History of George Washington: Father of the Nation

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, 1796. (Clark Art Institute/Wikimedia)

HISTORY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON: FATHER OF THE NATION

Part of the series on America 250, the US Semiquincentennial

[In my previous article, I discussed how the Founding Father John Witherspoon, immersed in both the Enlightenment and Presbyterian Christianity, was a professor and college president. Today’s Founding Father never went to college, but had a different kind of education.]

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into a moderately prosperous planter family.

Washington’s Birthday is an official federal holiday, though it is “observed” on Presidents Day, along with Abraham Lincoln’s, and other presidents’, as I’ve written about here.

Washington’s birthday has been celebrated since he was encamped with our first army at Valley Forge in 1778. It first became an official state holiday in Massachusetts in 1856 and a federal holiday in 1879. Since the 1968 passage of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which subordinated historical accuracy to federal workers’ preference for three-day weekends, Washington’s birthday has been celebrated on the third Monday of February, which never falls on his actual birthday, February 22.

What was the background of this planter class Founding Father, what was his training, how did he develop his leadership skills, what was unique about his presidency, and what was his legacy?

Washington’s Early Life: The Making of a Leader

His father, Augustine Washington, died when George was just eleven years old. Unlike the other men of his time who would become Founding Fathers, Washington was largely self-educated and never attended college.

Despite his lack of classical schooling, he possessed considerable raw ambition, a commanding physical presence, and an extraordinary capacity for self-discipline.

While still a teenager, Washington trained as a land surveyor, a profession that took him deep into the Virginia backcountry and gave him both a practical education in the American wilderness and a lifelong appreciation for land and geography. Washington’s journal provided readers with a firsthand account of the mountain ranges, wild rivers, and exotic indigenous peoples of the interior regions, which appeared on most European maps as dark and vacant spaces.

At just sixteen, he was hired to survey Lord Fairfax’s vast landholdings in the Shenandoah Valley — a job that sharpened his endurance, his eye for terrain, and his ability to lead men in difficult conditions.

Washington as a Military Leader

Washington the Soldier, by Jacques Auguste Regnier, 1834. Image: Wikipedia

At twenty-one, Washington’s military ambitions ignited. He was appointed as a major in the Virginia militia and sent by (British) Governor Robert Dinwiddie on a dangerous diplomatic mission to the French forts in the Ohio Valley, demanding they withdraw from land claimed by Britain. The French politely refused.

The resulting conflict — the French and Indian War — would be Washington’s first real military test as a British officer. His early campaigns were marked as much by disaster as by valor: in 1754, he was forced to surrender Fort Necessity, and a year later, he survived the catastrophic defeat of General Braddock’s forces near Fort Duquesne – in what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – where two horses were shot out from under him, and four bullets pierced his coat. He emerged physically unscathed and with a reputation for almost supernatural presence under fire. He retired from the militia with the rank of colonel.

By 1759, Washington had resigned his military commission, married the wealthy 27-year-old widow Martha Dandridge Custis, and settled into the life of a gentleman farmer at his Mount Vernon estate on the Potomac River. He managed her 18,000-acre estate and, as a result, became one of the wealthiest men in Virginia, thereby increasing his social standing. Over the next fifteen years, he became one of Virginia’s most prominent planters, a member of the House of Burgesses, and a careful student of the growing tensions between the American colonies and the British Crown.

George Washington as Farmer at Mount Vernon, by Junius Brutus Stearns. Image: Wikipedia

Historical Trivia:

On his plantation at Mount Vernon, Washington was one of the first farmers to grow coffee plants in Virginia. Today, Mount Vernon continues the gardening tradition Washington began, with two coffee plants still cultivated on site. These plants are mostly grown for their appealing looks rather than their productivity in producing caffeinated beverages. An arabica strand of coffee bean comes from seeds given to him by Thomas Law, his grandson-in-law, in 1799.

Though not yet a radical, Washington – like other leaders – grew increasingly frustrated by British taxation policies and trade restrictions that he saw as both economically damaging and constitutionally unjust.

Washington as Commander-in-Chief: Leading America Through War

George Washington accepting Continental Army commission, by Currier and Ives. Image: Wikipedia

When the Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in 1775 in the wake of the initial Battles of Lexington and Concord, the delegates faced an urgent problem: they had a war but no general to fight it. Washington, who arrived at the Congress in his Virginia militia uniform — perhaps not entirely by accident — was the obvious choice.

He was tall, dignified, experienced, and crucially, a Virginian at a time when southern support for the rebellion was essential. He stood about 6’2″ amongst men who were between 5’6″ and 5’9″, a head higher than the average male of his time. On June 15, 1775, Congress unanimously appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. He accepted the role without pay, asking only to be reimbursed for expenses.

Historical Trivia:

Contrary to popular belief, George Washington did not wear a wig, a common practice for gentlemen since the time of Louis XIV of France and Charles II of England. Instead, he wore his hair curled, powdered, and tied in a queue, in the style of the day.

What followed was eight years of grueling, often desperate warfare. Washington was not a flawless tactician — he lost more battles than he won — but he possessed something rarer and more valuable: the ability to hold an army, a cause, and a fragile coalition of colonies together through the darkest of times. His forces were perpetually underfunded, undersupplied, and undermanned. Congress was often ineffective in supporting the army. Desertions were common. Foreign allies were not always reliable.

His greatest moments were defined less by grand victories than by improbable survival. The crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776 — immortalized in Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting — was a bold, surprise attack on Hessian forces at Trenton, New Jersey, that injected desperately needed momentum into a collapsing cause.

Washington and Lafayette at Valley Forge, by John Ward Dunsmore, 1907. Image: Wikipedia

The brutal winter encampment at Valley Forge in 1777–78, where thousands of men froze and starved, tested Washington’s personal resolve to its absolute limit. Yet, he remained with his men, trained them under the Prussian drillmaster, and emerged with a far more professional fighting force.

The war’s decisive turning point came with the Franco-American victory at Yorktown in October 1781, where Washington — in a brilliantly coordinated operation with French General Rochambeau and Admiral de Grasse — trapped General Cornwallis‘ British army on the Virginia peninsula, forcing a surrender that effectively ended major combat operations. On the ground, there were four French soldiers for every American soldier.

When peace was formally concluded with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Washington did something that astonished the world: rather than seize power as a victorious general easily could have, he resigned his commission and returned to private life at Mount Vernon. English King George III himself reportedly said that if Washington truly did this, he would be “the greatest man in the world.” 

Washington’s First Presidency: Building a Nation from Scratch

Scene at the signing of the Constitution of the United States, depicting Washington as the presiding officer at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, by Howard Chandler Christy. Image: Wikipedia

Washington did not stay retired for long. The Articles of Confederation were failing, and the young republic was lurching toward chaos. Washington reluctantly returned to public life to preside over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, lending the gathering immense credibility simply by his presence.

When the new Constitution was ratified, and the question of who should be the first President arose, there was never really any doubt. In a feat never since repeated, the Electoral College in February 1789 cast every single vote for George Washington. He was inaugurated on April 30, 1789, on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, the nation’s temporary capital. The White House was not yet built.

The challenges of the presidency were staggering. Washington was not inheriting an established government — he was inventing one. Every decision he made set a precedent. The structure of the Cabinet, the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, the protocol of foreign diplomacy, and the use of presidential veto power were all being defined in real time. Washington was acutely aware that his every action would be scrutinized and imitated by successors for generations, famously noting that he walked “on untrodden ground.”

George Washington portrait by Stuart Lansdown, White House. Note lips protruding over dentures. Image: Wikipedia

Historical Trivia:

When Washington took his oath of office at New York’s Federal Hall, he wore awkward-fitting, painful, and face-disfiguring dentures. He looked like the artifically jowley Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Contrary to popular belief, his false teeth were not made of wood. Instead, they were made of a variety of ivory, including horse, donkeys, and cows. They clacked open and shut on tight wire springs.

His first term was dominated by efforts to stabilize the new nation’s finances, largely under the guidance of his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. The assumption of state war debts, the establishment of a national bank, and the creation of a sound credit system were all bitterly contested but ultimately transformative achievements. His Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, and Hamilton clashed constantly, their rivalry giving birth to America’s first political parties — the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans — a development Washington viewed with deep alarm.

Washington was re-elected unanimously in 1792. His second term was more turbulent. The French Revolution had destabilized European alliances, and Washington steered a careful course of neutrality despite enormous pressure from both Britain and France.

The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, in which western Pennsylvania farmers violently resisted a federal excise tax, allowed Washington to demonstrate federal authority by personally leading troops to suppress the uprising — the only sitting U.S. president ever to command troops in the field personally.

By 1796, Washington was exhausted and deeply wearied by partisan attacks and the weight of the presidency. He declined a third term — setting a precedent that would endure for 150 years — and issued his celebrated Farewell Address, a document that warned against permanent foreign alliances, the dangers of political factionalism, and the importance of national unity. It remains one of the most influential political documents in American history.

Washington’s Legacy: The Indispensable Man

Statue of George Washington in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., September 12, 2017. Image: National Review

Despite previous hagiographies written about him, he was no saint, and historians have not always been uncritical of Washington. Historians often are found to be:

oscillating in a swoonish swing between idolization and evisceration.

…as Joseph Ellis relates in his book on Washington, His Excellency. He further observes that,

Washington is noticed primarily as an inviting target for all the glaring failures of the revolutionary generation to meet our own superior standards of political and racial justice.

Yet even accounting for his personal flaws and our current “teleological presentism” – looking at the past through a lens of current moral, social, or political judgments – the weight of Washington’s historical achievement is almost without parallel. He won a war against the world’s most powerful military with a ragtag citizen army. He voluntarily surrendered power not once but twice, even though he could have easily held it.

Every Founding Father, despite their many accomplishments, acknowledged that Washington was their unquestioned superior. 

He shepherded the creation of constitutional government through its most fragile infancy. The historian James Thomas Flexner described him simply as “the indispensable man,” and the phrase has stuck, because it is hard to argue otherwise. The United States, as it emerged in the late eighteenth century, was, in very large measure, the product of one man’s character, endurance, and willingness to serve.

Washington on his Deathbed, by Junius Brutus Stearns, 1851. Image: Wikipedia

He died on December 14, 1799, at Mount Vernon at the age of 67. Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of France, ordered a ten-day mourning period for France and delivered a personal eulogy.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com