ALEXANDRIA, Va. — On June 15, 1775, in the Assembly Room of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress voted unanimously by ballot to appoint George Washington Commander in Chief of the newly formed Continental Army.
He was 43, more than six feet tall, the largest landowner among the delegates, and one of the most experienced soldiers in the colonies. He was also a man whose adult life had been organized around a town less than 10 miles north of his Mount Vernon home — Alexandria, where he attended Christ Church as a vestryman, where he belonged to Masonic Lodge No. 22, where he bought supplies, dined at Gadsby’s Tavern, and conducted his civic and commercial business.
The decision in Philadelphia
The Continental Army had been established only a day earlier, on June 14, 1775, when Congress voted to raise a standing army of soldiers from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia to support the Massachusetts militia then besieging the British in Boston. The question that remained was who would lead it.
John Adams of Massachusetts rose to nominate Washington, a fellow delegate whose physical presence and quiet manner had impressed Adams across two sessions of Congress. Adams’ political calculation was straightforward: New England’s militia was already fighting outside Boston, but if the war was to be a continental cause rather than a regional one, the army needed a commander from the South. Virginia — the largest and wealthiest of the colonies — would have to be brought in. A Virginia commander would do that…