What if George Washington was not the first president?

In today's episode, we talk about one of the Founding Fathers, and the first president of the United States: George Washington. Washington was one of the most influential presidents of the United States. He set the precedence which other American presidents would follow. Now, if we decided to take Washington out of the political picture, what would happen? Would the Union remain? Or would his replacement be able to hold onto the Union? And who would his replacement even be? There are multiple potential candidates, but which one would be the most qualified, and accepted by the American people. And what ripple would this cause throughout American history. Listen to this episode of Back to the Past: The Alternate History Podcast and find out!

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Podcast Transcript: https://kloka.org/go/althistranscripts

The following is a sample of the transcript:

So let's look back at a time period that not a lot of people would be familiar about. And that is 1789 United States of America, which we just came out of the Shades Rebellion around three years earlier in 1786, as a result of property taxes being way too high in Massachusetts. And the Shades Rebellion really showed and really highlighted the problems of the Articles of Confederation, which was a lack of a strong enough government in order to enforce taxes and commerce, for example. And that's why, for example, we see a lot of the numerator powers to commerce. And this is an example of, for example, like enumerated powers such as the Commerce Clause. And there's also the congressional ability to tax States, and they have the ability to enforce it as well. And so during this time period, the Constitution was authored by James Madison, eventually signed by every state around 1790, with the exception of Vermont, which is a special case because it actually was independent during the time period the Revolutionary War. And so it would only come into the United States around 1793. So this scenario would take out Washington. Let's just say he does not get convinced to run and just says, no, I'm going to stay at home for the rest of my life. What does that bring to the table? Because Washington was a pretty big unifier and a lot of people he was the only one to do it. However, that might not be exactly true. So who do you think would be able to do? Because I'm going to go first here. So I think if we're going to look to who is able to do it, in a sense, I think there's only one realistic point of view we're going to have to have. And I think it's going to be the Federalists.