George Washington

George Washington took command of a rebel army that had more cause than powder. Congress named him in June 1775. He was forty-three, a Virginia planter who had learned war on the Ohio as a young officer and then learned patience as a man who had to keep farmers in the field through winters that emptied a camp.

He did not win the Revolution by a single brilliant stroke. He held the army together after Long Island, crossed the Delaware in the last hours of 1776, and spent the rest of the war refusing to let the British turn a lost battle into a lost country. Valley Forge was not a legend he invented. It was a winter of hunger, disease, and drill that made a Continental line out of men who had arrived as militia.

The French alliance and Yorktown ended the fighting. The harder American act was what he did with victory. He resigned his commission to Congress in 1783 and went home to Mount Vernon. Later he would serve as the first President. The war page remembers the soldier who would not be king.

He died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799. The tomb on the Potomac is not a battlefield monument. It is the end of a life spent making a republic that could bury its general without a crown.