Wizards of America - George Washington

Well met, Wizards one and all,

As always, we hope that the day finds you in good health and high spirits!

As the United States marks its 250th year,   This July of our Founding we continue our Wizards of America series by turning to none other than perhaps the most well known of Americans, George Washington, a man whose name has become woven into the nation’s life.

He has been cast in bronze and carved into mountains; His portrait on the nation’s currency has come to stand for the country so completely that he can seem less like a human being than a public emblem. These honors are fitting, though familiarity can sometimes leave the living man difficult to see. Behind the monument stood a life spent learning how to bear responsibility and how to handle power when few reliable examples stood ready to guide him.

However, to understand Washington’s importance, we must begin well before the presidency, and indeed, even before the Revolution he would one day lead to victory... We begin instead with the formation of the man himself.

He was born on February 22, 1732, at Pope’s Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into the provincial gentry, though not at its highest rank. When George was six, the family moved to the plantation later known as Ferry Farm, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg. His childhood is among the least documented portions of his life, and the surviving record tells us little about the affections and anxieties of the Washington household.

Augustine Washington died suddenly when George was eleven. Whatever silence the record keeps about the boy’s private grief, the loss was personal before it was practical. He had lost his father at an age when he was only beginning to imagine the man he might become. Mary Ball Washington was left to raise their five children and manage the family plantation. As the eldest of her children, George helped her and learned early that responsibility often arrives before one feels ready. There is something poignant in this beginning: a boy left fatherless at eleven would one day be remembered as the Father of His Country.

The empty spaces in Washington’s childhood later proved irresistible to storytellers, most famously Mason Locke “Parson” Weems. In Weems’s telling, a six-year-old George damaged his father’s prized cherry tree with a new hatchet, then confessed because he couldn’t tell a lie. Augustine’s anger dissolved into an embrace, for the honesty of his son was worth more than a thousand trees. Weems first published the episode in 1806, seven years after Washington’s death, so the old cherry tree belongs to American folklore rather than documented biography. Parson Weems possessed a cheerful talent for providing history with the scenes it had neglected to record. The tale endured because it rendered Washington’s adult reputation for honesty in child-sized form. It also gave later Americans a tender moment between George and the father he would lose only a few years afterward.

Augustine’s death also redirected Washington’s education. His older half brothers, Lawrence and Augustine, had attended Appleby Grammar School in England, but the family could no longer afford to send George along the same path. Private tutors and possibly a local school in Fredericksburg provided his formal instruction. He studied reading, writing, arithmetic, basic legal forms, geometry, and trigonometry, practical knowledge that would soon serve him as a surveyor. His schooling was useful rather than classical, suited to a young man who would have to make his way through ability and application. Formal lessons ended when he was about fifteen, but his education did not. He continued reading throughout his life to become a better soldier, farmer, and statesman.

He also copied out the 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, probably as an exercise in penmanship. The maxims came from a European courtesy manual and instructed a young gentleman in how to conduct himself in company, showing respect through the small habits of speech and bearing. Some dealt with conscience and fairness. Others addressed such practical hazards as humming to oneself or speaking through a yawn. To a young Virginian eager to establish himself, they would have offered a working grammar of respectable conduct. Character became visible through small actions, and reputation began accumulating long before public life. Copying them was a fitting exercise for someone already intent on shaping his conduct.

This effort at self-formation would remain visible throughout his life. Washington possessed strong passions and considerable ambition. His celebrated composure came through discipline rather than ease. He learned to watch his words, master his posture, and consider the impression his actions left upon others. To Washington, a good name carried obligations. Reputation could hold confidence and create room for action, but it had to be renewed through conduct. He spent his life building that resource, then placed it at risk whenever public duty called.

At sixteen, Washington joined a surveying expedition into the Shenandoah Valley associated with the powerful Fairfax family. The work required more than drawing lines on a clean page. A surveyor traveled through rough country, took careful measurements, kept dependable records, and rendered disputed ground into a form that courts and landowners could recognize. In 1749, at seventeen, Washington became the official surveyor of Culpeper County. During the next several years, he completed nearly two hundred professional surveys.

Surveying gave him an education that no classroom could have supplied. He learned the Virginia backcountry through direct experience and developed an eye for terrain that would later serve him in war. He also learned the economic force of information. Accurate knowledge of land could become property and influence, then wealth. Washington used that knowledge to acquire western acreage of his own. The work placed him at the forward edge of colonial settlement, where British, French, and Native claims increasingly overlapped. Those competing claims would soon carry him from the surveyor’s chain into military service. From the beginning, Washington’s practical intelligence was shaped by real country, difficult travel, and decisions whose consequences couldn’t be solved on paper.

His early military career grew from the same western contest. In 1753, Virginia’s lieutenant governor sent the twenty-one-year-old major into the Ohio Country with a warning for French forces building forts in territory claimed by Britain. The journey was difficult, and Washington’s published account made his courage and endurance known at home. The following year, he returned with troops. Near a place later called Jumonville Glen, Washington’s force surprised a French detachment that he believed had been scouting his position. When his approach was discovered, the French ran for their arms, a brief fight followed, and their commander, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, was among the dead when it ended. French officials later remembered the purpose and conduct of their party rather differently, as opposing powers have a stubborn habit of doing once reports reach the capital.

Washington soon withdrew to a hastily constructed position called Fort Necessity, set in low ground that proved dangerously vulnerable. On July 3, 1754, surrounded and soaked by heavy rain, he surrendered. The French-language terms contained a description of Jumonville’s death that Washington said had been mistranslated to him. The French circulated it as an admission of assassination. Paperwork, Washington discovered, could wound a reputation almost as efficiently as gunfire. His first independent command ended in defeat, and the encounter became one of the sparks that widened into the French and Indian War and, beyond North America, the Seven Years’ War.

Failure became one of Washington’s sternest instructors.

He had shown energy and personal bravery, yet bravery couldn’t repair poor ground or flawed preparation. In 1755, the twenty-three-year-old Washington returned to the frontier as a volunteer aide to British General Edward Braddock, eager to learn from the regular army and restore his standing after Fort Necessity. During the march toward Fort Duquesne, a violent illness confined him to his bed and a wagon for more than ten days. He rejoined the advancing column before he had fully recovered and later recalled having to mount his horse upon cushions.

On July 9, after Braddock’s army crossed the Monongahela River within a few miles of the French fort, the woods erupted with gunfire. A smaller force of French and Native fighters spread through the trees and along the flanks of the British column. The regulars struggled to see the enemy and crowded together amid smoke, noise, and contradictory movement. Washington believed that some fired into their own ranks. Within three hours, sixty of Braddock’s eighty-six officers had been killed or wounded, and the general himself received a mortal wound.

Braddock’s other aides were wounded early, leaving Washington as the only aide still able to carry the general’s orders. Weak from illness, he rode back and forth across the collapsing field, carrying instructions, trying to rally soldiers, and helping to form an escape from the ruin. Mounted officers made conspicuous targets. Two horses were shot beneath him, and four musket balls passed through his coat. Washington emerged without a wound while death, as he later wrote, had been levelling his companions on every side.

News traveled faster than the survivors. By the time Washington reached Fort Cumberland, a report was already circulating that he had died and delivered a final speech. He dryly assured his brother that he remained alive and had “not, as yet, composed” the speech. He attributed his escape to “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence,” observing that he had been protected beyond ordinary probability and expectation. Later retellings occasionally added a bullet through his hat, though Washington’s own account mentions only the coat and horses. The verified story scarcely needs the extra embroidery.

The defeat brought Washington personal renown. Governor Dinwiddie praised him as the hero of Monongahela, and he was soon made colonel and commander of the Virginia Regiment. Only weeks after the battle, the Virginia preacher Samuel Davies pointed to “that heroic youth Col.   Washington” and expressed his hope that Providence had preserved him for “some important Service to his Country.” The words would sound prophetic twenty years later. To those who heard the story in 1755, Washington’s survival suggested that his life still had important work before it.

That reputation followed him into the Revolution. According to a later family recollection, Dr. James Craik, who had seen Washington exposed to danger at Monongahela, invoked the story before the Battle of Monmouth in 1778 to encourage Continental soldiers. The recollection was recorded decades afterward and carries the color of legend, but it captures the faith Washington’s survival came to represent. While he stood, the cause might yet stand with him. His soldiers came to know him as a commander who entered danger beside them and remained in the saddle when a line began to break.

Monongahela gave Washington more than fame. He watched a disciplined imperial force dissolve when its methods failed to suit the country in which it fought. Personal courage could save lives in retreat, but it couldn’t replace preparation, flexible judgment, or command suited to the ground. He would carry those lessons into a much greater war.

Washington spent the next years commanding the Virginia Regiment along a troubled frontier. There he gained experience in supply, recruitment, discipline, correspondence, and the daily administration that holds an army together. He left military service in 1758 and entered a different phase of public life. His marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis brought companionship, family responsibility, and control over a substantial estate. He took his seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, managed Mount Vernon, pursued western land interests, and became one of the colony’s most prominent planters.

Mount Vernon was also part of the slaveholding order of colonial Virginia. Washington had inherited enslaved people when he was still a boy, and his marriage placed him at the head of a household that included many more people legally bound to the Custis estate. At this stage of his life, he largely accepted the institution as part of the world he had inherited. Yet the language of liberty that soon filled his public life would not leave that inheritance unexamined. The change in his thinking would take years, and its fullest expression belongs near the end of his story. We will return to Mount Vernon when Washington does.

For now, we turn our attention to the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. It was then that Washington moved gradually toward resistance. He opposed parliamentary taxation and joined nonimportation efforts. By the time he attended the First and Second Continental Congresses, fellow delegates knew him as a wealthy Virginian, an experienced soldier, and a man whose disciplined bearing suggested reliability. In June 1775, John Adams proposed him for command of the Continental Army. A Virginian at the head of forces then concentrated around Boston could help bind the southern colonies to a struggle that might otherwise appear chiefly New England’s concern. Congress chose Washington unanimously.

He accepted the command while declining a salary, asking Congress only to repay his expenses. The gesture reflected humility and an acute awareness of public trust. Washington understood that service had to be visibly separated from personal profit, especially in a cause asking ordinary men to make great sacrifices. He also understood that a continental cause required a continental army, and the force awaiting him remained a collection of provincial units with uneven organization. Its soldiers came from colonies jealous of their independence. Enlistments expired, supplies failed to arrive, officers disputed rank, and Congress attempted to direct a war without the powers or revenues of a national government. Washington’s task was to create durable order while remaining answerable to civilian representatives who could advise and plead more readily than they could compel.

Of course, transforming these provincial forces into a continental army would take time, and some of Washington’s earliest decisions revealed the limits of his judgment. His policy toward Black soldiers also showed his capacity to reconsider an inherited assumption when experience required it. He initially opposed their further enlistment. By the end of 1775, as manpower needs sharpened and Virginia’s royal governor offered freedom to enslaved men who joined the British, Washington permitted free Black soldiers already serving to reenlist. Their service strengthened the Continental Army and revealed something characteristic of Washington at his best: experience could persuade him to change course.

On July 9, 1776, Washington ordered the newly adopted Declaration of Independence read aloud to his assembled troops in New York. British ships were gathering in the harbor, and a vast enemy force was preparing to descend upon them. The words from Philadelphia changed the declared object of the army standing there. These soldiers were now defending an independent political creation whose survival remained deeply uncertain. Later that evening, a crowd pulled down the gilded statue of King George III at Bowling Green. Symbols could be toppled in a night. Washington’s harder work was to keep the cause alive after the exhilaration passed.

The New York campaign brought severe defeats. Washington’s army was outmaneuvered on Long Island and driven from the city. A skillful nighttime withdrawal across the East River saved thousands of men, but further losses followed, including the surrender of the garrison at Fort Washington. By December, the army had retreated across New Jersey. Enlistments were about to expire, public confidence was collapsing, and the Revolution seemed close to extinction.

Washington’s greatest strategic achievement lay in understanding that the continued existence of the army was itself a form of victory. He learned when to preserve it and when a calculated stroke could restore its spirit. On Christmas night in 1776, he led his forces across the ice-choked Delaware River and attacked the Hessian garrison at Trenton. He followed the success with another at Princeton. The victories were modest beside the immense battles of European war, yet their effect was profound. They revived morale, disrupted British expectations, and showed that Washington could unite knowledge of terrain with timing and bold action.

His command also depended upon forms of judgment less visible than a river crossing. Smallpox threatened the Continental forces throughout the war. Washington had survived the disease as a young man during a visit to Barbados and knew its destructive power. In 1777, he ordered the systematic inoculation of soldiers entering the army. The procedure carried risk and had to be managed carefully so that recovering troops didn’t leave the army exposed. It became one of the war’s most consequential decisions. Applied knowledge protected the force more effectively than courage could have done.

The same practical intelligence shaped the winter at Valley Forge. The army suffered from shortages, disease, and failures of supply, but Valley Forge was also a place of institution-building. Washington pressed Congress and state governments for support, appointed Nathanael Greene to reorganize the quartermaster system, and welcomed the training methods of Baron Friedrich von Steuben. Soldiers emerged with greater cohesion and a common system of drill. The familiar image of endurance belongs to Valley Forge, alongside the harder work of transforming suffering into preparation.

Of course, as is true of all men, Washington still made mistakes. His preference for a decisive attack on British-held New York lasted longer than circumstances warranted. The Yorktown campaign of 1781 succeeded because Washington listened and adapted. French General Rochambeau urged movement toward Virginia, while Admiral de Grasse’s fleet created a fleeting opportunity in the Chesapeake. Washington shifted the combined American and French armies southward and coordinated a siege that trapped Lord Cornwallis. Victory at Yorktown grew from alliance and logistics, strengthened by a commanding general willing to release an old plan when a better one became possible.

The surrender at Yorktown ended major combat, though peace and payment remained unresolved. Officers who had served for years now faced the prospect of returning home without wages or promised pensions. In early 1783, anger at Congress gathered at Newburgh, New York. Anonymous writings encouraged the officers toward collective action that could have placed the army against the civilian government it had fought to establish.

Washington opposed the movement, but his formal address didn’t immediately settle the room. He then unfolded a letter from a member of Congress and reached for spectacles that many of his officers had never seen him wear. He asked their pardon, observing that he had grown gray and almost blind in service to his country. The sentence worked because eight years of shared hardship stood behind it. His officers knew his frustrations with Congress and knew that he had refused to turn those frustrations into a claim above the law. Their resistance subsided. Washington’s reputation had become a form of authority more powerful than threat.

On December 23, 1783, Washington entered the Old Senate Chamber of the Maryland State House in Annapolis to resign his commission before Congress. The ceremony was public and solemn. Accounts from the room remembered spectators weeping, Washington’s hand trembling as he held his address, and his voice faltering when he commended the country to the care of God. Eight years of war, sacrifice, and parting had gathered into a few pages.

The address was brief enough to preserve in full, and worthy of being heard in Washington’s own words, and so we present them to you here unchanged:

"Mr. President, The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country. Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence. A diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our Cause, the support of the Supreme Power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven. The Successful termination of the War has verified the most sanguine expectations, and my gratitude for the interposition of Providence, and the assistance I have received from my Country-men, encreases with every review of the momentous Contest. While I repeat my obligations to the Army in general, I should do injustice to my own feelings not to acknowledge in this place the peculiar Services and distinguished merits of the Gentlemen who have been attached to my person during the War. It was impossible the choice of confidential Officers to compose my family should have been more fortunate. Permit me Sir, to recommend in particular those, who have continued in Service to the present moment, as worthy of the favorable notice and patronage of Congress. I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life, by commending the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping. Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life."

He then presented his commission to Thomas Mifflin, the president of Congress. The image of the theatre was exact. Washington understood command as work entrusted to him for a purpose, not as a possession that success had made permanently his. When the work was finished, authority returned to those who had conferred it, and the commander left the stage.

Having led the army that defeated an empire, Washington had become the most admired man in the new nation. He now placed military power back into civilian hands, bowed to Congress, and departed for home. He reached Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, in time to spend his first Christmas there in more than eight years. In an age crowded with victorious generals who converted command into personal rule, his surrender of power gave the republic a living example of restraint. It became one of Washington’s most creative political achievements.

Washington hoped to enjoy his retirement, though the weakness of the new government soon drew his attention back toward national affairs. The government under the Articles of Confederation struggled with debt and interstate rivalry, while its inability to enforce decisions left national authority uncertain. Washington worried that the independence won by the army might be lost through governmental weakness. In 1787, he agreed to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and was chosen to preside. He spoke little during the formal debates, but his presence gave the gathering legitimacy. Delegates knew that any presidency created by the Constitution would likely be entrusted first to him, and confidence in his character helped make the office’s considerable executive power acceptable.

Washington became president in 1789 with no inherited republican model adequate to the office. He understood that nearly every choice could become a precedent. He accepted the simple title “Mr. President” and gathered the heads of the executive departments into what became the cabinet. The Constitution had said nothing about such a body, though Washington’s advisers quickly ensured that the new government would never lack opinions. By bringing Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson into the same administration, he placed competing visions of the country close enough that each would have to be heard. He established the expectation that the president would execute laws while remaining bounded by them. During the Whiskey Rebellion, he called militia into federal service to demonstrate that constitutional law could be enforced, then allowed the resistance to disperse with little bloodshed and later pardoned the two men convicted of treason. In foreign affairs, he preserved American neutrality during renewed war in Europe, judging that the young republic needed time more than martial glory.

As the work of governing continued, fierce opposition followed. Financial policy intensified conflict between followers of Hamilton and Jefferson. The Jay Treaty with Britain brought denunciations, and an increasingly partisan press attacked Washington personally. He disliked criticism and sometimes met it with anger, a failing that places him in fairly broad human company. Even so, opposition remained part of constitutional life, and Washington kept his popularity within constitutional limits. His concern for reputation again served a public purpose. Having made his own conduct inseparable from the credibility of the presidency, he worked to leave the office stronger than the individual occupying it.

As his second term approached its end, Washington again found an opportunity to define an office by leaving it. In 1796, he declined to seek the presidency again, although the Constitution placed no term limit upon him. His decision established an expectation that lasted until the twentieth century and later became law. In his Farewell Address, he urged Americans to value national union and cautioned that faction and foreign entanglements could endanger it. The struggles he foresaw still came, yet his retirement demonstrated once more that an office belonged to the republic rather than to the person who first gave it shape.

After leaving office, Washington returned once more to Mount Vernon. An honest account must return with him to slavery, the great contradiction within an otherwise extraordinary public life. By 1799, more than three hundred enslaved people lived on the estate. Washington legally owned 123 of them, while many others belonged to the Custis estate under the terms of Martha’s first marriage. His thinking had changed during and after the Revolution, and he came to favor ending slavery through legislative action. In his will, he carried that conviction into action across the full reach of his legal authority.

Washington ordered that every enslaved person he owned receive freedom after Martha’s death. William Lee, who had served beside him throughout the Revolutionary War, was granted immediate freedom and an annual pension. His instructions established continuing support for those too elderly or infirm to provide for themselves. Young people without parents able to provide for them were to be taught to read and write, then prepared for a useful occupation. Washington had no legal authority over the Custis dower slaves, whose ownership belonged to Martha’s first husband’s estate, but he exercised every power the law gave him over those who were his to free. Martha carried out the manumission early, and on January 1, 1801, all 123 people covered by Washington’s provision became free.

The scale and care of the act were extraordinary for his time. Washington was the only founding father to enact a large-scale manumission in his will, and the freedom he arranged at Mount Vernon preceded nationwide abolition by more than six decades. His final instructions joined liberty with the means to begin an independent life. The decision belongs among Washington’s accomplishments as an act of moral leadership. He had inherited slavery as part of the world that formed him, examined it across the course of his life, and finally directed every person within his legal power toward freedom.

George Washington died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799. By then, Americans had already begun to regard him as the father of their country. The title preserves the commander’s composure and the president’s dignity. The living Washington offers something richer. He was an ambitious young surveyor, an officer who learned from defeat, a commander who held an army together, and a statesman who repeatedly returned power to the people who had entrusted it to him. His growth gives the achievement its enduring human value.

We call George Washington a Wizard because he made self-command into a lifelong practice and learned to turn experience into responsible action. Land taught him to read terrain, while failure taught him that survival could be strategic. His long handling of authority taught him the creative power of relinquishing it. He used an earned reputation to hold together institutions that existed first as promises. An army followed civilian direction because he did. A presidency acquired limits because he observed them. At decisive moments, he placed responsibility above appetite and taught the country that command could culminate in return rather than possession.

The republic inherited Washington’s example of restrained power. His wisdom appeared in his willingness to learn from failure and allow experience to revise his judgment. Above all, it appeared in his repeated return of authority when duty was complete. His public example remains extraordinary: at moments when ambition could have converted popularity into personal rule, he chose the republic.

In this anniversary July, America can meet Washington beyond the monument. He was a man formed through ambition, error, study, endurance, and repeated tests of character. His example proves that authority becomes trustworthy when its holder accepts limits and can surrender command. Because he was human, his achievements invite emulation rather than distant reverence. The habits that formed him remain available to us.

As the nation enters its next 250 years, Washington leaves a high charge. Character is formed before crisis, and reputation gains power through repeated conduct. Public authority earns trust through service and restraint. The country honors its first president most faithfully when it learns from the full measure of his life.

Measured whole, George Washington stands among the Wizards of America.