But in 1777 his forces were defeated at the Brandywine in September and at Germantown in October, and Howe occupied Philadelphia. Washington led his army to Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where the weakened forces encamped through the winter of 1777–8, perhaps the lowest ebb of the revolutionary cause. It was Washington’s personality above all that held together his broken army during that long winter. He used his almost dictatorial wartime powers with caution, tempered with bold action and skilled improvisation, common sense and respect for civil power. Aided by French entry into the war, in 1781 Washington commanded the superb Yorktown campaign against the British commander Cornwallis, whose army was besieged in the Virginia town which, after much bombardment, surrendered on October 19, 1781. This was to be the final major battle of the war.
After his victories, Washington retired to Mount Vernon. In 1787 he attended the Philadelphia Convention that discussed the creation of a new American government. Washington was elected president of the convention but refrained from joining the debate. The office of president of the United States was created to head the new government, and in 1788 Washington was elected to the post, winning re-election in 1792. As president, he attempted to maintain neutrality between the pro-French faction led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and the pro-British faction of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, but he generally favored the latter, angering those who supported the French revolutionary cause and wanted another war with Britain. When Washington’s second term ended, he refused to stand for a third, setting a precedent that held for 140 years before being enshrined in law by the Twenty-second Amendment in 1951.
His calm, dignified leadership was followed by a civilized return to private life at Mount Vernon, where this democratic hero of talent and decency, the founder of a future superpower, died of a throat infection in 1799.
JEFFERSON
1743–1826
J.F. Kennedy, welcoming forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962
Thomas Jefferson was a radical polymath who put into words the principles of the American Revolution and then put those words into practice as a statesman. Private, intense and simultaneously possessed of matchless generosity of spirit, grace and sensitivity, Jefferson was a man almost without compare who advanced the cause of liberty across the world.
Jefferson’s intellect was second to none. The son of a wealthy Virginian planter, he could, at college and while studying law, as a close friend recalled, “tear himself away from his dearest friends, to fly to his studies.” Gracious and charming in manner, he nonetheless had an intense dislike of oral debate and rarely spoke in public. But the intricate brilliance of the young politician was quickly noted in Virginia’s colonial legislature.
Jefferson’s power was in his pen. It is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. As a delegate at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, Jefferson became the chief author of the document repudiating British sovereignty. In his exposition he championed universal liberty and equality. It was the first charter of civil rights, the founding document of freedom. The stamp of Jefferson’s peerless mind, his determination to secure liberty and his immense generosity toward his fellow men are apparent in the declaration’s every word.
Elected to the new Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson was determined to translate his ideals into practice in Virginia’s new constitution. He secured the abolition of primogeniture and entail. He tried in vain to introduce a scheme of universal education but later succeeded in founding the University of Virginia, which he considered among his greatest achievements. A deist himself, Jefferson pushed through a statute for religious freedom that established the complete separation of church and state, a division that lies at the very core of American democracy.
