GW
George Washington
February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799
Commander of the Continental Army, president of the Constitutional Convention, and the first President of the United States, remembered as the “Father of His Country.”
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George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, at Popes Creek farm in Westmoreland County, Virginia. (Because Britain still used the old Julian calendar, his birth was first recorded as February 11, 1731, until a calendar change in 1752 moved the date to the one we use today.) His father died when George was eleven, so he never attended college; instead he trained as a land surveyor, tramping the Virginia frontier as a teenager and buying up land of his own. When his older half-brother Lawrence died, George leased the family estate of Mount Vernon in 1754 and became its full owner in 1761, beginning a lifelong attachment to the place.
Washington first made his name as a soldier in the French and Indian War. In 1754, a skirmish he led at Jumonville Glen helped ignite a war that spread around the globe, and weeks later he was forced to surrender his hasty Fort Necessity, the only battlefield surrender of his life. In 1755 he rode as a volunteer aide to British General Edward Braddock, and when Braddock's army was ambushed and shattered near the Monongahela River, Washington had two horses shot from under him and bullets tear through his coat, yet he emerged unhurt and helped cover the retreat. Commanding Virginia's frontier regiment taught him hard lessons about logistics, discipline, and the limits of British confidence that he would use decades later.
In 1759 Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, a young widow and one of the wealthiest women in Virginia, and settled into life as a Mount Vernon planter and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. As Britain piled new taxes on the colonies, Washington moved from loyal subject to determined opponent, and when war came he was the natural choice to lead. The Second Continental Congress appointed him commander in chief in mid-June 1775, and he took command of the ragged army outside Boston on July 3, 1775.
The war that followed nearly broke him many times. After forcing the British out of Boston in 1776, he lost battle after battle around New York and almost lost his army entirely. Then, on Christmas night 1776, he ferried his men across the ice-choked Delaware River and struck the enemy at Trenton and Princeton, stunning victories that revived the cause when it looked lost. His army survived the brutal winter at Valley Forge in 1777 to 1778 and came out better trained and tougher. With the help of a French alliance, Washington trapped a British army at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, whose surrender effectively won American independence, which the colonies had declared in the Declaration of Independence five years earlier. Through years of defeat, hunger, and freezing camps, it was Washington's steadiness and refusal to quit that held the army together.
His greatest moment may have been a thing he did not do. In 1783, angry officers who had gone unpaid gathered at Newburgh, New York, and some spoke of marching on Congress. Washington faced them down in person, and then did something almost unheard of in history: at the end of the year he handed his military commission back to Congress and went home to Mount Vernon, voluntarily giving up power instead of seizing it. The gesture stunned the world and set a lasting American principle that the military answers to elected leaders. King George III is said to have remarked that if Washington truly gave up power, he would be 'the greatest man in the world.'
Washington could not stay retired for long. In 1787 he was called to Philadelphia to preside over the Constitutional Convention, and his prestige helped hold the fractious delegates together. When the new government began, he was the unanimous choice for President, and he was inaugurated in New York City on April 30, 1789. Almost everything he did became a precedent, because no one had done it before. He created the first cabinet, gathering advisers like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton; he personally led an army of militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794; he kept the young country out of Europe's wars; and it was during his presidency that the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution. In 1796 he published his Farewell Address, a printed letter that warned Americans against the dangers of fierce political parties and permanent foreign alliances. Then, by choosing not to run a third time, he set the two-term tradition that lasted for nearly 150 years.
Washington returned to Mount Vernon in 1797 and died there on December 14, 1799, at age 67, after a sudden throat infection. His doctors, following the medicine of the day, drained large amounts of his blood, a treatment that probably hastened his death. His old comrade Henry 'Light-Horse Harry' Lee eulogized him as 'first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,' a phrase that stuck to Washington forever.
Like other founders, Washington's life carried a deep contradiction. He enslaved people from the age of eleven, and by 1799 more than 300 enslaved men, women, and children lived at Mount Vernon, though only about 123 were legally his to free; the rest belonged to his wife's family estate. Over time he grew privately troubled by slavery, and he became the only one of the major slaveholding founders to order, in his will, that the people he owned be freed; Martha freed them on the first day of 1801. Yet freedom came late and only to some, and enslaved people like Ona Judge and the cook Hercules had already freed themselves by escaping. Washington gave the new nation its most important habits, civilian control of the military, the peaceful surrender of power, and the very shape of the presidency, while living a life that fell short of the liberty he fought for. You can explore the government he helped launch in the U.S. Constitution & Civics journey.