George Washington was a man who fascinated his contemporaries. Unusually tall and strong, quick of reflex, a superb horseman and graceful dancer, he immediately impressed people as the scrupulous gentleman and natural-born leader that he was. Son of a Virginia family of modest means, almost entirely self-educated, ambitious for both material wealth and the high regard of others, Washington rose through diligent application of his abilities to become the first general to win a modern revolutionary war, the first president of the United States, "the first in the hearts of his countrymen."
Award-winning author Albert Marrin has written a highly readable, fast-paced account of the life and times of this man who would, as Lord Fairfax observed when Washington was only sixteen, "go to school all his life." Washington's schools were the rugged terrain and international background of the French and Indian War; the insolvent, beleaguered Continental Army; the Constitutional Convention and Presidential years; and the pleasure and paradoxes of his Mount Vernon plantation. Turning his back on the power usually claimed by a victorious general, Washington so embodied the virtue of farsighted public service that his leadership put to rest his compatriots' fear of monarchy and forged a unity among the fractious American states—at least for a while. For, as Marrin takes pain to show, Washington knew firsthand both the economics of slave owning and the contradiction it posed for the new republic. Toward the end of his life, after two terms as president, he pronounced the future. "I can clearly foresee that nothing but rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union."
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