In, 1789, George Washington became the first president of the United States of America. In 1789, George Washington, was standing on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York, and took his promise of office as the first President of the United States. Washington was born in 1732 into a Virginia planter family. George, was the eldest of Augustine and Mary Washington's six children, he spent much of his childhood at Ferry Farm, a plantation near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Also learned the morals, manners, and knowledge. He was married with Martha Washington and had a stepson John Custis. George Washington was interested in military arts and western expansion. When he was 16 he was in charge as lieutenant colonel in 1754 and fought the first fight of what end up of being the French and Indian War. By the late of the 1760s, Washington had personal experienced the effects of rising taxes applied on American colonists by the British, so he started to believe that it was the best to declare independence from England. Washington served as a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774 in Philadelphia. He proved to be a better general than military strategist. In 1781, with the help 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 Yorktown, Virginia. This action ended the Revolutionary War and Washington was declared a national hero. In 1783, with the treaty signed between Great Britain and the U.S., Washington gave up his command of the army and returned to Mount Vernon, to back to his life as a gentleman farmer and family man. However, in 1787, he was asked to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and head the committee to draft the new constitution. He convinced the delegates that he was the most qualified man to become the nation's first president. He wanted to 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, 1789, and Washington won handily. John Adams who received the second-largest