George Washington Born: Father of American Democracy

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into a family of middling Virginia planters who owned tobacco farms and enslaved laborers. His father died when he was eleven, and he was raised largely by his older half-brother Lawrence, whose connections to the powerful Fairfax family gave the young Washington access to the Virginia gentry. He worked as a surveyor, served as a militia officer in the French and Indian War, and by his mid-twenties had acquired a reputation for physical courage, organizational competence, and an almost pathological commitment to personal honor. He married Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow, in 1759, and spent the next sixteen years as a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon. The Continental Congress appointed him commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in 1775, a position he held through eight years of war against the most powerful military in the world, often with an army that was starving, unpaid, and hemorrhaging deserters. He was offered the chance to become king after the war and declined, a decision his aide Nathanael Greene called one of the most consequential in American history. He served two terms as the first President of the United States and voluntarily stepped down, establishing the precedent of peaceful transfer of power that held for over two centuries. He owned enslaved people his entire life, more than three hundred at his death. He freed them in his will, the only Founding Father to do so, on the condition that emancipation wait until Martha's death. She freed them within a year, reportedly concerned that some of the enslaved might hasten her death to achieve their freedom. His false teeth were made of ivory, hippopotamus bone, and the teeth of enslaved people, not wood.