George Washington: the general who won America

George Washington was the commander who would not lose the war by losing a battle. Leading a ragged Continental Army against one of the most powerful empires of the age, he survived defeat after defeat, struck back at Trenton when all seemed lost, and held on until the Franco-American victory at Yorktown secured American independence. He was not a great tactician, and he knew it. What he had was character: the ability to hold the confidence of an army and a people, and the stubbornness to keep both in the field. Then, at the height of his power, he gave it up.²

Compare: Washington vs Cornwallis

A Virginia youth

Washington was born on 22 February 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia; under the Julian calendar still used in the British colonies at the time, the date was 11 February. He grew up mostly at Ferry Farm on the Rappahannock River, near Fredericksburg. When he was eleven his father, Augustine, died, and his older half brothers inherited most of the estate. George received a smaller farm and ten enslaved people. He never went to university; instead he learned practical mathematics and surveying, and by 17 he held his first official commission as surveyor of Culpeper County.³

In 1751 he sailed to Barbados with his half brother Lawrence, who was ill with tuberculosis. It was the only time he left the borders of what became the United States, and he came home marked by smallpox but immune to it for life. Lawrence died in 1752, and within a few years Washington was master of Mount Vernon.⁴

A soldier of the frontier

Washington learned war on the frontier. In October 1753 Virginia's lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie, sent the 21-year-old to warn the French out of the Ohio Valley. The French refused, and Washington's return journey nearly killed him: he was shot at by an Indian at close range, fell from a raft into the ice-choked Allegheny, and almost froze. He reached Williamsburg on 16 January 1754 with his report.⁵

Promoted to lieutenant colonel, he marched west in the spring of 1754. On 28 May his men and allied Indians under Tanacharison attacked a French party at Jumonville Glen, killing its commander, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville. The French answered in force, and on 3 July they surrounded the stockade he had built in a waterlogged meadow, Fort Necessity, and forced him to surrender after a day's fighting. The terms he signed, in French, which he could not read, admitted the "assassination" of Jumonville. The skirmish helped ignite the Seven Years' War.⁶

In 1755 he rode with General Edward Braddock against Fort Duquesne as a volunteer aide. On 9 July the column was ambushed near the Monongahela and destroyed. Washington, so ill he rode on a cushion, carried orders across the field, had two horses shot under him and four bullets through his coat, and helped bring the survivors out. Braddock was mortally wounded. A month later, at 23, Washington was given command of all Virginia's troops, guarding a frontier of hundreds of miles with a few hundred ill-disciplined men. He resigned at the end of 1758, after Fort Duquesne fell, frustrated that he had never won the royal commission he wanted.⁷

Planter and rebel

In January 1759 he married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis and took his seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. At Mount Vernon he quadrupled the house, grew the estate to nearly 8,000 acres, gave up tobacco for wheat, and experimented with crop rotation. The plantation ran on enslaved labor. Washington bought dozens of people before the war, and Martha brought 84 enslaved people from the estate of her first husband to Mount Vernon.⁸

Debt to London merchants and anger at Parliament's taxes turned him against British rule. He backed non-importation in the House of Burgesses, and in 1774 he went to Philadelphia as one of Virginia's delegates to the First Continental Congress. After the fighting at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army, and on 15 June it chose Washington, unanimously, as commander in chief. He was the most experienced soldier among the delegates, but he was also a Virginian, and putting a southerner at the head of what was still a New England army bound the colonies together. He refused any pay beyond his expenses.⁹

Commander in chief

On 3 July 1775 he took command of the army besieging Boston, a crowd of volunteers that at its peak slightly exceeded 20,000 men, with poor sanitation, little discipline and officers who quarreled over rank. He imposed order, and in the winter he sent Henry Knox to drag the guns captured at Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. On the night of 4 March 1776 he occupied Dorchester Heights and mounted the guns over the harbor. The British commander, Sir William Howe, evacuated the city on 17 March.¹⁰

It was the last easy success for years. Washington then moved to defend New York, and there he made his worst mistakes. He placed half his army on Brooklyn Heights, where a British fleet could cut it off, and on 27 August 1776 Howe outflanked it at the Battle of Long Island. The Americans lost about 2,000 men: some 300 killed, 800 wounded and 1,079 missing or captured. Washington saved the rest by ferrying them across the East River under cover of fog, but over the following weeks he was driven out of Manhattan, lost Fort Washington with about 2,600 men, and retreated across New Jersey while his army melted away.¹¹ › The Battle of Long Island, 1776

The darkest hour, Trenton and Princeton

By December 1776 the enlistments of nearly half his men were due to expire on 1 January. Washington planned a stroke to save the cause. On the night of 25 December he recrossed the icy Delaware with about 2,400 men, ferried by John Glover's Marblehead fishermen, marched through a snowstorm, and at dawn fell on the Hessian garrison at Trenton. In less than two hours the Hessians were beaten, their commander Johann Rall mortally wounded and nearly 1,000 men captured, without an American killed in the fighting.¹²

Lord Cornwallis hurried to Trenton with about 8,000 men and found Washington behind Assunpink Creek. He decided to wait for morning to "bag the old fox." That night Washington left his campfires burning, slipped around the British flank on frozen roads, and on 3 January 1777 routed three British regiments at Princeton before withdrawing to winter quarters at Morristown. The two victories did not change the balance of forces, but they revived a cause that had seemed finished and brought recruits back in the spring.¹³ › The Ten Crucial Days, 1776 to 1777

Philadelphia, Valley Forge and Monmouth

In 1777 Howe sailed south and landed below Philadelphia. Washington, with about 11,000 men, met him on 11 September at Brandywine Creek, where Cornwallis marched around the American right and broke it. Philadelphia fell on 26 September, Congress fled, and Washington's counterstroke at Germantown failed. That autumn the victory at Saratoga went to Horatio Gates, and a cabal of officers and congressmen tried to put Gates in Washington's place. Washington exposed and crushed it.¹⁴

The army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge for the winter of 1777 to 1778, beaten twice, badly housed and short of food and clothing, with thousands of men barefoot. Washington stayed with it, never moving into comfortable quarters before his men were sheltered, and Martha joined him in February. That winter the Prussian volunteer Baron von Steuben drilled the troops into a disciplined force, and by spring the army that marched out of the camp was not the one that had marched in.¹⁵ › Baron von Steuben

The French alliance of 1778 changed the war. The British abandoned Philadelphia for New York, and on 28 June Washington caught their rear guard at Monmouth. When General Charles Lee ordered a retreat, Washington rode forward, rebuked him and restored the line, but the chance of a decisive blow was lost. For the next three years the main armies watched each other around New York while the war moved south.¹⁶

Yorktown

By 1781 the British under Cornwallis were campaigning in Virginia after Nathanael Greene, Washington's best general, had worn them down in the Carolinas. Cornwallis fortified Yorktown and waited for the navy. Washington wanted to attack New York, but Rochambeau and the French admiral de Grasse preferred the Chesapeake, and Washington agreed. On 19 August he marched south with the French army. De Grasse's fleet drove the British from the Chesapeake in early September, sealing Cornwallis in. The allies dug their trenches closer and closer, bombarding the town: about 5,500 Continentals, 3,500 Virginia militia and 5,000 French regulars against roughly 7,000 British troops. On 19 October Cornwallis surrendered. Britannica calls the campaign probably the finest display of Washington's generalship.¹⁷ › Battle of the Chesapeake, 1781

Giving up the sword

The war was not formally over, and the army, unpaid for months or years, grew dangerous. In 1782 Colonel Lewis Nicola suggested that Washington use the army to make himself king, and Washington rejected the idea with fury. In March 1783, when officers at Newburgh circulated an anonymous address threatening Congress, he met them, read a speech urging obedience to the civil power, and, fumbling for his spectacles to read a letter, remarked that he had grown gray and almost blind in the service of his country. The plot collapsed.¹⁸

The Treaty of Paris recognized American independence in 1783. On 23 December, in the Maryland State House at Annapolis, Washington returned his commission to Congress and rode home to Mount Vernon, arriving on Christmas Eve. He had served eight years without a salary. In an age of kings and military strongmen, a victorious general handing back his power was extraordinary.¹⁹

The first president

The weak Confederation alarmed him, and Shays's Rebellion in 1786 convinced him that reform could not wait. In 1787 he went to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, was elected its president and attended every session; his support helped win ratification. In 1789 the electors chose him unanimously as the first president, and he took the oath on 30 April on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York. He chose Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph for his first cabinet, backed Hamilton's financial program, kept the country neutral when Britain and France went to war in 1793, sent troops against the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and signed the unpopular Jay Treaty with Britain in 1795.²⁰

Re-elected unanimously in 1792, he refused a third term. His Farewell Address of 19 September 1796, drafted largely by Hamilton but shaped by Washington, warned against faction and entangling foreign ties, and in March 1797 he went home to Mount Vernon.²¹

Death and memory

On 12 December 1799 Washington rode for hours around his farms in cold and wet snow and sat down to dinner without changing. The next night he woke with a throat infection and could hardly breathe. His doctors bled him four times and blistered his throat, which only added to his suffering, and he died between 10 and 11 p.m. on 14 December.²²

His will freed the 122 enslaved people he owned after Martha's death, freed his valet William Lee at once and provided for the old and the young. It could not touch the other half of the more than 300 enslaved people at Mount Vernon, who belonged to the estate of Martha's first husband and passed to her heirs. In Congress, Henry Lee called him "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." The capital already bore his name, and a state later would too.²³

See his decisive victory at the Battle of Yorktown, his partner in that campaign the Marquis de Lafayette, the Battle of Saratoga that brought France into the war, the early modern era, or the greatest battles in American history. His birthday falls on 22 February.