George Washington

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the first child of Augustine Washington and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington ^[1]. The family belonged to the colony's middling gentry: comfortable, ambitious, and dependent on tobacco cultivated by enslaved laborers. When Augustine died in 1743, eleven-year-old George inherited a modest farm and ten enslaved people, but the death ended any prospect of the English schooling his older half brothers had received ^[2].

His formal education stopped in his mid-teens. What he lacked in Latin and rhetoric he made up for in mathematics, drafting, and an early command of surveying. At sixteen he joined a party surveying the Shenandoah Valley lands of Lord Fairfax, and in 1749 he secured appointment as official surveyor of Culpeper County, a paid public office held by a seventeen-year-old ^[1]. The work took him deep into the backcountry and taught him to read terrain, a skill that later served him in war.

The half brother he most admired, Lawrence Washington, died of tuberculosis in 1752. Through Lawrence's estate George eventually gained control of Mount Vernon, the Potomac River plantation that anchored the rest of his life ^[2].

Washington's public career began with a dangerous errand. In 1753 Virginia's lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, sent the twenty-one-year-old major through winter wilderness to warn French forces out of the Ohio Country. The French declined, and Washington's published account of the journey made his name known in both Williamsburg and London ^[3].

The following year his small force clashed with a French detachment near present-day Jumonville Glen, an exchange of fire that helped ignite the French and Indian War. Weeks later he surrendered Fort Necessity, the only capitulation of his career ^[3]. In 1755 he served as an aide to General Edward Braddock and survived the disastrous ambush on the Monongahela, where two horses were shot from under him and bullets pierced his coat. Virginia rewarded him with command of its provincial regiment, and for three years he defended a raw 350-mile frontier ^[1].

Denied the royal commission he wanted, Washington resigned in 1758, married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis in January 1759, and settled into the life of a planter and member of the House of Burgesses ^[2]. British taxation policy gradually turned him against the empire he had once served. He backed nonimportation agreements after the Townshend duties, and by 1774 he was a Virginia delegate to the First Continental Congress ^[4].

In June 1775, weeks after fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress unanimously chose Washington to command the new Continental Army ^[4]. He held that command for eight and a half years without pay, keeping an underfed, underequipped force intact against the largest military Britain had ever sent abroad. He forced the British evacuation of Boston in March 1776, then absorbed punishing defeats around New York before the surprise crossings of the Delaware River produced victories at Trenton and Princeton that revived a collapsing cause ^[3].

His greatest wartime skill was endurance. The winter encampment at Valley Forge in 1777 and 1778 nearly broke the army, yet Washington held it together while Baron von Steuben retrained it. In October 1781, coordinating with French land and naval forces, he trapped General Cornwallis at Yorktown, the victory that effectively ended the war ^[4]. In December 1783 he returned his commission to Congress and went home, a resignation that astonished European observers accustomed to victorious generals seizing power ^[5].

Retirement lasted four years. Convinced the Articles of Confederation were failing, he presided over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and in 1789 the electoral college chose him unanimously as first President of the United States, a result repeated in 1792 ^[1]. Among George Washington achievements in office: he organized the executive departments, signed legislation establishing the national bank and the federal judiciary, suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and kept the young republic out of the wars of the French Revolution through the Proclamation of Neutrality and the Jay Treaty ^[4]. His decision to retire after two terms set a precedent that lasted until 1940 and was later written into the Constitution ^[5].

Washington's 1759 marriage to Martha Custis brought him one of Virginia's largest fortunes and two young stepchildren, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis. The couple had no children together, but they later raised two of Martha's grandchildren at Mount Vernon ^[2]. Contemporaries described a tall, physically commanding man, roughly six feet two inches, reserved in company, fond of dancing, fox hunting, and the theater.

Farming absorbed him as much as politics. He abandoned tobacco for wheat in the 1760s, experimented with crop rotation and mule breeding, built one of the largest whiskey distilleries in the country in the 1790s, and expanded Mount Vernon to roughly 8,000 acres ^[6].

That estate ran on slavery. At his death 317 enslaved people lived at Mount Vernon, 123 of them owned by Washington outright ^[6]. His views shifted over his lifetime from unquestioning acceptance to private unease, and his will directed that the people he owned be freed after Martha's death, the only such provision made by a slaveholding founding president. The will could not free the Custis dower slaves, who belonged to Martha's first husband's estate ^[6].

Washington delivered his Farewell Address in September 1796, published in a Philadelphia newspaper rather than spoken. It warned against permanent foreign alliances and the spirit of party, advice that entered the canon of American political writing ^[5]. In March 1797 he handed the presidency to John Adams and rode home to Virginia.

His retirement was brief and busy. He rebuilt neglected farms, managed the distillery, and in 1798, during the Quasi-War crisis with France, accepted nominal command of a provisional army, his last public office ^[1].

On December 12, 1799, he spent hours riding his farms in snow and freezing rain. A severe throat infection followed, and after treatments that included repeated bloodletting, he died at Mount Vernon on the night of December 14, 1799, aged 67 ^[1]. Congressional resolutions mourned him in Henry Lee's words as first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen ^[7].

Few reputations in American history have proved as durable. The national capital, a state, dozens of counties, and hundreds of towns carry his name, and his likeness appears on the one dollar bill, the quarter, and Mount Rushmore ^[7]. The Washington Monument, completed in 1884, was the tallest structure in the world at its dedication ^[7].

Historians rank him among the greatest presidents, less for legislation than for restraint: he defined the office, respected its limits, and left it voluntarily. Scholars also weigh the contradiction at the center of his story, a champion of liberty who enslaved hundreds of people, and modern scholarship at Mount Vernon and elsewhere documents the lives of those he held in bondage ^[6].

Among basic George Washington facts, one still surprises: in 1976 Congress posthumously promoted him to General of the Armies of the United States, with the stipulation that no American officer may ever outrank him ^[8]. Mount Vernon, preserved by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association since 1858, remains one of the most visited historic homes in the country ^[6].