On January 6, 1759, Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, the twenty-seven-year-old widow of a wealthy planter. Martha was intelligent, experienced in managing a large estate, and brought with her a substantial inheritance. The marriage made Washington one of the wealthiest men in Virginia and gave him a settled domestic life he had not previously known. He took his seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses that same year, representing Frederick County, and began the slow transition from soldier to statesman.

At Mount Vernon, Washington cultivated tobacco and wheat, and quickly discovered that the tobacco trade was a trap. He exported his crop through a London merchant, paid for imported British luxury goods with the proceeds, and found himself eighteen hundred pounds in debt by 1764, subject to the whims of distant buyers and fluctuating prices. The experience made him acutely sensitive to British commercial power over the colonies. Between 1764 and 1766, he switched Mount Vernon's primary crop from tobacco to wheat, expanded into flour milling and hemp farming, and began to diversify. The plantation became a more self-sufficient operation, and Washington became a more politically engaged legislator.

He believed the Stamp Act of 1765 was oppressive and celebrated its repeal. When Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, taxing colonial imports, Washington introduced a proposal in May 1769 urging Virginians to boycott British goods. The acts were mostly repealed the following year. He and his neighbour George Mason drafted resolutions for their county committee in 1774, including a call to end the Atlantic slave trade. When Parliament punished Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party with the Coercive Acts, Washington called them 'an invasion of our rights and privileges'. In August 1774, he was selected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. By the following spring, he was helping train local militias and organising boycotts of British goods. The war found him ready.

The American Revolutionary War began on April 19, 1775, with the clashes at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Washington left Mount Vernon on May 4 and joined the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. On June 14, Congress created the Continental Army, and the next day, on the nomination of John Adams, Washington was unanimously elected its commander-in-chief. He declined a salary, though he later submitted detailed expense accounts. He was forty-three years old, had not commanded troops in battle for seventeen years, and was now responsible for fighting the most powerful military in the world with an army of farmers and shopkeepers.

He arrived outside Boston on July 2, 1775, to find not an army but an armed mob: undisciplined militiamen, inadequate supplies, and officers of doubtful competence. He instituted military drills and strict discipline, promoted men who had performed well at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and removed those he judged incompetent. When the Charles River froze that winter, he wanted to assault the city directly, but his officers persuaded him against it. Instead, in March 1776, Washington secured the Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston, placing artillery that Henry Knox, his chief of artillery, had hauled three hundred miles across frozen terrain from Fort Ticonderoga. The British commander William Howe found his position untenable. On March 17, nearly nine thousand British troops and over a thousand Loyalists evacuated by sea. Washington entered the city with five hundred men, leaving civilian authority in local hands.

The victory at Boston proved deceptive. Washington correctly anticipated that the British would come for New York City next, and he ordered fortifications built across Manhattan and Brooklyn. But the British force that arrived in the summer of 1776 was overwhelming: over thirty-two thousand regulars and Hessian auxiliaries against Washington's twenty-three thousand, most of them untrained recruits. Howe landed twenty thousand troops at Brooklyn in August and outmanoeuvred Washington at the Battle of Long Island, inflicting fifteen hundred Patriot casualties. Washington retreated to Manhattan, then across the Hudson River into New Jersey, his force dwindling to five thousand four hundred men. By November, the situation was catastrophic. Howe had captured Fort Washington, Loyalists were celebrating in New York City, and desertions were draining the Continental Army to almost nothing.

Washington crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, where the future of the revolution hung in the balance. Enlistments were expiring, supplies were exhausted, and morale had collapsed. Then, before dawn on December 26, 1776, Washington led his men back across the Delaware through sleet and darkness. At sunrise, they struck the Hessian garrison at Trenton in a surprise attack. The Hessians were overwhelmed. Washington returned to New Jersey a week later and launched a second blow at Princeton on January 3, 1777, killing or capturing over two hundred and seventy British regulars. Howe retreated to New York for the winter. The two victories, coming when the Patriot cause seemed finished, revived morale across the colonies and changed the strategic calculus of the war. Thomas Paine had written that these were the times that tried men's souls; Washington had answered the trial with action.

The winter of 1777 into 1778 was the lowest point. Washington had lost Philadelphia itself in September 1777, outmanoeuvred at the Battle of Brandywine, and a follow-up Patriot attack at Germantown had failed. Meanwhile, a British army under General John Burgoyne had surrendered to Patriot forces under General Horatio Gates at Saratoga in October, and some in Congress began openly comparing Gates' triumph to Washington's defeats. Washington took his army of eleven thousand men into winter quarters at Valley Forge, north of Philadelphia, in December 1777. Over the following months, between two thousand and three thousand men died of disease, cold, and starvation. The army shrank below nine thousand. Some of his own officers discussed removing him from command.

Washington petitioned Congress repeatedly for provisions and got limited relief. What saved the army was a Prussian officer named Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a veteran drillmaster who arrived at Valley Forge in February 1778 and began transforming Washington's recruits into disciplined soldiers. Washington made him Inspector General. At the same time, France, encouraged by the victory at Saratoga, entered into a formal military alliance with the Americans in early 1778. The strategic situation shifted. When the British evacuated Philadelphia for New York in June 1778, Washington pursued and fought them to a draw at Monmouth in a sprawling summer battle. It was the last major engagement in the north. The war was moving south.

The British shifted their focus to Georgia and the Carolinas, capturing Savannah in late 1778. Washington, unable to follow in force, ordered a punishing expedition against the Haudenosaunee people of upstate New York, Britain's indigenous allies, destroying their villages. He also turned his attention to intelligence. In 1778, he directed Major Benjamin Tallmadge to establish a spy network in New York, which became known as the Culper Ring. The ring gathered information on British troop movements and, crucially, exposed the treason of Washington's own general Benedict Arnold, who had been secretly passing plans to deliver West Point, the key American fortification on the Hudson, to the British. Arnold fled to New York in September 1780. Washington assumed personal command at West Point and reorganised its defences.

By the summer of 1781, Washington still hoped to strike at New York City, but the French commander Marshal Rochambeau argued that the real opportunity lay further south, where the British general Cornwallis had moved his army into Virginia. On August 19, Washington and Rochambeau began what became known as the celebrated march south to Yorktown, Virginia. Washington commanded a combined force of roughly seven thousand eight hundred Frenchmen, eight thousand Continental troops, and three thousand militia. He was inexperienced in formal siege warfare and frequently deferred to Rochambeau, though Rochambeau never challenged his authority as overall commander.

By late September, the combined Patriot and French forces had surrounded Yorktown from the landward side. The French navy, victorious at the Battle of the Chesapeake, blocked any British escape or relief by sea. Cornwallis was trapped. Washington fired the opening shot of the final American assault himself. The British held on for three weeks, but their position was hopeless. On October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered. More than seven thousand British soldiers laid down their arms. It was the largest British military capitulation in a century, and though the peace treaty would take two more years to negotiate, Yorktown effectively ended the war. Britain's Parliament voted to cease hostilities in March 1782. The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, formally recognised American independence.

Washington disbanded his army, addressed his soldiers in a farewell on November 2, 1783, and then, in early December, met his officers one last time at a tavern in New York City before riding south to Annapolis. On December 23, he stood before Congress in his uniform and resigned his commission as commander-in-chief. He read a statement: 'I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life, by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God.' Then he rode home to Mount Vernon, arriving on Christmas Eve, 1783. He had spent ten days there in eight and a half years.

Washington returned to the life of a planter, but the country kept pulling him back. Mount Vernon had run at a deficit for eleven consecutive years by 1787. Creditors paid him in depreciated wartime currency, crops were poor, and his finances were precarious. He threw himself into estate management, experimenting with new crops and landscaping, and began breeding mules after receiving a stud as a gift from the King of Spain in 1785. He also remained alert to the national crisis unfolding around him. The Articles of Confederation, the loose agreement binding the states, were, as he wrote, no more than 'a rope of sand'. When Shays's Rebellion, an armed uprising by indebted farmers, erupted in Massachusetts in 1786, Washington feared the republic was sliding toward anarchy.

He was persuaded to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in May 1787, partly because his allies believed that his presence alone would give the proceedings legitimacy. Benjamin Franklin nominated him to preside, and he was unanimously elected. Washington said little during the debates, but his quiet authority shaped the room. The convention produced a new Constitution, signed by thirty-nine of fifty-five delegates on September 17, 1787. Washington lobbied hard for its ratification by the states. When the first presidential election was held in February 1789, the Electoral College cast every vote for Washington. He was the only person in American history to be elected president unanimously, and it happened twice.

He was inaugurated on April 30, 1789, at Federal Hall in New York City, before a crowd of ten thousand. The oath was administered by a judge named Robert Livingston, using a Bible provided by the local Freemasons. Washington read a speech asking the Almighty to 'consecrate the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States'. He immediately set about defining what the presidency would mean: he rejected the Senate's proposed titles of 'His Majesty' and 'His Highness the President' in favour of the plain 'Mr. President'. He wrote to James Madison that 'the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent', and he chose every precedent with care.

His cabinet was a constellation of talent and conflict. Thomas Jefferson became Secretary of State; Alexander Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury. Both were brilliant, both were indispensable, and they despised each other. Hamilton wanted a powerful central government with a national bank and strong ties to Britain. Jefferson wanted to limit federal power and favoured France. Washington tried to hold them both and remain above the faction, but he was temperamentally closer to Hamilton's vision, and Hamilton's agenda largely prevailed, to Jefferson's fury. Washington was the only president in American history to remain formally non-partisan throughout his term, but the battle inside his cabinet planted the seeds of the party system that would define every presidency after his.

Domestic crises tested his authority. In 1794, farmers in western Pennsylvania rose up against a federal whiskey tax in what became known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington mobilised a militia force of nearly thirteen thousand men and personally rode out to lead the expedition, the only sitting president to command troops in the field. The rebellion collapsed without a major battle, but the message was clear: the federal government would enforce its laws. That same year, American troops defeated a Native American confederation at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, ending the Northwest Indian War, and Chief Justice John Jay signed a treaty with Britain that normalised trade relations and secured British withdrawal from western forts. Washington supported the Jay Treaty because it kept the peace, though he knew it would anger France.

The French were indeed furious. After the treaty's signing, French privateers began seizing American ships. Washington navigated the crisis with a formal declaration of neutrality, refusing to be drawn into the European wars of the French Revolution even as opinion in America split bitterly along pro-French and pro-British lines. He also asked that France recall its minister to the United States, Edmond-Charles Genêt, a diplomat who had openly organised American privateers against British and Spanish ships in defiance of Washington's neutrality. Jefferson resigned from the cabinet in 1793. Hamilton followed in early 1795. By the final year of his second term, Washington was being savaged in the partisan press as ambitious and corrupt. He had come to regard that press as a disuniting force, and he had had enough.

In September 1796, Washington published his Farewell Address in a Philadelphia newspaper. It was not a speech delivered aloud but a written statement to the country, extensively revised by Hamilton from an earlier draft Washington had asked James Madison to prepare. Washington warned against the dangers of political parties, which he saw as engines of faction that would tear the republic apart. He warned against entangling foreign alliances. He insisted that 'religion and morality are indispensable supports' of republican government. And he stressed, above everything, the importance of national unity, arguing that the 'name of AMERICAN... must always exalt the just pride of patriotism'. Later scholars would rank the address alongside Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as a defining statement of American political principle.

He retired to Mount Vernon in March 1797 and tried to make the estate pay. He built a whiskey distillery using enslaved workers, speculated in land near the new capital city that bore his name, and managed his farms with the same methodical attention he had given to military campaigns. His finances remained difficult: most of his wealth was land and enslaved people rather than cash. He was drawn back into public service in 1798 when the deteriorating relations with France, which had escalated into an undeclared naval conflict, led President John Adams to nominate him as commanding general of the army. Washington accepted, though he delegated the active work to Hamilton and never took the field.

The question of slavery had shadowed Washington's entire adult life. He had inherited enslaved people as a child, gained more through his marriage to Martha, and purchased others over decades. At the peak of Mount Vernon's operation, over five hundred enslaved people had lived and worked there. His first doubts about the institution arose in the 1760s, when his switch from tobacco to grain left him with more enslaved workers than his farms required, and he began to question the system's economic logic. The principles of the Revolution deepened those doubts. From the mid-1780s onward, he expressed privately, in correspondence and conversation, a wish to see slavery ended by gradual legislation, though he never said so publicly, believing the issue was too divisive to risk.

His will, written in 1799, freed his long-serving valet Billy Lee immediately upon his death, and provided for the freedom of all his personally owned enslaved people upon Martha's death. It also directed that funds be used to support those too young, too old, or too infirm to support themselves. On January 1, 1801, Martha Washington signed the order to free them, a year after her husband died. Many were reluctant to leave; others could not leave without abandoning spouses or children held as dower slaves by the Custis estate, which Washington had no legal power to free. The gap between what he believed and what he did remains the most contested part of his legacy.

On December 12, 1799, Washington spent five hours riding around his farms in cold, wet weather and came home without changing his clothes. He had a sore throat the next morning but was well enough to mark trees for cutting. Early on December 14, he woke with a severely inflamed throat and difficulty breathing. He ordered his estate overseer to remove nearly a pint of his blood; bloodletting was the standard treatment of the era. His family summoned three doctors. They disagreed on the diagnosis, argued over the treatment, and continued drawing blood until approximately five pints had been removed. One of the doctors proposed a tracheotomy. The others refused, unfamiliar with the procedure. Washington told his doctor James Craik: 'Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.'

He died that night, between ten and eleven o'clock, with Martha seated at the foot of his bed. His last words were: 'Tis well.' He was sixty-seven years old. Modern medical opinion holds that he most likely died from severe epiglottitis, a dangerous inflammation of the airway, made fatal by the treatments he received, including repeated bloodletting that probably sent him into hypovolemic shock. Washington had been afraid of being buried alive, and had instructed his secretary Tobias Lear to wait three days before his burial. His funeral was held on December 18, 1799, at Mount Vernon, with cavalry, pallbearers, and a Masonic ceremony. Church bells rang across the country as the news spread. Martha burned almost all of their private correspondence to protect its privacy.