George Washington: His Life Before His Presidency - Research Paper Example

His career before the revolutionary war spanned many decades, and taught him invaluable lessons that would later help shape America and American history for centuries to come. While his revolutionary military career is well known, very few people actually spend much time considering the life experiences that made Washington so adept in that conflict. Washington’s background, like many revolutionaries, was actually relatively British and relatively upper class (Brookhiser 18). In contrast to Benjamin Franklin, for instance, who was a working class revolutionary that made his way from practically nothing to being one of the most important people in America, George Washington was born to landed estate holders of significant means (Brookhiser 23).

All of George Washington’s siblings were able to go to England to receive education, but Washington’s father unfortunately died relatively early in George’s life, forcing him to stay behind in America and receive only the equivalent of an elementary school education (Brookhiser 20). His family connections, however, consistently allowed Washington to achieve relatively well paying work, and become and land owner in his own right, in addition to estate that his family traditionally held. Washington, also through these connections, was able to achieve a small level of his military ambitions (Boller 48).

Though he never actually achieved the British military commission that he had long hoped for (48), he was appointed one of the four people in charge of the Virginia colony’s military (49). Following the French and Indian war, which will be discussed below, Washington married a wealthy heiress, Martha, and thus improved his social and economic standing significantly (Brookhiser 73). Washington thus always fit the mould of the traditional revolutionary, being relatively wealthy, a slave owner, and having achieved social status as well as government rank largely through the acquisition of wealth through social and family connections of various sorts.

Washington was also, however, quite talented in a variety of ways and was well positioned to be a revolutionary leader because of those experiences. In 1754, a war broke out between the English and the French colonies over land that was claimed by both parties. This was called the “French and Indian War,” or else the “Seven Years War.” At the opening of this war, Washington was an aide to Edward Braddock, a British General that was leading the military expedition at the time. He is best known for the famous Braddock disaster of 1755, in which British soldiers, believing themselves to have numbers, walked into an ambush by French and Indian soldiers ().

A year after the outbreak, the governor of Virginia awarded Washington with supreme control of Virginia’s military forces, and Washington was tasked with fighting the French on the frontier of the mutually claimed territory. Washington thus led the first professional military brigade that had ever been formed in the United States, the Virginia Regiment (all previous military engagements had been fought by militias that were raised solely to fight the conflict, then disbanded. Throughout the course of the French and Indian War, Washington’s military aspirations were never fully realized, as he wanted to be