His leadership during the winter of at Valley Forge was a testament to his power to inspire his men to keep going. Over the course of the grueling eight-year war, the colonial forces won few battles but consistently held their own against the British. In October , with the aid of the French who allied themselves with the colonists over their rivals the British , the Continental forces were able to capture British troops under General Charles Cornwallis in the Battle of Yorktown.
This action effectively ended the Revolutionary War and Washington was declared a national hero. However, in , he was asked to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and head the committee to draft the new constitution. At first Washington balked. He wanted to, at last, return to a quiet life at home and leave governing the new nation to others.
But public opinion was so strong that eventually he gave in. The first presidential election was held on January 7, , and Washington won handily. Because Washington, D.
While in office, he signed a bill establishing a future, permanent U. The United States was a small nation when Washington took office, consisting of 11 states and approximately 4 million people, and there was no precedent for how the new president should conduct domestic or foreign business. Mindful that his actions would likely determine how future presidents were expected to govern, Washington worked hard to set an example of fairness, prudence and integrity. In foreign matters, he supported cordial relations with other countries but also favored a position of neutrality in foreign conflicts.
Domestically, he nominated the first chief justice of the U. Supreme Court , John Jay , signed a bill establishing the first national bank, the Bank of the United States , and set up his own presidential cabinet. His two most prominent cabinet appointees were Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton , two men who disagreed strongly on the role of the federal government. Washington believed that divergent views were critical for the health of the new government, but he was distressed at what he saw as an emerging partisanship.
He signed the first United States copyright law, protecting the copyrights of authors. He also signed the first Thanksgiving proclamation, making November 26 a national day of Thanksgiving for the end of the war for American independence and the successful ratification of the Constitution. In his second term, Washington issued the proclamation of neutrality to avoid entering the war between Great Britain and France.
His meddling caused a stir between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, widening the rift between parties and making consensus-building more difficult. It helped the U. Skip to content. Age at Inauguration. Joe Biden was the oldest president sworn-in at 78 years 61 days. John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president at 43 years days. On top of these policies, Reagan also increased defense spending by 35 percent. On top of all this, Bush also dealt with two recessions.
President Obama holds the title for growing the national debt the most dollar-wise. This makes him the President with the eleventh largest increase in National Debt in Presidential history. However, unlike Bush, Obama decreased spending on national defense by 9. A discussion of the national debt would be incomplete without mentioning the one President who pulled off what no other president could.
On Jan. He paid off the national debt. How he did it requires some background on Jackson himself. Before he was president, Andrew Jackson was a land speculator from Tennessee. When a land deal he made went bad and left him with massive debt and some worthless paper notes, his hatred of debt was formed.
When Jackson ran for president, he disliked banks as purveyors of debt and the existence of the national debt itself. He referred to it as the national curse. To attack the debt, as his first step, Jackson started selling off the most valuable thing the country owned: land. Second, he vetoed every spending bill that came across his desk.
By not only was the national debt paid off, the government ran a surplus. Unfortunately for Jackson, his vision of a debt-free America lasted a grand total of one year.
Long before the Federal Reserve was created, America had a National Bank, which Jackson promptly killed early in his presidency. This left him with nowhere to put the surplus funds the government was amassing after he paid off the debt, so he redistributed the funds to the states. Shortly after that, a real estate bubble occured, which promptly popped, sending the country into recession, which promptly re-created a national debt.
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