*Washington: A Life*, by Ron Chernow

When the news from Boston reached Mount Vernon around New Year's Day, Washington deplored the methods of the tea party, even if he loathed the tax on tea.  It was the next step in a fast-unfolding drama that would fully radicalize him.  The administration of the bluff, portly Lord North had decided that Boston should pay for the destroyed tea and that Parliament should assert its supremacy, cracking down on harebrained schemes of independence now beginning to ferment in the colonies…the tea party convinced many British sympathizers that colonial protestors had become a violent rabble who had to pay a steep price for their inexcusable crimes.

I read only a few hundred pages of this book.  The level of quality is high, but I find Alexander Hamilton's life much more interesting.  This book does have an especially good discussion of Washington's contradictory attitudes and behavior toward his slaves.

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