You surely recall the description: “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
Those words described George Washington, our first president, whose birthday anniversary is today. He was born Feb. 22, 1732.
He didn’t arrive at his honored reputation easily. In fact, he had the prospect of being an absolute failure, even facing the possibility that he could be executed as a traitor to Great Britain.
He was born in Virginia. His educational opportunities were nothing compared with those available to nearly everyone today. But he learned mathematics and surveying, plus some literary classics — and the “rules of civility.”
His father died in 1743 and George went to live with his half-brother Lawrence, who died of tuberculosis.
Having had some early military experience with the British, and with the American desire for independence at hand, Mr. Washington was chosen unanimously in June 1776 by the Continental Congress to be commander in chief of what came to be fewer than 14,000 undisciplined and mostly untrained American Colonial military forces.
After the American Declaration of Independence brought the American Revolutionary War, he often was in retreat and defeat.
He had a hard winter at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania.
At one time, his fellow Americans sought to have him removed from command.
But he labored on.
The war with Great Britain went badly, with heavy casualties, not enough arms, not enough food, and with too many desertions among his troops as he faced what was then the greatest military power in the world.
But miraculously, it seems, he finally won! He accepted the surrender of the British at Yorktown, Va., as a band played, quite appropriately, “The World Turned Upside Down.”
Well, no wonder George Washington was “first in war.”
But what about “peace”?
Fortunately, he was elected to be the first president of the embryonic United States, that otherwise might not have survived.
He served two challenging four-year terms, then insisted on self-limiting his presidential tenure, setting a tradition that eventually was cemented in law.
President Washington went back to his beloved Mount Vernon in Virginia, where, at the age of 69, he died of what was probably streptococcic laryngitis. (Just consider how fortunate we are to have antibiotics today!)
In the centuries since, and especially today, on the date of his birth, we salute him in memory as truly being “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
If there had been no George Washington, would there have been — would there be today — a United States of America?
General and President George Washington certainly gave us a magnificent heritage.
“The past is prologue.” What have we done with it? What will we do with it in the future?
That’s something for us to think about very thankfully today, as we enjoy being the inheritors of General and President Washington’s great leadership.