George Washington. 1st President,

Transcription

1 1st President, Born: February 22, 1732 Bridges Creek, Westmoreland County, Virginia Died: December 14, 1799 Mount Vernon, Virginia Political Party: Federalist Vice President: John Adams Cabinet Members Secretary of State: Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, Timothy Pickering Secretary of the Treasury: Alexander Hamilton, Oliver Wolcott, Jr. Secretary of War: Henry Knox, Timothy Pickering, James McHenry Attorney General: Edmund Randolph, William Bradford, Charles Lee George Washington stands unique among presidents of the United States in the near unanimity with which politically influential Americans agreed that he should be elected. No other president has enjoyed a comparable degree of public confidence upon entering the office, and few if any other presidents have had equal scope for defining the chief executive s place in the federal government and the nation s life. The symbolic prestige attached to the presidency comes not only from its constitutionally defined powers but also from the implicit expectation that each new incumbent may achieve some of the unifying popular respect commanded by Washington. The Character of a Leader: Ambition and Self-Control Rather than deriving this respect from his position as president, Washington brought to the office the esteem he had won personally by virtue of his character and career. Little in Washington s youth gave promise of the exceptional stature he later attained; yet, beginning in those early years, he developed the circumspection and reliability that became integral to his public career. Washington was born February 22, 1732, in Westmoreland County in the northern neck of Virginia, near the Potomac River. His mother, Mary Ball Washington, was the second wife of Augustine Washington. Augustine s grandfather John had emigrated from Portrait of George Washington. (Whitehouse.gov) 18

2 England to Virginia in George was eleven years old when his father died. Augustine s adult son by an earlier marriage, Lawrence Washington, filled some of the role of a father for George until Lawrence died in First by lease and then by ownership, Lawrence s estate, Mount Vernon, became George s property and his preferred home for the rest of his life. Washington grew to adulthood in an agricultural, slaveholding society that combined the stability of a self-perpetuating gentry leadership with the volatility of expanding settlement, immigration, and natural population increase. Through Lawrence s marriage to the daughter of Colonel William Fairfax, George came into contact with the comparatively cosmopolitan proprietary family, including Thomas Lord Fairfax, whose holdings included much of northernmost Virginia as far west as the Shenandoah Valley. The prospective value of this land lay in peopling it with tenants or buyers. Washington worked with a Fairfax surveying team in the Shenandoah Valley in 1748 and was appointed Culpeper County surveyor in Like other surveyors, the eighteen-year-old acquired land on his own account, in addition to inheriting Ferry Farm, which had belonged to his father. Washington was a home-taught and self-taught youth; he did not attend college. His reading tended toward history, biography, novels, and practical works on agriculture and the military. The ambition that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams manifested through intellectual self-development George Washington sought to realize in the world of plantation and military affairs. In 1753 and 1754, as a major and then a lieu- The First Lady Martha Washington Martha Washington remains one of the most admired women in U.S. history. She was born on June 2, 1731, in New Kent County, Virginia. Her father, John Dandridge, was a county clerk and owned a successful 500-acre plantation in the eastern Tidewater region of the colony. Martha s mother, Frances Jones, was descended from a line of well-respected English preachers and was born in the colony. As a teenager in 1749, Martha Dandridge married Daniel Parke Custis, who was twenty years her senior and son of one of the colony s wealthiest and foremost families. The two had four children: Daniel, born in 1751; Frances, born in 1753; John, born in 1754; and Martha, born in Tragically, the first two children died in infancy and, in 1757, Martha Custis would find herself widowed. The following year, George Washington entered Martha s life, and the two were married on January 6, 1759, at the Custis family home, which was known as the White House. The Washington marriage was childless, but in marrying Martha, George Washington gained two adopted children, one of Virginia s largest plantations, two mansions, and an attractive bank account in London. Most important, he also gained what the obituary pages would eventually call a worthy partner. Martha s status as heroine of the early Republic is without dispute. However, although she described herself as an old-fashioned Virginia housekeeper, there was much more to Martha Washington. Lady Washington, as she was affectionately known to the troops of the American Revolution, was arguably the young nation s most admired woman and foremost hostess. The role she played helping her husband and war-weary soldiers while in camp each winter of the Revolutionary War and in forging the official duties of the president s wife define her legacy. Martha Washington died on May 22, 1802, at Mount Vernon, two years after her husband. Robert P. Watson 19

3 American Presidents Washington and his family at home, by Currier & Ives. (Library of Congress) tenant colonel in the Virginia militia, Washington became conspicuous in his activities as Governor Robert Dinwiddie s emissary to the chiefs of the Six Nations and to the French who were constructing a chain of forts from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. Washington s first skirmish with the French late in May, 1754, is often described as the beginning of the Seven Years War. His military career during the war, although it attracted attention and won respect, was linked to several reverses: In July, 1754, he surrendered his command to a much larger French force from Fort Duquesne; in the summer of 1755 he served as an aide-de-camp with General Edward Braddock s expedition against Fort Duquesne, which ended in ambush and rout; as colonel and commander in chief of Virginia militia, he spent two frustrating years trying to protect the Shenandoah Valley and western Virginia with about three hundred men and inadequate supplies. Moreover, in 1755 and 1757 Washington stood for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses and was twice defeated. At the same time, he unsuccessfully sought a regular commission in the Royal Army. After cooperating with the last expedition against Fort Duquesne in 1758, which ended in French withdrawal and the establishment of Fort Pitt at the forks of the Ohio, Washington returned to civil life. He won election to the House of Burgesses in In January, 1759, he married Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow, and settled with her and her children at Mount Vernon. For fifteen years he enjoyed the life of a family man, planter, colonial legislator, and justice of the peace; and yet, to decorate his home, Washington ordered portrait busts of Al- 20

4 exander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick II of Prussia, Prince Eugene, and the duke of Marlborough all famous commanders. When his London agent could not get them, Washington declined to accept busts of poets and philosophers as substitutes. His own appearance was imposing: He was 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 209 pounds. His shoulders were narrow,buthisarms, hands, legs,and feet were large. He had great strength yet was graceful in posture and movement. He was an excellent dancer and an expert horseman. His large head had a prominent nose and a firm mouth. His eyes were gray-blue, and in his forties he began to use spectacles to read. By the time that Washington attained national stature as commander in chief of the Continental Army in 1775, the character that buttressed his popular standing was well formed. As a youngman, he was emotional,effusive, audacious, and ambitious. These traits remained with him throughout his life, but he schooled himself to keep these manifestations of his passionate nature under rigorous control. He had purposefully chosen a life of outward stability and inward disappointment. He gained the rewards of equanimity at the cost of curbing his strongest inclinations. The cost was high. Washington often said that he would not relive his life if given the chance. As Revolutionary War commander and as president, Washington won an unequaled public respect for integrity and reliability. He maintained this public, ideal character while remaining privately aware of the gap between his studied moderation of demeanor and his emotional preference for bold risks, high honors, impulsive attachments, and strong aversions. Without ever losing the enthusiastic temperament of his youth, he subjected it to the control of his will, so that his public expression of his deepest anxieties or strongest joys remained temperate. Only rarely as in his occasional angry rages or in his effusive friendship with the marquis de Lafayette did the young Washington and the inner Washington appear to others without being moderated by the mature, public Washington. After he became a general, he was asked whether he really had written the often-quoted lines from his report of his first skirmish with the French in 1754 I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound. Washington replied, If I said so, it was when I was young. Having worked so hard to build it, Washington set a very high value on his reputation. He distinguished his personal honor from the popular opinion of him: Praise did not make him overweening, nor did censure paralyze him, but he tended to believe that anyone who attacked his conduct or reputation thereby impugned his honor. Knowing that his public character was his own creation, maintained at the cost of great effort, he resented suggestions that it had flaws. At the same time, possessing a private distance from his public posture, he could see mistakes he had made and correct them, even when he did not want to admit them. Two of the most intimate views of Washington may provide the best brief summary of his character. Gilbert Stuart, who painted portraits of the public Washington, saw the private Washington clearly: All his features were indicative of the most ungovernable passions, and had he been born in the forests...hewould have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes. Lafayette, who knew the private Washington better than most, described the reliability of the public Washington: Had he been a common soldier, he would have been the bravest in the ranks; had he been an obscure citizen, all his neighbors would have respected him. The American Revolution: Commander in Chief By the time that Americans resistance to the British government s measures to levy colonial taxes and to tighten imperial administration had become armed conflict, George Washing- 21

5 American Presidents ton was one of the most important Virginia politicians. On May 27, 1774, he joined the extralegal meeting of burgesses in the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, after the royal governor had dissolved the House; and he was one of Virginia s delegates to the First and Second Continental Congresses in 1774 and He was not a theorist or propagandist of the political thought by which Americans explained their effort to win independence and to establish a republican form of government. Nevertheless, he understood the intellectual bases, as well as the moral vision, on which the American Revolution was undertaken. His wartime addresses to his soldiers went beyond the appeals to discipline and professional pride characteristic of the British commanders orders to include brief summaries of the significance of civil liberties, self-government, and the prospect for America s greatness. He concluded in 1789 that the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government depended on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people. There were more learned, more philosophically profound, more articulate explicators of the American Revolution than Washington. His standing owed most to the personal reliability that had impressed Virginians before the war and that became integral to American victory. The Continental Congress appointed Washington to command the American forces on June 15, The importance of unity among sections while most of the fighting was being done by New Englanders made a military veteran from the most populous colony especially appropriate. He remained commander in chief throughout the war, resigning his commission on December 23, 1783, in a ceremony before Congress. His conduct during these eight years established his unique national fame, which led to his election as the first president of the United Washington Crossing the Delaware, an engraving by F. O. Freeman from the painting by E. Leutze. (Library of Congress) 22