Alasdhair willis biography of george washington

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Even before the end of Washington’s first administration, opposition coalesced around secretary of state Thomas Jefferson and his friend congressman James Madison. When the French Revolution led to a major war between France and England, Washington refused to accept entirely the recommendations of either his Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was pro-French, or his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who was pro-British.

Instead, he was trained as a land surveyor, a profession of considerable importance in Virginia, where colonial settlement was pushing rapidly into the Shenandoah Valley and other parts of western Virginia.

Washington’s surveying career benefited much from Lawrence’s patronage, and more particularly from that of the wealthy Fairfax family of Belvoir, Lawrence’s neighbors and in-laws.

That same year he was elected by the first Virginia Convention as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, which adopted Virginia’s program of economic coercion against the mother country. On July 3, 1775, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, he took command of his ill-trained troops and embarked upon a war that was to last six grueling years.

Second, the soldiers and officers adored him. Washington learned much from the professionalism of British generals Edward Braddock and John Forbes under whom he served and earned a military reputation not only for courage and coolness under fire but also as an efficient administrator and a fair and able commander of men. Washington’s profitable surveying career provided him with much that an ambitious white Virginian needed to make it big in the eighteenth century.

Washington’s greatest achievement, however, was to hold his little army together over the next two years in the face of public apathy, marginal state support, inadequate Congressional assistance, and a series of logistical and military frustrations at Valley Force and during the subsequent Philadelphia campaign. That May the tweenty-one-year-old became commander of the Virginia Regiment, raised to oppose the French in the Ohio Valley, and French retaliation for the attack on a small party across the Alleghenies provided his first defeat-the surrender of the hastily-constructed Fort Necessity in July 1754.

Instead, he became one of the greatest figures in American history.

A series of personal losses changed the course of George’s life. He lost more battles than he won and at times had to hold the army together with sheer will, but ultimately emerged victorious in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War.

Washington’s success as a commander derived from three factors.

Virginia plantation lords not only supervised agricultural operations and marketed a staple commodity (Washington began to shift the Mount Vernon farms over from the traditional tobacco crop to wheat, for which he built his own gristmill), managed an enslaved labor force (in Washington’s case, of about 274 blacks), and provided sustenance, health care, and leadership for the entire plantation community.

He also developed a resentment of the British officials who denied him the regular army commission to which he aspired and proper respect for the contributions made by provincial troops in general and his Virginia Regiment in particular.

Love & Marriage

With his prestige enhanced by his military experiences and the potential of his land holdings vastly increased by bounties granted to officers and men of the Virginia Regiment (he owned 45,000 acres west of the mountains at his death), Washington returned to private life as a very eligible bachelor.

On 6 January 1759 the twenty-six-year-old married Martha Dandridge Custis (1731-1802), the widow of Daniel Parke Custis, who had left her and their two children, John Parke and Martha Parke Custis, one of the greatest fortunes in Virginia. In the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, he became an early advocate of the patriot cause.

His wealth, produced by slavery, made possible his decades of public service. He persuaded the Virginia governor to appoint him to his deceased brother’s adjutancy in 1752, which came with a commission as major and an annual salary of 100 pounds. The small and ill-supplied United States Army suffered two disastrous defeats against Northwestern Indian nations.