Theme: George Washington

THEME:George Washington

PLAN:

1. George Washington

2. Washington played an indispensable role in adopting .

3. Washington has been memorialized by monuments .

George Washington (February 22, 1732[b] – December 14, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the 1st president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of the Continental Army, Washington led the Patriot forces to victory in the American Revolutionary War and served as the president of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which created the Constitution of the United States and the American federal government. Washington has been called the "Father of the Nation" for his manifold leadership in the formative days of the country.
Washington's first public office was serving as the official surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia from 1749 to 1750. Subsequently, he received his initial military training (as well as a command with the Virginia Regiment) during the French and Indian War. He was later elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and was named a delegate to the Continental Congress. Here he was appointed Commanding General of the Continental Army. With this title, he commanded American forces (allied with France) in the defeat and surrender of the British at the Siege of Yorktown during the American Revolutionary War. He resigned his commission after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.
Portrait based on the unfinished Athenaeum Portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1796
Washington played an indispensable role in adopting and ratifying the Constitution of the United States. He was then twice elected president by the Electoral College unanimously. As president, he implemented a strong, well-financed national government while remaining impartial in a fierce rivalry between cabinet members Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. During the French Revolution, he proclaimed a policy of neutrality while sanctioning the Jay Treaty. He set enduring precedents for the office of president, including the title "Mr. President", and swearing the Oath of Office on the Bible. His Farewell Address is widely regarded as a pre-eminent statement on republicanism.
Washington was a slave owner who had a complicated relationship with slavery. During his lifetime he controlled a cumulative total of over 577 slaves, who were forced to work on his farms and wherever he lived, including the President's House in Philadelphia. As president, he signed laws passed by Congress that both protected and curtailed slavery. His will said that one of his slaves, William Lee, should be freed upon his death and that the other 123 slaves must work for his wife and be freed on her death. She freed them during her lifetime to remove the incentive for hastening her death.
He endeavored to assimilate Native Americans into the Anglo-American culture. However, he waged military campaigns against hostile Native American nations during the Revolutionary War and the Northwest Indian War. He was a member of the Anglican Church and the Freemasons, and he urged broad religious freedom in his roles as general and president.
Colonel George Washington, by Charles Willson Peale, 1772
Washington has been memorialized by monuments, a federal holiday, various media depictions, geographical locations, including the national capital, the State of Washington, stamps, and currency, and many scholars and ordinary Americans alike rank him among the greatest U.S. presidents. In 1976 Washington was posthumously promoted to the rank of General of the Armies of the United States, the highest rank in the United States Army.
The Washington family was a wealthy Virginia planter family that had made its fortune through land speculation and the cultivation of tobacco.[14] Washington's great-grandfather John Washington emigrated in 1656[15] from Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, England, to the English colony of Virginia where he accumulated 5,000 acres (2,000 ha) of land, including Little Hunting Creek on the Potomac River.[16] George Washington was born on February 22, 1732,[b] at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, in the British colony of Virginia,[17] and was the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington.[18] His father was a justice of the peace and a prominent public figure who had four additional children from his first marriage to Jane Butler.[19] The family moved to Little Hunting Creek in 1735. In 1738, they moved to Ferry Farm near Fredericksburg, Virginia on the Rappahannock River. When Augustine died in 1743, Washington inherited Ferry Farm and ten slaves; his older half-brother Lawrence inherited Little Hunting Creek and renamed it Mount Vernon.
Martha Washington based on a 1757 portrait by John Wollaston
Washington did not have the formal education his elder brothers received at Appleby Grammar School in England, but did attend the Lower Church School in Hartfield. He learned mathematics, trigonometry, and land surveying and became a talented draftsman and map-maker. By early adulthood, he was writing with "considerable force" and "precision";[20] however, his writing displayed little wit or humor. In pursuit of admiration, status, and power, he tended to attribute his shortcomings and failures to someone else's ineffectuality.[21]
Washington often visited Mount Vernon and Belvoir, the plantation that belonged to Lawrence's father-in-law William Fairfax. Fairfax became Washington's patron and surrogate father, and Washington spent a month in 1748 with a team surveying Fairfax's Shenandoah Valley property.[22] He received a surveyor's license the following year from the College of William & Mary.[c] Even though Washington had not served the customary apprenticeship, Fairfax appointed him surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, and he appeared in Culpeper County to take his oath of office July 20, 1749. He subsequently familiarized himself with the frontier region, and though he resigned from the job in 1750, he continued to do surveys west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.[24] By 1752 he had bought almost 1,500 acres (600 ha) in the Valley and owned 2,315 acres (937 ha).[25]
In 1751, Washington made his only trip abroad when he accompanied Lawrence to Barbados, hoping the climate would cure his brother's tuberculosis.[26] Washington contracted smallpox during that trip, which immunized him and left his face slightly scarred.[27] Lawrence died in 1752, and Washington leased Mount Vernon from his widow Anne; he inherited it outright after her death in 1761.
General Washington, Commander of the Continental Army by Charles Willson Peale (1776)