George Washington

His father died when Washington was 11, and with him went the English schooling his older half-brothers had received. What he got instead was arithmetic, a gift for drafting, and a surveyor's license from the College of William and Mary at 17. He crossed an ocean once, to Barbados in 1751, and came home pocked by smallpox and immune to it. At 22 he ambushed a French party in the Ohio country, killed a man carrying a diplomatic message, lost the stockade he had named Fort Necessity, and signed surrender terms in French he could not read that admitted to an assassination. The war that followed ran on four continents. He married a rich widow in 1759 and spent 16 years as a planter.

Then eight years commanding an army that was usually losing, and after that an office nobody had ever held. Two terms spent inventing it — a cabinet, a working treasury, a policy of staying out of Europe's wars, and a decision to go home after eight years that every successor honored until 1940. BriefHistory has the presidency in full, precedent by precedent. What that account has no room for is the arithmetic of the household that paid for all of it.

At his death Washington owned 124 people outright. Another 153 at Mount Vernon belonged to the estate of Martha's first husband, and no will of his could reach them, which meant that freeing his own would tear apart families that had intermarried across the two groups for decades. He knew it. While president in Philadelphia he rotated his household staff back to Virginia every few months so none of them could accumulate the six months of residence that triggered Pennsylvania's emancipation law. In 1793 he signed the Fugitive Slave Act. When Ona Judge, Martha's personal maid, escaped to New Hampshire in 1796, he spent three years trying to get her back, using federal officers, and failed. His cook Hercules Posey walked away too. Neither came back.

His last request was that his body not go into the vault for three days. It never left Mount Vernon. Congress built a crypt beneath the Capitol rotunda to hold him, finished it in 1827, and was refused by the family — the chamber sits empty under a floor tourists cross daily. The country compensated elsewhere: a capital, a state, a monument that took 36 years to finish, a face on Rushmore. Meanwhile a bookselling parson named Mason Locke Weems added a hatchet and a cherry tree to a later edition of his 1800 biography, and that invention has outrun every documented thing Washington did as a boy. Historians' rankings have never moved him out of the top three.

George Washington's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Judiciary Act of 1789 law
  Built the federal courts and the office of attorney general from nothing 1789
• Residence Act law
  Put the permanent capital on the Potomac, near his own land 1790
• First Bank of the United States company
  Chartered over Jefferson's objection 1791
• Jay Treaty law
  Bought a decade of peace with Britain and cost him his popularity 1795
• Farewell Address speech
  Drafted with Hamilton and printed rather than spoken 1796
• Mount Vernon mansion building
  He designed the enlargements himself, in stages, over 30 years 1787

• July 20, 1749 aged 17 Sworn in as surveyor of Culpeper County at 17 He was buying western land within three years.
• 1751 aged ~19 Sails to Barbados and catches smallpox The only time in his life he left North America.
• May 28, 1754 aged 22 Ambushes a French detachment in the Ohio country Jumonville, carrying a diplomatic message, was killed. The Seven Years' War followed.
• July 3, 1754 aged 22 Surrenders Fort Necessity and signs terms in French he cannot read The document had him confessing to assassination. He blamed the translator.
• January 6, 1759 aged 26 Marries Martha Dandridge Custis and becomes one of the richest men in Virginia
• April 30, 1789 aged 57 Takes the first presidential oath in New York He had one natural tooth left in his head.
• 1796 aged ~64 Ona Judge escapes from the presidential household in Philadelphia Washington pursued her for three years through federal officers and never recovered her.
• December 14, 1799 aged 67 Dies at Mount Vernon after asking not to be entombed for three days
• January 1, 1801 aged 68 The 123 people he owned are freed, a year after his death Martha released them early. The 153 dower slaves stayed enslaved.

• Martha Washington 1731–1802
  First First Lady who defined the role and spent every wartime winter in the Continental Army's camps. married to
• Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804
  Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers. appointed
• Benedict Arnold 1741–1801
  Continental Army general whose plot to surrender West Point made his name the American synonym for treason. betrayed by