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George Washington

Born at Westmoreland County, Virginia, Feb. 22, 1732. Died at Mt. Vernon, Dec. 14, 1799. Son of Augustine Washington, Virginia planter, Surveyor. Adjutant of Virginia troops 1751. Appointed LieutenantColonel 1755. Married Martha Custis 1759. Delegated to Virginia House of Burgesses and Continental Congress 1774-75. Appointed Commanderin-Chief of Continental Forces July 15, 1775, in the Revolution against England. Took command in Cambridge July 2, 1776. Resigned his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Army at Annapolis 1783. Greatest general of his time, gaining through his skill as a Commander the independence of the Colonies of America. Made President of the Constitutional Convention 1787. Was unanimously elected President of the United States in Feb., 1789, with John Adams as Vice-President. Inaugurated at New York April 30, 1789. Re-elected 1793 and served until 1797, with John Adams as Vice-President. Buried Mt. Vernon, Va.

By the time of George Washington’s birth in 1732 on the marshy shores of Popes Creek, his family had been on the land between Mattox and Popes Creek for three quarters of a century. In 1657, an English merchant ship sailed up the Potomac River, anchored in Mattox Creek, and took on a cargo of tobacco. With her new load, the ship ran aground on a shoal and sank. During the delay, a young officer, John Washington, great-grandfather of the future president, befriended the family of Colonel Nathaniel Pope, especially his daughter Anne. When the ship was ready to set sail John stayed behind to marry Anne, thus beginning the Washington family legacy in the New World. The bride’s father gave the newlyweds a wedding gift of 700 acres of land on Mattox Creek four miles to the east. John Washington eventually expanded his land holdings to 10,000 acres.

His son Lawrence, born in 1659, inherited the bulk of his father’s estate. His son Augustine, born in 1694, inherited some property from his father and acquired more, including an iron furnace near Fredericksburg and a substantial plantation on Pope’s Creek. Augustine found a small house on the Popes Creek property and began expanding it into a middle-sized plantation manor house. It was here that George Washington, the first son of his second marriage, was born on February 22, 1732. This is where young George lived until 1735, when his father moved the family to his Little Hunting Creek Plantation, the land that would eventually be renamed Mount Vernon.

Washington’s American ancestors saw themselves primarily as planters, but they all also involved themselves in the public service that confirmed a planter’s status while imparting skills such as public speaking, leadership, and generosity to others. They served as justices on the county courts, militia officers, sheriffs, vestrymen in the local Anglican Church, and members of the Virginia House of Burgesses. When Augustine Washington died in 1743, the bulk of his estate went to the two sons of his first marriage. George Washington did not inherit much wealth or land, but his father did pass on to him the Washington family’s status as members of the landed gentry and its commitment to public service.

George Washington’s first military assignment came in October 1753 when he delivered a British ultimatum to the French in the Ohio Valley. Its refusal precipitated the French and Indian War. His subsequent years of military service earned George Washington high rank and respect as a military leader.

In 1759, Washington retired from the army and married Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow and mother of two children. Their combined property placed the couple high in the Tidewater planter aristocracy. Between 1759 and 1774, he occupied most of his time becoming one of the largest landowners and richest and most innovative planters in Virginia. He served in the Virginia House of Burgesses for part of that time, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with British colonial policies. Toward the end of this period, he began to enlarge the house, adding a new wing on the south, beginning work on a north wing, and remodeling the interior.

Selected as one of the Virginia representatives to the Continental Congress, George Washington left for Philadelphia in 1774. Congress appointed him as commander in chief of the Continental Army the following year. Although his military experience was limited, he had the intelligence, courage, and determination to avoid defeat long enough to turn his ragtag Continental Army into a force capable of meeting and defeating professional British troops on the open field. On August 19, 1781, Washington marched south with his army to assist the French fleet against the British under Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The surrender of Cornwallis on October 19 ended the war.

By this time, America recognized Washington as its first military hero, but in December 1783, he resigned his commission. By renouncing power at a time when he probably could have been crowned king, he became internationally famous and set the first of many precedents for the new nation.

In 1784, Washington convinced the assemblies of Virginia and Maryland, which bordered the river, to establish a company to improve navigation on the Potomac between its headwaters near Cumberland, Maryland and tidewater at Georgetown. Organized in 1785, the Patowmack Company had directors and subscribers from both States; George Washington was president and presided over the project until he went to New York to accept the office of president. The greatest engineering challenge was the construction of a canal and locks on the Virginia side of the river to bypass the Great Falls, where the Potomac drops nearly 80 feet in less than a mile. Hired hands, indentured servants, and slaves blasted the southern end of the narrow canal through high rocky cliffs by using only black powder creating an engineering marvel of the day. Although George Washington did not live to see the canal completed, he often visited the project to inspect its progress. Many boats used the canal to bypass the falls, but it was never profitable and was abandoned in 1830.

In the summer of 1787, he traveled to Philadelphia, where he served as president of the Constitutional Convention. He departed once more when the Electoral College created by the newly adopted Federal Constitution elected him president in its first and only unanimous vote. Because the Federal Government was located in New York and Philadelphia throughout his presidency, he was able to return to Mount Vernon only about twice a year.

On April 30, 1789, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York State administered the oath of office to George Washington, the Nation's first President, at New York City's Federal Hall. Washington, who had built, led, and by the force of his example sustained the Army through the War for Independence, was now the leader of the Government. If integrity and respectability were important to winning the support of the people, Washington was a wise choice for the Presidency. To most Americans, he embodied the two qualities more than any other man.

The office of President was new. How should the Executive behave in public? The United States had 4 million people and a land area greater than that of most of the European powers. Kings governed large nations, but the United States was a republic, not a monarchy. Washington fostered the formal dignity of the Presidency but stopped short of the pomp and trappings of European monarchs. He held formal receptions on Tuesdays and rode about in an elegant coach emblazoned with the family coat of arms. Advocates of republican simplicity found both practices objectionable, and the formal appearance of the President in Congress touched off a spirited debate.

To make the Constitution work, administrative machinery had to be created. The Continental Congress bequeathed to Washington a tiny Government staff. It consisted of a foreign affairs office, manned by two Ministers, a supervisor, and two clerks; a Board of Treasury, which had no money; a department of war, without a real army; and an inadequate postal system. Furthermore, the national debt was large. The appointment of capable and dedicated officials, the establishment of new agencies, and the collection of ample revenues were vital to the launching of the Government.

Washington’s first term was largely devoted to organizing the executive branch and defining the relationship between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the new government created by the Constitution. Always aware of the effects of his actions, he established precedent after precedent for the presidency as an institution. He also worked with his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to put the nation’s finances in order and selected a permanent site for the nation’s capital on the Potomac River, not far from Mount Vernon.

A national bank was another part of Hamilton's program. The bank, really a private bank affiliated with the Government, would serve as a depository and investment agent for money collected by the Treasury. By means of branch banks, it would carry on Government business throughout the Nation. State banking interests opposed the national bank. Although legislation for the bank had passed Congress, Washington, unsure if the measure was constitutional, hesitated to sign it. In a written opinion, Jefferson, in a "strict" interpretation of the Constitution, had argued that chartering of the bank was unconstitutional because it was not among the powers enumerated in the Constitution. In rebuttal, Hamilton, employing a "broad" interpretation of the Constitution, held that certain implied powers gave Congress the authority to do what was "necessary and proper" to accomplish ends not prohibited by the Constitution or inimical to the public good.

Washington’s second term was troubled by the international tensions created by the war between England and revolutionary France and by growing partisanship within his own administration. His support for the strict neutrality advocated by Hamilton kept the new United States out of war, but led to the resignation of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Washington hated political partisanship, but the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson soon sparked creation of the first two political parties, Federalist and Republican.

In 1798, Washington declined a third term, setting a precedent left unbroken until 1940 and now permanent in the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. He retired to his home at Mount Vernon in 1797 and died there two years later at the age of 67. His wife lived there until she died in 1802.

George Washington owned slaves from age eleven until his death, when his will promised his slaves freedom. Born in 1732, Washington came of age in a time when large-scale tobacco planting, carried out by slave labor, dominated the economy and society of colonial Virginia. Washington made no official public statements on slavery or emancipation as a Virginia legislator, as a military officer, or as president of the United States. As a young man he acted as most of his slaveholding peers did — making full and lawful use of slave labor, buying and selling slaves, and even raffling off a debtor’s slaves, including children, to recoup a loan.

Count Julian Niemcewicz, a Polish visitor who spent twelve days at Mount Vernon in 1798, wrote, “General Washington treats his slaves far more humanely than do his fellow citizens of Virginia. Most of these gentlemen give to their Blacks only bread, water and blows.” But he also wrote that the Mount Vernon slaves worked almost unceasingly and that “the condition of our peasants is infinitely happier.” He left a sobering description of a slave family’s habitation: We entered one of the huts of the Blacks, for one cannot call them by the name of houses. They are more miserable than the most miserable of the cottages of our peasants."

Washington’s public actions as president did nothing to dismantle southern slaveholding society, including his signing of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slaveholders to capture escaped slaves, even in free states or territory, and return them to bondage. Washington’s will decreed that all 123 of his slaves be freed upon the death of his wife.

To his repeated exasperation, he faced problems with enslaved workers, overseers, and paid white workers who stole, drank, and lazed about. He fed, clothed, and housed his slaves poorly, candidly admitting that some of the dwellings he provided were so miserable that a white person would never consent to live in them. When a bricklayer seemed to be shirking, Washington threatened that he would be “severely punished and placed under one of the Overseers as a common hoe negro.” He approved harsh punishment (sometimes described in the records by a euphemism, “correction”) even for the seemingly trivial offense of being “impertinent.”