George Washington


by Albu Andreea Alexandra
 
 George
Washington (1732– 1799)
was an American military
officer, statesman,
and Founding Father who
served as the 1st president
of the United States from
1789 to 1797.
 
 Appointed by the Continental
Congress as commander of
the Continental Army,
Washington led the Patriot forces
to victory in the American
Revolutionary War and served as
the president of the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, which
created the Constitution of the
United States and the American
federal government.
  Washington has been called the "Father of the
Nation" for his manifold leadership in the formative
days of the country.
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 Early years

 George Washington was born on February 22, 1732,
at his family’s plantation on Pope’s Creek in
Westmoreland County, in the British colony
of Virginia, to Augustine Washington and his second
wife, Mary Ball Washington. George, the eldest of
Augustine and Mary Washington’s six children,
spent much of his childhood at Ferry Farm, a
plantation near Fredericksburg, Virginia.
 
 Few details about Washington’s early education are
known, although children of prosperous families like
his typically were taught at home by private tutors
or attended private schools. It’s believed he finished
his formal schooling at around age 15.
 As a teenager, Washington, who had shown an
aptitude for mathematics, became a successful
surveyor. His surveying expeditions into the Virginia
wilderness earned him enough money to begin
acquiring land of his own.
 Martha Washington
An Officer
and
Gentleman
Farmer
In December 1752, Washington, who had no previous military experience, was
made a commander of the Virginia militia. He saw action in the French and Indian
War and was eventually put in charge of all of Virginia’s militia forces. By 1759,
Washington had resigned his commission, returned to Mount Vernon and was
elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he served until 1774. In January
1759, he married Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow with two children.
Washington became a devoted stepfather to her children.
 
 In the ensuing years, Washington expanded Mount
Vernon from 2,000 acres into an 8,000-acre property
with five farms. He grew a variety of crops,
including wheat and corn, bred mules and
maintained fruit orchards and a successful fishery.
He was deeply interested in farming and continually
experimented with new crops and methods of land
conservation.
 George Washington During the
American Revolution

 By the late 1760s, Washington had experienced
firsthand the effects of rising taxes imposed on
American colonists by the British and came to believe
that it was in the best interests of the colonists to declare
independence from England. Washington served as a
delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774 in
Philadelphia. By the time the Second Continental
Congress convened a year later, the American
Revolution had begun in earnest, and Washington was
named commander in chief of the Continental Army.
 
 Washington proved to be a better general than military strategist.
His strength lay not in his genius on the battlefield but in his ability
to keep the struggling colonial army together. His troops were
poorly trained and lacked food, ammunition and other supplies.
However, Washington was able to give them direction and
motivation. Over the course of the grueling eight-year war, the
colonial forces won few battles but consistently held their own
against the British. In October 1781, with the aid of the French (who
allied themselves with the colonists over their rivals the British), the
Continental forces were able to capture British troops under
General Charles Cornwallis in the Battle of Yorktown. This action
effectively ended the Revolutionary War and Washington was
declared a national hero.
 America’s First President

 In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the
U.S., Washington, believing he had done his duty, gave up his command of the
army and returned to Mount Vernon, intent on resuming his life as a
gentleman farmer and family man. However, in 1787, he was asked to attend
the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and head the committee to draft
the new constitution. His impressive leadership there convinced the delegates
that he was by far the most qualified man to become the nation’s first president.
 At first, Washington balked. He wanted to, at last, return to a quiet life at home
and leave governing the new nation to others. But public opinion was so strong
that eventually he gave in. The first presidential election was held on January 7,
1789, and Washington won. Because Washington, D.C., America’s future
capital city wasn’t yet built, he lived in New York and Philadelphia. While in
office, he signed a bill establishing a future, permanent U.S. capital along the
Potomac River—the city later named Washington, D.C., in his honor.
 Accomplishments

 The United States was a small nation when Washington took
office and there was no precedent for how the new president
should conduct domestic or foreign business. Mindful that his
actions would likely determine how future presidents were
expected to govern, Washington worked hard to set an example
of fairness, prudence and integrity. In foreign matters, he
supported cordial relations with other countries but also
favored a position of neutrality in foreign conflicts.
Domestically, he nominated the first chief justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, signed a bill establishing the first
national bank, the Bank of the United States, and set up his
own presidential cabinet.
 His two most prominent cabinet appointees were Secretary of State Thomas
Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, two men who
disagreed strongly on the role of the federal government. Washington believed that
divergent views were critical for the health of the new government, but he was


distressed at what he saw as an emerging partisanship.

Thomas Jefferson Alexander Hamilton

Under Washington’s leadership, the states ratified the Bill of Rights, and
five new states entered the union: North Carolina, Rhode
Island, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee.


 
 In his second term, Washington issued the proclamation
of neutrality to avoid entering the 1793 war between
Great Britain and France. But when French minister to
the United States Edmond Charles Genet toured the
United States, he boldly flaunted the proclamation,
attempting to set up American ports as French military
bases and gain support for his cause in the Western
United States. His meddling caused a stir between
Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, widening the
rift between parties and making consensus-building
more difficult.
 
 In 1795, Washington signed the “Treaty of Amity
Commerce and Navigation, between His Britannic
Majesty; and The United States of America,”. It
helped the U.S. avoid war with Great Britain, but
also rankled certain members of Congress back home
and was fiercely opposed by Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison. Internationally, it caused a stir
among the French, who believed it violated previous
treaties between the United States and France.
 
 Washington’s administration signed two other
influential international treaties. Pinckney’s Treaty of
1795, also known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo,
established friendly relations between the United
States and Spain, firming up borders between the U.S.
and Spanish territories in North America and opening
up the Mississippi to American traders. The Treaty of
Tripoli, signed the following year, gave American
ships access to Mediterranean shipping lanes in
exchange for a yearly tribute to the Pasha of Tripoli.
George Washington’s Retirement
to Mount Vernon and Death

 In 1796, after two terms as president and declining to serve a third
term, Washington finally retired. In Washington’s farewell address,
he urged the new nation to maintain the highest standards
domestically and to keep involvement with foreign powers to a
minimum.
 Washington returned to Mount Vernon and devoted his attentions to
making the plantation as productive as it had been before he became
president. More than four decades of public service had aged him,
but he was still a commanding figure. In December 1799, he caught a
cold after inspecting his properties in the rain. The cold developed
into a throat infection and Washington died on the night of December
14, 1799, at the age of 67. He was entombed at Mount Vernon, which
in 1960 was designated a national historic landmark.
 
 Washington left one of the most enduring legacies of
any American in history. Known as the “Father of
His Country,” his face appears on the U.S. dollar bill
and quarter, and dozens of U.S. schools, towns and
counties, as well as the state of Washington and the
nation’s capital city, are named for him.