Description
Join instructor Joan W. Musbach! On any list of presidential “greats,” you will find George Washington. U.S. historians rank him third, following Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Washington willingly relinquished military power and returned to the life of a Virginia planter, expecting to spend his remaining days there and likely die in his fifties as his father had. But Washington carried an abiding faith in the United States of America that he had helped to create. His experiences both in the French and Indian War and in the Revolution convinced him that a strong national government was necessary. He believed in a representative government with success dependent on men possessing qualities of civic virtue. So when “history came knocking on his door at Mount Vernon,” he left retirement to assume power again and, as he said, “walk on untrodden ground.”
