eorge Washington, first president, was born Feb. 22, 1732 (Feb. 11, 1731, old style), the son of Augustine Washington and Mary Bell, at Wakefield on Pope’s Creek, Westmoreland Co., Va. His early childhood was spent on a farm, near Fredericksburg. His father died when George was 11. He studied mathematics and surveying and when 16 went to live with his half brother Lawrence, who built and named Mount Vernon. George surveyed the lands of William Fairfax in the Shenandoah Valley, keeping a diary. He accompanied Lawrence to Barbados, West Indies, contracted small pox, and was deeply scarred. Lawrence died in 1752 and George acquired his property by inheritance. He valued land and when he died owned 70,000 acres in Virginia and 40,000 acres in what is now West Virginia.

Washington’s military service began in 1753 when Gov. Dinwiddie of Virginia sent him on missions deep into Ohio country. He clashed with the French and had to surrender Fort Necessity July 3, 1754. He was an aide to Braddock and at his side when the army was ambushed and defeated on a march to Ft. Duquesne, July 9, 1755. He helped take Fort Duquesne from the French in 1758.

After his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis, a widow, in 1759, Washington managed his family estate at Mount Vernon. Although not at first for independence, he opposed British exactions and took charge of the Virginia troops before war broke out. He was made commander-in-chief by the Continental Congress June 15, 1775.

The successful issue of a war filled with hardships was due to his leadership. He was resourceful, a stern disciplinarian, and the one strong, dependable force for unity. He favored a federal government and became chairman of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He helped get the Constitution ratified and was unanimously elected president by the electoral college and inaugurated, Apr. 30, 1789, on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall.

He was reelected 1792, but refused to consider a 3d term and retired to Mount Vernon. He suffered acute laryngitis after a ride in snow and rain around his estate, was bled profusely, and died Dec. 14, 1799. [The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 1993]

Notes on George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and later the first President of the United States.
He symbolized qualities of discipline, aristocratic duty, military orthodoxy, and persistence in adversity that his contemporaries particularly valued as marks of mature political leadership. George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the eldest son of Augustine Washington, a member of the colonial aristocracy, and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington. After his Father’s death, he moved to Mount Vernon, a large estate in Fairfax County, the home of his elder half-brother Lawrence (1718-52). Washington had little or no formal schooling, but his early notebooks show that he read widely in geography, military history, agriculture, deportment, and composition and that he showed aptitude in surveying and mathematics. Tall, strongly built, and fond of action, he was a good horseman and enjoyed the robust sports and social occasions of the planter society. Aged 17, he joined a party to survey lands owned by the Fairfax family (to which he was related by marriage) west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1749, he was appointed official surveyor for Culpeper County, and during the next two years he made many surveys for landowners on the Virginia frontier. In 1753, he was appointed Adjutant of one of the districts into which Virginia was then divided, with the rank of Major. Washington played an important role in the struggles preceding the outbreak of the French and Indian War. He was chosen by Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia to deliver an ultimatum calling on French forces to cease their encroachment in the Ohio River valley. After successfully completing this mission, Washington, then a Lieutenant Colonel, was ordered to lead a militia force for the protection of workers building a fort at the forks of the Ohio River. Having learned that the French had ousted the work party and renamed the site Fort Duquesne, he entrenched his forces at a camp named Fort Necessity and awaited reinforcements. A successful French assault obliged him to surrender and depart with the remnants of his company. Washington resigned his commission in 1754, but the next year he began service as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the British General Edward Braddock, who had been sent to Virginia with a force of British regular troops. A few miles from Fort Duquesne, Braddock’s men were ambushed by a band of French soldiers and Indians. Braddock was mortally wounded, and Washington, who behaved gallantly during the conflict, narrowly escaped death. In Aug 1755 he was appointed (with the rank of Colonel) to command the Virginia Militia, charged with the defence of the western frontier of the Colony. War between France and Britain was officially declared in May 1756 at the beginning of the Seven Years War. While the principal struggle moved to other areas, Washington succeeded in keeping the Virginia frontier relatively safe. After the death of his half-brother Lawrence, Washington inherited Mount Vernon. A spectacular rise in the price of tobacco during 1730s and 1740s, combined with his marriage in 1759 to Martha Custis, a young widow with a large estate, made him one of the wealthiest men in Virginia. Elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758, he served for more than a decade. He also gained legal and administrative experience as Justice of the Peace for Fairfax County. Like other Virginia planters, Washington became alarmed by the repressive measures of the British Crown and Parliament in the 1760s and early 1770s, seeking taxes to fund the war with France. In Jul 1774, he presided over a meeting in Alexandria that adopted the Fairfax Resolves, calling for the establishment and enforcement of a stringent boycott on British imports. His public response to unpopular British policies won Washington election as a Virginia delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and to the Second Continental Congress the following year. When fighting broke out between Massachusetts and the British in 1775, Congress named Washington as Commander of the new Continental Army, hoping thus to promote unity between New England and Virginia. He took command of the makeshift force besieging the British in Boston in mid-July. When the British evacuated the city in March 1776, he moved his army to New York. Defeated there in August by a superior force under Sir William Howe, he withdrew from Manhattan to establish a new defensive line north of New York City. In November he retreated across the Hudson River into New Jersey, and a month later crossed the Delaware to safety in Pennsylvania. Demoralized by Howe’s easy capture of New York City and northern New Jersey, Washington spotted the points where the British were overextended. Recrossing the icy Delaware on the night of 25 Dec 1776, he captured Trenton in a surprise attack the following morning, and on 3 Jan 1777, he defeated British troops at Princeton. These two engagements restored patriot morale, and impressed by such tenacity, Howe delayed moving against Washington until late August, when he landed an army at the head of Chesapeake Bay. The American commander tried unsuccessfully to block Howe’s advance toward Philadelphia at the Battle of Brandywine Creek in September. Following the British occupation of the city, he fought a minor battle with them at Germantown, but their superior numbers forced him to retreat. Washington and his men spent the following winter at Valley Forge, west of Philadelphia. During these months, when his fortunes seemed to have reached their nadir, he thwarted a plan by his enemies in Congress and the army to have him removed as Commander-in-Chief. In June 1778, after France’s entry into the war on the American side, the new British commander, Sir Henry Clinton, evacuated Philadelphia and marched overland to New York. Washington attacked him at Monmouth, New Jersey, but was again repulsed. Washington blamed the defeat on General Charles Lee’s insubordination during the battle; the climax of a long-brewing rivalry between the two men. Washington spent the next two years in relative inactivity with his army encamped in a long semicircle around the British bastion of New York City – from Connecticut to New Jersey. The arrival in 1780 of about 6,000 French troops in Rhode Island under the Comte de Rochambeau augmented his forces, but the weak US government was approaching bankruptcy, and Washington knew that he had to defeat the British in 1781 or see his army disintegrate. He hoped for a combined American-French assault on New York, but in August he received word that a French fleet was proceeding to Cheseapeake Bay for a combined land and sea operation against another British force in Virginia, and reluctantly agreed to march south. Washington and Rochambeau’s movement of 7,000 troops, half of them French, from New York State to Virginia in less than five weeks was a masterpiece of execution. Washington sent word ahead to the Marquis de Lafayette, commanding American forces in Virginia, to keep the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, from leaving his base of operations at Yorktown. At the end of September the Franco-American army joined Lafayette. Outnumbering the British by two to one, and with 36 French ships offshore to prevent Yorktown from being relieved by sea, Washington forced Cornwallis to surrender in October after a brief siege. Although peace and British recognition of United States independence did not come for another two years, Yorktown proved to be the last battle of the American Revolution. Washington’s contribution to American victory was enormous, and analysis of his leadership reveals much about the nature of the military and political conflict. His tactic of avoiding major battles with the British main force prevented his foes from using their strongest asset, the professionalism and discipline of their soldiers. At the same time, however, Washington remained a conventional military officer. The practical result of this caution and even inhibition was to preserve the Continental Army as a visible manifestation of American government when allegiance to that government was tenuous. In 1783, he returned to Mount Vernon and became in the mid-1780s one of the more enterprising and effective agriculturalists among the Virginia aristocracy. Washington and other Virginia nationalists were instrumental in bringing about the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to promote that end. Elected as a delegate to the convention by the Virginia General Assembly, Washington was chosen its President. Elected President of the newly United States in 1788 and again in 1792, Washington presided over the formation and initial operation of the new Government. His stiff dignity and sense of propriety postponed the emergence of the fierce partisanship that would characterize the administrations of his three immediate successors; John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. He created the Cabinet, although no such body was envisioned by the Constitution. By appointing Alexander Hamilton Secretary of the US Treasury and Thomas Jefferson Secretary of State, he brought the two ablest and most principled figures of the revolutionary generation into central positions of responsibility. Washington vigorously supported the innovations in fiscal policy proposed by Hamilton; a funded national debt, the creation of the Bank of the United States, assumption of state debts, and excise taxes, especially on whiskey, by which the Federal Government would assert its power to levy controversial taxes and import duties high enough to pay the interest on the new national debt. Similarly, he allowed Jefferson to pursue a policy of seeking trade and cooperation with all European nations. Washington did not foresee that Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s policies were ultimately incompatible. Hamilton’s plan for an expanding national debt yielding an attractive rate of return for investors depended on a high level of trade with Britain generating enough import-duty revenue to service the debt. Hamilton therefore felt that he had to meddle in foreign policy to the extent of leaking secret dispatches to the British. The outbreak of war between revolutionary France and a coalition led by Britain, Prussia, and Austria in 1793 jeopardized American foreign policy and crippled Jefferson’s rival foreign policy design. When the French envoy, Edmund Genet, arrived in Charleston in April 1793 and began recruiting American privateers and promising aid to land speculators who wanted French assistance in expelling Spain from the Gulf Coast. Washington insisted, over Jefferson’s reservations, that the US denounce Genet and repudiate its 1778 treaty with France. Washington’s anti-French leanings, coupled with the aggressive attitude of the new regime in France toward the US, thus served to bring about the triumph of Hamilton’s pro-British foreign policy; a posture formalized by Jay’s Treaty of 1795, which settled outstanding American differences with Britain. The treaty, which many Americans felt contained too many concessions to the British, touched off a storm of controversy. The Senate ratified it, but opponents in the House of Representatives tried to block appropriations to establish the arbitration machinery. In a rare display of political pugnacity, Washington challenged the propriety of the House tampering with treaty making. His belligerence on this occasion cost him his prized reputation as a leader above party, but it was also decisive in securing a 51-48 vote by the House to implement the treaty. Conscious of the value of his formative role in shaping the presidency and certainly stung by the invective hurled at advocates of the Jay Treaty, Washington carefully prepared a farewell address to mark the end of his presidency, calling on the US to avoid both entangling alliances and party rancor. After leaving office in 1797, Washington retired to Mount Vernon, where he died without issue on 14 Dec 1799. Shortly after the president’s death, an Episcopal clergyman, Mason Locke Weems, wrote a fanciful life of Washington for children, stressing the great man’s honesty, piety, hard work, patriotism, and wisdom. This book, popularized the story that Washington as a boy had refused to lie in order to avoid punishment for cutting down his father’s cherry tree. Throughout most of the Victorian era, Washington’s example served as one of the symbols of American identity along with the flag, the Constitution, and the Fourth of July. His leadership abilities and his personal principles were exactly the ones that met the needs of his own generation. As later historians have examined closely the ideas of the Founding Fathers and the nature of warfare in the Revolution, they have come to the conclusion that Washington’s specific contributions to the new nation were, if anything, somewhat underestimated by earlier scholarship. [GADD.GED]

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