First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation's—Prosperity

George Washington (1732–99) served several roles throughout his career, but to military historian Lengel (Inventing George Washington), chief among these positions, and the through line of this brief and admiring biography, was businessman. Lengel attributes Washington's hardwired business sense and lifelong fear of debt to the relentless practicality and self-discipline his mother instilled in him in his youth. These traits carried the future founding father into a surveying career which, combined with a large inheritance and wife Martha's wealth, boosted him into the Virginia planter elite. At his Mount Vernon estate he was a meticulous micromanager and "fanatical account-keeper" but also a shrewd investor: his risky but prescient (and profitable) switch from tobacco to wheat in the 1760s foretold his savvy handling of battlefield challenges alongside upkeep of his many properties, dealing with an inept Congress, and the colonies' wartime currency crisis. Guiding his standard-setting presidency above all was his view that the colonies' economic and political interests were "one and the same."