Washington, America's First Engineer

I listened to a lecture last night on George Washington as an intellectual. The speaker made the points that Washington did not attend college due to the early death of his father and apparently regretted losing the opportunity, and that he is compared with some rather high flying intellectuals such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

Washington is of course thought of as the only man trusted by his peers to lead the newly established constitutional government, and as the leader of its armed forces before and after his presidency, not to mention as the chair of the Constitutional convention. Apparently he is seen as a great leader but not as an "intellectual".

As a plantation owner he pioneered what were at the time innovative agricultural techniques of crop rotation, soil fertilization, and livestock management. He eventually gave up growing tobacco on the plantation, growing wheat instead, and going into flour milling, fishing, horse breeding, spinning, weaving and (in the 1790s) whiskey production. Again. seen as an economic innovator but not as an "intellectual".

Washington as a Proto-Engineer

I got to wondering. He was a qualified surveyor by age 15, and worked as a surveyor. That suggests that he knew some trigonometry and understood how to calculate the areas of complex shapes. He would have know how to use precise instruments and understood how to make precise measurements. According to one source:

Equipment used by George Washington while surveying included: a brass plain (or plane) surveying compass, a jacob staff, a surveyor's chain and poles, an "18 inch Circumferentor with Sights to let down," a lodestone, a twelve inch brass Gunter [scale], full and compleat, one side to have inches and 10ths and the other inches and l2ths as usual," a brass parallel rule, and a case of surveyor's plotting instruments.

The beginning of my engineering education was a course in surveying, designed to turn typical high school students into people with an engineering appreciation for measurement, accuracy and precision.

In his early 20's in 1754

George Washington, newly commissioned lieutenant colonel, started westward from Alexandria with part of a regiment of Virginia frontiersmen to build a road to Redstone Creek, present day Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela. 

In 1755, General Edward Braddock with Washington as as a volunteer aide

decided to follow the road Washington had blazed over the mountains on his way to Fort Necessity the previous year. Because the trail was inadequate for the army's large wagons and artillery, it was widened to 12 feet, but only at great effort and expenditure of time. 

I can only assume that Washington played a role in laying out the road, managing the construction of its first version, and managing is improvement under General Braddock.

Washington's two great  military successes in the Revolutionary War were the capture of Boston and the defeat of the British at Valley Forge.

• In Boston, Washington ordered the transport of canon captured at Fort Ticonderoga to Boston (a major engineering feat itself) and their emplacement in fortified positions (built in a single night) in Dorchester Heights. The American canons on the Heights could command the British positions, but could not be effectively reached by the British guns below.
• At Yorktown, Washington and his French allies conducted a formal siege, building engineered siege works. Their artillery, more effective than that of the British, led to the surrender of Cornwallis and his troops.

Washington had studied military texts for much of his life, and apparently had learned from them as well as from his service with experienced English military officers. I assume that that knowledge, plus what he had learned as a surveyor, and in the building of military roads and forts helped him to understand the use of artillery and siege warfare. These were core objectives of the military engineering curricula that he would later order created at West Point.

In 1784, after the Treaty of Paris was signed, Washington became involved in the creation of the Patomac Company which was "to make improvements to the Potomac River and improve its navigability for commerce." That year he also certified an invention of a steam operated boat by James Rumsey, which enabled the inventor to obtain a Virginia patent. Later, in 1794, Washington used his familiarity with Harpers Ferry to champion the site for a new federal armory and arsenal. Thus Washington played an important role in stimulating transportation and industrial engineering in the United States,

I quote from "George Washington: The First US Engineer"

On June 9, 1778, at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, General George Washington issued a call for engineers and engineering education. This order is considered the genesis of a US Army Engineer School, which found its permanent home at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where Washington had practiced surveying. As President (1789-97), Washington pushed for the passage of the first US Patent Act in 1789, and signed the first official US patent to Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for his process of making potash and pearl ashes. In 1794, President Washington established a Corps of Artillerists and Engineers to be educated and stationed at West Point in New York, which later become the US Military Academy at West Point.

George Washington has also been described as America's first engineer. That his birthday, on February 22 (observed February 20), is celebrated during National Engineers Week, February 21-27, is no coincidence.

I wonder if historians, with their typical education in the humanities, often fail to understand the intellectual content of engineering. In Washington's youth there was no college engineering program available to him, but he seems to have picked up the skills and understanding of a military engineer, and used them to good effect in his great victories.

So Washington was a statesman, general, agricultural innovator and engineer. What does it take to qualify as an intellectual in the lexicon of historians?