George Washington

Washington took command at Cambridge in 1775 and spent the next eight years holding together an army perpetually short of men, money, and supplies. He avoided the decisive battle that might have destroyed it, kept his forces in being, and waited for the French alliance and British exhaustion to turn the war.

What mattered as much as his strategy was his character. When a group of officers at Newburgh talked of marching on Congress, he defused the plot with a speech, and at the end of the war he surrendered his commission to Congress rather than to any king. That voluntary return to private life made the army safe for the republic.

The Constitution says little about how a president should behave, and Washington invented much of it. He chose a cabinet of department heads, consulted the Senate only on treaties, and adopted a formal but republican style that avoided the trappings of monarchy.

Most importantly, he retired after two terms, establishing a limit that lasted until Franklin Roosevelt, and in his farewell address he warned against permanent foreign alliances and against the spirit of party. His willingness to leave office was the precedent on which the peaceful transfer of power came to rest.

Washington inherited Mount Vernon in 1761 and spent decades expanding it into a working estate of five farms, a gristmill, a fishery, and a mansion he rebuilt in the fashionable neoclassical style. He was a careful, demanding farmer who experimented with crop rotation and tried to move away from tobacco toward wheat.

The plantation rested on the labor of enslaved people, whose work made Washington's public life possible and whose freedom he arranged only in his will. He returned to Mount Vernon after leaving the presidency and died there in 1799, and the house became a national shrine soon after.