Born on the 22nd of February, on the banks of the Potomac, at Bridge's Creek in Virginia, the new general belonged to a good family of Virginia planters, descended from those country gentlemen who had formerly caused the English revolution. He lost his father at an early age, and was brought up by his mother, a distinguished woman, for whom he always preserved as much tenderness as respect. He had undergone in his youth a free and rough life as a land-surveyor. At the age of nineteen, during the war in Canada, he had taken his place in the militia of his country, and we have seen him fighting brilliantly by the side of General Braddock. When the war ended, his haughty discontent concerning a question of military rank brought him home again. His eldest brother was dead, and had left him the Mount Vernon estate. He settled there, became a great agriculturist and sportsman, was loved and esteemed of everybody, and was already the object of the confidence as well as the hopes of his fellow-citizens. {279} "Capable of raising himself to the highest destinies, he had been able to ignore himself without suffering from it, and to find in the cultivation of his land the satisfaction of those powerful faculties which were sufficient for the command of armies and the founding of a government. But when the occasion offered, when the necessity arrived, without effort on his part, without surprise on the part of others, the wise planter was a great man. He had in a high degree the two qualities which, in active life, render a man capable of great things. He knew how to believe firmly in his own idea, and to act resolutely according to what he thought, without fearing the responsibility of his action." [Footnote 3] [Footnote 3: M Guizot, _Etude sur Washington_.] [Essay on the Character and Influence of Washington in the Revolution of the United States of America; page 60; http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60668]