For readers of Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life and Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming, award-winning historian Brady J. Crytzer delivers a fast-paced account of George Washington as never seen before: an embattled, untested president confronting five crises that threatened the young United States as he forged the powers of the commander in chief and secured the nation’s future.

The year 1748. Sixteen-year-old surveyor George Washington crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains into a wilderness claimed by Indigenous nations, European empires, and settlers answering to no one. Danger was brewing in the American West. It was only the beginning.

Four decades later, during Washington’s presidency, the country was coming apart at its frontier. Settlement. Debt. Occupation. War. Insurrection. In Commander in Chief, award-winning historian Brady J. Crytzer reveals the exasperated Washington readers have never seen, an untested president confronting five interlocking crises that brought his government to the brink.

This struggle forged federal power, secured the West, and pushed America toward continental expansion. The nearly bankrupt nation looked to western land it could neither control nor defend. Britain occupied American forts around the Great Lakes. Spain closed the Mississippi and New Orleans. Settlers defied deeds, borders, and taxes. Indigenous nations defended homelands Britain had signed away without their consent.

Two American armies marched west and were annihilated. The second suffered the deadliest defeat the US Army would ever endure at the hands of Native forces. As panic spread, Washington turned to Revolutionary War hero “Mad Anthony” Wayne to build a professional national army. Meanwhile, western Pennsylvania rebels rose against the whiskey tax and dared the government to stop them.

By 1794, Washington faced frontier war, domestic insurrection, and foreign powers waiting for an American collapse. Crytzer makes the provocative case that America’s first potential civil war was not North versus South, but sectional rupture of East versus West that would decide whether the United States survived.