George Washington

About this figure

George Washington was born on 22 February 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into a family of modest planter gentry, and got his start not at a desk but outdoors. As a teenager he trained as a surveyor, and a journal he kept in 1748, recording weeks spent surveying land beyond the Blue Ridge for Lord Fairfax, survives as one of the earliest documents in his own hand. That backcountry apprenticeship, followed by hard military experience during the French and Indian War, including the loss of Fort Necessity in 1754 and his presence at the disastrous Braddock expedition of 1755, gave him an early reputation for composure under pressure that shaped the rest of his public life.

In June 1775 the Second Continental Congress appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed Continental Army, a post he held through the Revolutionary War until he resigned his commission in December 1783. That resignation followed a circular letter he sent to the state governments that June, urging them toward stronger federal union and warning against the dangers of a weak central government, one of several moments in his career when he used a public letter to shape opinion rather than simply issue an order. He presided over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and was elected the first President of the United States in 1789, serving two terms until 1797. His First Inaugural Address, delivered in New York in April 1789, opens with an unusually personal admission of anxiety at leaving a private retirement he had, in his words, chosen "with the fondest predilection," a note of reluctance that recurs through his public writing.

As president he delivered an annual address to Congress in most years of his administration, the forerunner of what is now called the State of the Union. In 1790 he answered a welcoming letter from Moses Seixas, warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, with a reply assuring American Jews that the federal government "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," language that echoed a phrase in Seixas's own letter and that has since become closely associated with Washington's stated views on religious liberty. He had also been a Freemason since 1752, initiated at the Fredericksburg lodge in Virginia, and he kept up an active correspondence with Masonic lodges for the rest of his life.

Washington declined to seek a third term, and his Farewell Address of 1796, published as a letter rather than delivered as a speech, warned against permanent foreign entanglements and the dangers of party faction; it has been reprinted and invoked in American political debate ever since. He died at Mount Vernon on 14 December 1799. His will, signed that July, directed that the enslaved people he held in his own right be freed after his wife Martha's death, one of the few such provisions among slaveholding Founders, though it applied only to those he personally owned and not to the larger number of people held under the Custis estate that Martha controlled during her lifetime.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.