The Life of George Washington
On April 30, 1789, George Washington, standing on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York, took his oath of office as the first President of the United States. “As the first of every thing, in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent,” he wrote James Madison, “it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles.”
Born in Westmoreland County, Va., on the twenty second day of February, 1732 into a Virginia planter family, he learned the morals, manners, and body of knowledge requisite for an 18th century Virginia gentleman. He was the eldest among the siblings of Augustine Washington to Mary Ball Washington, his second wife.
He pursued two intertwined interests: military arts and western expansion. At the age of sixteen, he helped survey Shenandoah lands for Thomas, Lord Fairfax. Commissioned a lieutenant colonel in 1754, he fought the first skirmishes of what grew into the French and Indian War. The next year, as an aide to Gen. Edward Braddock, he escaped injury although four bullets ripped his coat and two horses were shot from under him.
Washington managed his lands around Mount Vernon and served in the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1759 to the outbreak of the American Revolution. Married to a widow, , he devoted himself to a busy and happy life. Despite the pleasures of marriage, he felt the demoralizations and being held back by the British government, like his fellow planters. As the quarrel with the mother country heightened, he moderately but firmly voiced his resistance to the restrictions.
Washington became one of the Virginia delegates of the Second Continental Congress Assembly in Philadelphia on May 1775. He was also elected Commander in Chief of the Continental Army on that particular event. On July 3, 1775, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, he took command of his ill-trained troops and embarked upon a war that was to last six grueling years.
He realized early that the best strategy was to harass the British. He reported to Congress, “we should on all Occasions avoid a general Action, or put anything to the Risqué, unless compelled by a necessity, into which we ought never to be drawn.” Ensuing battles saw him fall back slowly, then strike unexpectedly. Finally in 1781 with the aid of French allies–he forced the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.
Washington longed to retire to his fields at Mount Vernon. But he then realized that the Nation under its Articles of Confederation was not functioning well. That encourages him to take the lead on being the prime mover in the steps towards the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. When the new Constitution was ratified, the Electoral College unanimously elected Washington as its President.
He did not infringe upon the policy making powers that he felt the Constitution gave the Congress. But the determination of foreign policy became preponderantly a Presidential concern. When the French Revolution turns into a major war between France and England, Washington refused to accept entirely the recommendations of either his Secretary of State , who was pro-French, or his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who was pro-British. Rather, he insisted upon a neutral course until the United States could grow stronger.
To his disappointment, two parties were developing by the end of his first term. Wearied of politics, feeling old, he retired at the end of his second term. In his Farewell Address, he insisted on his countrymen to forswear excessive party spirit and geographical distinctions. In foreign affairs, he warned against long-term alliances.
Washington enjoyed less than three years of retirement at Mount Vernon, for he died of a throat infection on December 14, 1799. For months the Nation had mourned him. It is said of Washington that he was “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen”.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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