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WASHINGTON, George
(1732–99), first president of the U.S., commander
in chief of the Continental army during the American Revolution.
He symbolized qualities of discipline, aristocratic duty, military
orthodoxy, and persistence in adversity that his contemporaries
particularly valued as marks of mature political leadership.
Washington was born on Feb. 22, 1732, in Westmoreland Co.,
Va., the eldest son of Augustine Washington (1694?–1743),
a Virginia planter, and Mary Ball Washington (1708–89).
Although Washington had little or no formal schooling, his early
notebooks indicate that he read in geography, military history, agriculture,
deportment, and composition and that he showed some aptitude in
surveying and simple mathematics. In later life he developed a style
of speech and writing that, although not always polished, was marked
by clarity and force. Tall, strong, and fond of action, he was a
superb horseman and enjoyed the robust sports and social occasions
of the Virginia planter society. At the age of 16 he was invited
to join a party to survey lands owned by the Fairfax family (to
which he was related by marriage) west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
His journey led him to take a lifelong interest in the development
of western lands. In the summer of 1749 he was appointed official
surveyor for Culpeper Co., 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
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 Lt.
Gov. Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia to deliver an ultimatum calling
on French forces to cease their encroachment in the Ohio River valley.
The young messenger was also instructed to observe the strength
of French forces, the location of their forts, and the routes by
which they might be reinforced from Canada. After successfully completing
this mission, Washington, then a lieutenant colonel, was ordered
to lead a militia force for the protection of workers who were 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 accept
articles of surrender, and he departed with the remnants of his
company.
Washington resigned his commission in 1754, but in May 1755
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
regulars. A few kilometers 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 August 1755 he was appointed
(with the rank of colonel) to command the Virginia regiment, charged
with the defense of the long western frontier of the colony. War
between France and Britain was officially declared in May 1756,
and while the principal struggle moved to other areas, Washington
succeeded in keeping the Virginia frontier relatively safe.
After the death of his elder half brother Lawrence (1718–52),
Washington inherited the plantation known as Mount Vernon. A spectacular
rise in the price of tobacco during the 1730s and ’40s,
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 House of Burgesses in 1758, he served conscientiously
but without special distinction for 17 years. He also gained political
and administrative experience as justice of the peace for Fairfax
Co.
Like other Virginia planters, Washington became alarmed by
the repressive measures of the British crown and Parliament in the
1760s and early ’70s. In July 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
prior to similar action by the First Continental Congress. Together
with his service in the House of Burgesses, his public response
to unpopular British policies won Washington election as a Virginia
delegate to the First Continental Congress in September and October
1774 and to the Second Continental Congress in 1775.
When fighting broke out between Massachusetts and the British
in 1775, Congress named Washington commander of its newly created 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, and when the enemy evacuated the city in March 1776,
he moved his army to New York. Defeated there in August by Gen.
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.
Although 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 Dec. 25, 1776, he captured Trenton in a surprise
attack the following morning, and on Jan. 3, 1777, he defeated British troops
at Princeton. These two engagements restored patriot morale, and
by spring Washington had 8000 new recruits. Impressed by such tenacity,
Howe delayed moving against Washington until late August, when he landed
an army at the head of Chesapeake Bay. Wanting to fight, Washington
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 lowest
point, 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, N.J., but was again repulsed. Washington
blamed the defeat on Gen. 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 6000 French troops in Rhode Island under the comte
de Rochambeau augmented his forces, but the weak U.S. 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 Chesapeake Bay for a combined
land and sea operation against another British army in Virginia,
and reluctantly agreed to march south.
Washington and Rochambeau’s movement of 7000 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 U.S. independence did not come for another two years, Yorktown proved
to be the last major land battle of the 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. Being selective about
where and when he fought the British main force prevented his foes
from using their strongest asset, the professionalism and discipline
of their soldiers. At the same time, Washington remained a conventional
military officer. He rejected proposals made by Gen. Charles Lee
early in the war for a decentralized guerrilla struggle. As a conservative,
he shrank from the social dislocation and redistribution of wealth
that such a conflict would cause; as a provincial gentleman, he
was determined to show that American officers could be every bit
as civilized and genteel as their European counterparts. 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 one of his last acts as commander, Washington issued a circular
letter to the states imploring them to form a vibrant, vigorous
national government. In 1783 he returned to Mount Vernon and became
in the mid-1780s an enterprising and effective agriculturalist.
Shay’s Rebellion, an armed revolt in Massachusetts (1786–87),
convinced many Americans of the need for a stronger government.
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. In this position
he played virtually no role—either formal or behind the
scenes—in the deliberations of the convention; however,
his reticence and lack of intellectual flair may well have enhanced
his objectivity in the eyes of the delegates, thereby contributing
to the unself-conscious give and take that was the hallmark of the
framers’ deliberations. Also, the probability that Washington
would be the first president may have eased the task of designing
that office. His attendance at the Constitutional Convention and
his support for ratification of the Constitution were important
for its success in the state conventions in 1787 and 1788.
Elected president 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 successors—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and
James Madison. He also made several decisions of far-reaching importance.
He instituted the cabinet, although no such body was envisioned
by the Constitution. He was socially aloof from Congress, thus avoiding
the development of court and opposition factions. By appointing
Alexander Hamilton secretary of the 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 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, Edmond Genêt, 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 U.S. denounce Genêt
and remain neutral in the war between France and Britain. Washington’s
anti-French leanings, coupled with the aggressive attitude of the
new regime in France toward the U.S., thus served to bring about
the triumph of Hamilton’s pro-British foreign policy—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 U.S. to avoid both
entangling alliances and party rancor.
After leaving office in 1797, Washington retired to Mount
Vernon, where he died on Dec. 14, 1799.
Washington’s place in the American mind is a fascinating
chapter in the intellectual life of the nation. Washington provided
his contemporaries with concrete evidence of the value of the citizen
soldier, the enlightened gentleman farmer, and the realistic nationalist
in stabilizing the culture and politics of the young republic. 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, which went through many editions, 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. Washington
long served as a symbol of American identity along with the flag,
the Constitution, and the Fourth of July. The age of debunking biographies
of American personages in the 1920s included a multivolume denigration
of Washington by American author Rupert Hughes (1872–1956),
which helped to distort Americans’ understanding of their
national origins. Both the hero worship and the debunking miss the essential
point that 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.