George Washington

George Washington died at Mount Vernon on the evening of December 14, 1799, after a sudden inflammation of the throat. He was sixty-seven. The house looked over the Potomac he had crossed as a surveyor, a soldier, and a planter. Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on February 22, 1732, he learned the western woods before he learned a legislature, and he carried that outdoor patience into a war the colonies nearly lost. He held the Continental Army together through hunger, mutiny, and the long winter at Valley Forge. He presided over the Constitutional Convention without speechifying, then served two terms as the first President and left on purpose. The Farewell Address warned against faction and foreign entanglements; the more lasting lesson was that a republic could survive a man who refused a crown. He married Martha Washington and kept open house on the river. The tomb on the estate is not a marble argument. It is the end of a life spent making a country that could bury him without a king.