Americans have commemorated George Washington’s accomplishments as Commander-in-Chief and President from his lifetime and into the present day. Often, these celebrations are aligned with Washington’s birthday on February 22. In 1879, "George Washington's Birthday" was declared holiday for employees of the Federal government in the District of Columbia. Then in 1885, the Federal holiday law was expanded to include all Federal employees. Since 1968, this commemoration has been observed on the third Monday in February as “President’s Day.”
Early Commemorations of Washington’s Birthday
Americans, however, have celebrated George Washington's birthday long before it became an official holiday. Soldiers at Valley Forge in 1778 gathered to offer birthday wishes to their Commander-in-Chief. As early as 1779 the birthday was a cause for public celebration in Milton, Massachusetts.
In the early nineteenth century in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, public balls and dinners were important events for social elites to commemorate Washington by honoring his birthday. Likewise, public parades and demonstrations for the masses filled the city streets of the Republic, celebrating Washington's Birthday.
In 1856, Massachusetts became the first state to formally recognize Washington's birthday as an official holiday. In response, the nation's oldest literary magazine, the North American Review, published an 1857 oration, proclaiming, "it would auger well for the Republic to observe it as a universal holiday."
The great American orator and abolitionist Edward Everett reminded his audience repeatedly of the words that Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Washington that, "North and South will hang together while they have you to hang to."1 From 1856 to 1860, Everett read his Washington Birthday oration on some 129 occasions, donating $69,000 of the proceeds to Ann Pamela Cunningham’s, aiding her efforts to purchase Washington's Mount Vernon plantation.
Under the cloud of war, Abraham Lincoln in 1862 encouraged Americans to listen put on and attend public readings of Washington's Farewell Address. Both the Union and Confederacy attempted to claim Washington as their own. On Washington's Birthday, February 22, 1862, the government of the Confederate States of America was inaugurated in Richmond Virginia, with a drawing of sculptor Thomas Crawford's statue of Washington on horseback.
State Celebrations for George Washington
State governments set their own holidays, and while most states and employers follow the lead of the Federal government in designating the third Monday of February as the “President’s Day” holiday, only nine states currently identify “Washington's Birthday” as the sole commemorative event. Another twenty-four states observe a "President's Day" as a holiday. In total, 41 states observe some form of holiday commemorating either the birth of Washington or "President's Day."
Some states honor Washington in other months than February. The states of Georgia and Indiana commemorate Washington's Birthday on December 24. New Mexico's "President’s Day" falls on the fourth Friday of November.
Some states honor Washington's Birthday or a Presidents Day in conjunction with celebrations also honoring Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. Arkansas honors both George Washington and civil rights activist Daisy Gaston Bates.
George Washington as a Namesake
Often, Washington’s memory is honored through the naming of places throughout the United States. By 1932, the bicentennial year of Washington's birth, the American map contained a Federal capital, a state, 33 counties, 121 cities and towns, 257 townships, 1140 streets, roads, and avenues, one mountain, three colleges and universities, and uncounted schools and lakes—all named for Washington.
David Alan Rego, Revised by Zoie Horecny, Ph.D., 10 April
Notes:
1. Quoted in Paul Revere Frothingham, Edward Everett, Orator and Statesman. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925, 391.
Bibliography:
Bodnar, John E. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Kammen, Michael G. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991.
Lengel, Edward G. Inventing George Washington: America's Founder, in Myth and Memory. New York: Harper, 2011.
Newman, Simon P. Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997
Schwartz, Barry. George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol. New York: Free Press, 1987.
Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
