during which four of the first five presidents of the U.S. hailed from the Old Dominion. According to the author, the four men—Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Monroe—who composed the Dynasty were all “children of the Enlightenment” who valued individual rights as well as slaveholders who “sensed the coming of a great conflict” over that wicked institution and thus “feared for the Union.” Yet they were different. Washington was the prototypical leader, Jefferson and Madison the “life-long students” and wordsmiths, and Monroe the diligent type who lacked the “intellectual agility” of his two immediate predecessors in office. At times they clashed: Madison and Monroe ran against each other in a congressional election, and Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe opposed the policies of Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s first secretary of the treasury. Cheney capably shows that despite these differences and disputes, the quartet helped lead to “the creation of the American nation,” and general readers will learn plenty from the text. However, the author breaks no new ground for those already familiar with the history of her principals, and her account suffers from supposition (too many instances of the phrase “may have”; “Jefferson and Madison surely took up the topic” of their health when they roomed together; “Madison, an uncommonly serious student, might have earlier been acquainted with such ideas”) and odd repetition (“at age twenty-nine, less than three months after his arrest, [Benjamin Franklin Bache] died of yellow fever at age twenty-nine”).

A flawed yet informative history of the early years of the Republic.