In his personal discipline, however, he was not less Puritan than the strictest of New Englanders.

The coming years were to show that a great leader had taken his fitting place.
Washington, born in 1732, had been trained in self-reliance, for he had been fatherless from childhood.

At the age of sixteen he was working at the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land.

At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children, though her marriage with Washington was childless.

His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly a hundred years.
There were twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of frontage on the tidal river.