Yep, I remember those very well. He ended up moving to my home state of South Carolina at some point after that, possibly when he was writing or doing research for his next series
about the Civil War,
North and South. It too became a mini-series, a good bit of which was filmed on location in Charleston. A friend of mine got his SAG card for having
a couple of lines in a duel scene in that, in fact.
As far as getting the nod, we would assume he or his agent just pitched it to his publisher - he had plenty of historical novels to his credit before then to, dating back to the 50's.
He could have been under contract anyway, so assuming they were up to or above his usual standard, they'd then have been printed either way. But of course, they are just historical fiction,
epic in scope like a thousand other novels -
Gone With the Wind,
Les Miserables, etc. - but not poetry, not supernatural, etc. Everything from
Johnny Tremaine to
Howard Fast's
April Morning to the stage musical
1776 had already covered this ground, with varying degrees of success. As far as a connected series of novels about grand
adventures in American history, James Fenimore Cooper had definitely done that much earlier with his Deerslayer novels (there's some actual name for those but I forget it) an I'm sure there were many others.
But of course none of the above were commissioned and paid for by the sitting leader of the nation, or feature his family members as characters, or provide scenes for
the decoration of his tomb.
Following Rome, though, I'm not sure that there have been too many cultures that consciously attempted to promote any kind of national sense of values and virtues, until the 19th and 20th
centuries when dictators - and elected officials often called dictators by their foes - began using that as a way to unite their supporters. But there are a fair number of national epics in the sense of folk tales
gathered together and considered a shared national or cultural tradition, just like
The Iliad and
The Odyssey: Beowulf, Roland, El Cid, the Arthurian and Robin Hood cycles, Sigurd/Siegfried,
the Norse Eddas (too lazy to look up the actual names of the most famous versions) etc. etc.
Note: Longfellow's
Song of Hiawatha is generally considered an American epic, in the traditional sense of poetry, mythology, and heroics. And Milton always claimed
Paradise Lost was an
epic poem about Christianity.