Without George Washington, America Wouldn’t Have A 250th Birthday

Next year marks the much anticipated semiquincentennial celebration of our nation’s founding, when 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, severing themselves from the British Crown to form a new body politic. Certainly the Fourth of July will, rightly, serve as the high watermark of our national festivities. 

But in truth it was not simply the signing of that document that makes 250 years such a significant memorial, but everything that transpired in that fateful year: the British evacuation of Boston in March; the Americans’ disastrous defeat at the Battle of Long Island in August; the American counterattack in New Jersey in December. And as Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough’s best-selling book 1776 records, no figure looms larger in all of these events than George Washington. As much as 2026 is America’s year, we would do well to remember that it is so in large part because of that one remarkable hero.

A Man of Unequaled Character and Calling

A Virginia planter and veteran of the French & Indian War, Washington in the summer of 1775 assumed leadership of the Continental Army, a position he told his wife Martha he had “used every endeavor” in his power to avoid. Yet he was a man of duty, and also someone who recognized that his previous military experience and leadership abilities made him ideally suited to command a “volunteer force of farmers and tradesmen” pitted against the “best-trained, best-equipped, most formidable force on earth,” as McCullough writes. As Washington admitted privately, he knew the eyes of the whole continent were on him, “fixed with anxious expectation.” 

During the siege of Boston, the tremendous leadership qualities and virtuous character of George Washington emerged. In January of 1776 he wrote in private correspondence that he often thought how much happier he would have been if he had simply entered the ranks of common soldiers instead of accepting command, or even to retreat into the back country beyond the reach of the British. Nevertheless, he wrote: “If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies; for surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.”