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To: BereanBrain

Good question. I would add that he was incredibly well-educated in the classical way, as were most of the Founding Fathers. I don’t know if there’s any comparison with Washington and the candidates we have today.

“Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years: a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my Country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens, a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with dispondence, one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpractised in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.”


82 posted on 11/15/2011 6:47:31 AM PST by agrarianlady
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To: agrarianlady
I would add that he was incredibly well-educated in the classical way, as were most of the Founding Fathers.

Actually, Washington did not receive much of an education compared to his peers. He was self-conscious about that fact. Throughout the founding period, he relied on Madison and Hamilton as basically his tutors, who tried to get him up to speed on things before the Philly convention.

From wiki:

"He received the equivalent of an elementary school education from a variety of tutors,[12] and also a school run by an Anglican clergyman in or near Fredericksburg."

Not that I'm relying on wiki--I've read a few biographies of Washington. And I grant you his elementary education was probably better than ours, but he was not on par with the other founders by a long shot. That's why he went into the military.

91 posted on 11/15/2011 6:55:10 AM PST by Huck (I predict record low turnout for the GOP primaries.)
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