Mayjorie roxas biography of george washington

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When it adopted the New England militia army that was besieging the British Army in Boston in June 1775, Congress recognized Washington’s military experience and political trustworthiness by unanimously electing him its commander-in-chief. From 1760 to 1774 he also sat as a justice of the Fairfax County court at Alexandria. Although he was unanimously elected to a second term as president, the nation was anything but united behind him.

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

A series of personal losses changed the course of George’s life. At Yorktown in 1781 he completed a successful siege operation in the traditional European style and captured Lord Cornwallis’s entire army; he later celebrated in typical understatement by naming one of his favorite greyhounds after the earl.

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.

The deference that glued Virginia society together required gentlemen like Washington to manifest their social status by maintaining a lavish lifestyle modeled after that of the British landed gentry and aristocracy. After Governor Dunmore dissolved the Assembly in 1774, Washington met with other disgruntled Burgesses at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and adopted a nonimportation agreement.

He warned Americans to come together and reject partisan or foreign attempts to divide them, admonitions that retain their significance into the twenty-first century. As president, Washington also oversaw the establishment of the financial system, the restoration of the nation’s credit, the expansion of US territory (often at the expense of Native Americans), the negotiation of economic treaties with European empires, and the defense of executive authority over diplomatic and domestic affairs.

Washington set countless precedents, including the creation of the cabinet, executive privilege, state of the union addresses, and his retirement after two terms.

When the new Constitution was ratified, the Electoral College unanimously elected Washington President

He did not infringe upon the policy making powers that he felt the Constitution gave Congress. Wearied of politics, feeling old, he retired at the end of his second. Washington survived a case of smallpox while in the West Indies, thus acquiring immunity to the disease that claimed the lives of many colonial Americans, but his brother died in 1752 after returning from the Caribbean, probably of tuberculosis.

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. He took the oath of office on April 30, 1789.

As the first president, Washington literally crafted the office from scratch, which was an accomplishment that cannot be overstated because every decision was an opportunity for failure.

Washington knew that his leadership was no longer indispensable to the survival of the nation, and he left as his political testament to the American people his Farewell Address, which was widely printed in newspapers and broadsides.

The Final Chapter

Only once more was the General called from his beloved plantation to serve the country.

In May 1775, less than a month after a shooting war commenced at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, Washington again traveled to Philadelphia to take his seat in the Second Continental Congress. Washington’s financial success, and that of the new nation, also depended on the violent seizure of extensive territory from Native American nations along the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River.

The small and ill-supplied United States Army suffered two disastrous defeats against Northwestern Indian nations. His mission marked the start of the Seven Years’ War.

Washington then joined General Edward Braddock’s official family as an aide-de-camp. In the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, he became an early advocate of the patriot cause. 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.