what did George Washingtons oath say?
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Probably something like -- Egads, by Jove, I promiseth to be a splendid president of this new country.
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George Washington presided over the constitutional convention.
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As an African American, I'd like to quote an ex-slave named Frederick Douglass.  He made a speech which in part said:\n\n"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."
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here you go, hope they help - I just typed in ceremonial speeches to google.  Good luck!
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The third verse of the US National Anthem:\n\n"And where is that band who so vauntingly swore \nThat the havoc of war and the battle's confusion \nA home and a country should leave us no more? \nTheir blood has wiped out their foul footsteps' pollution. \nNo refuge could save the hireling and slave \nFrom the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: \nAnd the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave \nO'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."
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George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799) \n\nhttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Washington
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George Washington and James Monroe
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The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln, America's first Republican president.\n\n\nFour score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. \n\nNow we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. \n\nBut, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE, shall not perish from the earth.
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George Washington was the first president of the United States.  He was a tobacco farmer and the commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution.\n\n\nHe also have teeth made of ivory.
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George Washington was born in Westmoreland County Virginia in 1732. \n\nFamily\n\nWashington's ancestors were from England; his great-grandfather, John Washington, immigrated to Virginia in 1657. George's father Augustine "Gus" Washington (1693–1743) was a slave-owning planter who later tried his hand in iron-mining ventures. His mother was Mary Ball Washington (1708–1789), who lived to see her son become famous, but had a strained relationship with him. In George's youth, the Washingtons were moderately prosperous members of the Virginia gentry, of "middling rank" rather than one of the leading families. Washington, the oldest child from his father's second marriage, had two older half-brothers and four younger siblings. \n\nWashington would marry Martha Washington. She was born Martha Daindridge in Virginia. At the age of 18, she married Daniel Parke Custis, a rich bachelor two decades her senior. She had four children by Custis. A son and a daughter, Daniel (1751-1754) and Frances (1753-1757), died in childhood, but her two younger children, John (Jacky) Parke Custis (1754-1781) and Martha ("Patsy") Parke Custis (1756-1773) survived to young adulthood. Custis' death in 1757 left Martha a rich widow, with independent control over a dower inheritance for her lifetime and trustee control over the inheritance of her minor children.\n\nTwo years after the death of her first husband, Martha Dandridge Custis married Colonel George Washington on January 6, 1759. Shortly after the marriage, he left the colonial arm of the British military due to the British policy denying colonials command opportunities with the regular British army. They lived a prosperous and apparently happy life at Washington's Mount Vernon estate. Martha and George Washington had no children together, but they raised Martha's two surviving children. John Parke Custis served as an aide to Washington during the siege of Yorktown in 1781. During this service, Jack died, probably of typhus. After his death, the Washingtons raised two of his children, Martha's youngest grandchildren, Eleanor Parke Custis and George Washington Parke Custis (April 30, 1781 - October 10, 1857). They also provided personal and financial support to nieces, nephews and other family members in both the Dandridge and Washington families.\n\n\n\nEducation\n\nWashington had little formal education: the death of his father prevented him from receiving an education in England as his older brothers had done. Instead, Washington was trained as a surveyor. \n\nCareer\n\nGeorge Washington was the Commander in Chief of American forces in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), and later the first President of the United States, an office he held from 1789 to 1797. Because of his central role in the founding of the United States, Washington is often called the "Father of his Country". Scholars rank him among the greatest of United States presidents.\n\nWashington first gained prominence leading troops from Virginia in support of the British Empire during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), a conflict which he inadvertently helped to start. After leading the American victory in the Revolutionary War, he relinquished his military power and returned to civilian life, an act that brought him much renown. In 1787, he presided over the Constitutional Convention that drafted the United States Constitution and, in 1789, was the unanimous choice to become the first President of the United States. His two-term administration set many policies and traditions that survive today. After his second term expired, Washington again retired to civilian life, establishing an important precedent of peaceful change of government that was to serve as an example for the United States and for other future republics.
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IN the UNited States, mnay people see the oath upon the bible as meerely a nod to tradition.\n\nOur country was founded by many men, all who shared the same religion, who wanted to build the USA with a strong religious backround, hence we get "one nation under God".\n\nNeedless to say we live in a much different world today.  Not all americans pray to the same God, or pray at all. \n\nIn the beginning, presidents used their great great great grandfathers bible during their inaugural oath.  Today presidents are just as likely to use a regular old bible.  Perhaps a reflection of the times.\n\nGood thing or a bad thing, you decide.
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Abraham Lincoln, "Second Inaugural Address," 4 March 1865\n\n\nFellow-Countrymen:\n\nAt this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.\n\nOn the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.\n\nOne-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."\n\nWith malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting
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From the Preamble of the US Constitution (basically like a mission statement for the US Goverment)\n\nAt the time that it was written, Enlightenment thinkers believed the legitimate job of government was to protect citizen's lives, basic freedoms, and the ability to do things like earn a living.  \n\n"blessings of liberty" would be the rhetoric for basic freedoms like speech and religion.  It ties into the rhetoric of being endowed inalienable right from the creator, etc. from the Declaration of Independence, as in blessings from god (creator) as part of inalienable rights.
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"I, George Dubya Bush, do solemnly swear..."
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From The Declaration Of Independence\n\nThe unanimous Declaration of the United States of America,\n \nWhen in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.\n \n--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. \n\n-But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-\n\nFrom The Constitution of the United States:\n\nArticle. I.\nSection. 8.\nTo provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;\nTo provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, \nand for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, \nthe Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;\n\nSection. 9.\nThe Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.\n\nSection. 4.\nThe United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE\n\nFrom The BILL Of RIGHTS\n\nAmendment II\nA well regulated militia, being necessary to the Security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. \n\nAmendment X\nThe powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, \nnor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or TO THE PEOPLE \n\n\nShould American Citizens take arms up against ILLEGAL\nAliens? \nAnd Force them from our country? \n\nIf Our Government Doesnt Resolve This\nWe May Have To (Article 1 - Sections 8 and 9)\nIt Is Our RIGHT And Our DUTY As American Citizens \nTo DEFEND Our Nation Against Invaders\n\nAs It Is Our RIGHT And Our DUTY \nTo Remove The GOVERNMENT\nWhen Our Government Is Not Acting In The Best Interest Of Our Nation (Article 1 - Section 4)\n\nThats When Amendments 2 and 10 Come Into Play\n\nDont Believe Me??? Read The Words I Typed Above ^
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Sir:\n\nWe congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.\n\nFrom the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?\n\nWhen an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.\n\nWhile the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.\n\nThe workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]\n\nSigned on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:
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British\n\n[modified below to provide source]\n"British forces march on Washington. At a brief battle on the road, known as the Battle of Bladensburg; the British forces defeat the American forces, who withdraw in disarray, thus opening the road to Washington. The British burn the White House and the Capitol, but the rest of Washington is saved by a strong rain storm. The British, under orders not to hold any territory, withdrew."\nhttp://www.historycentral.com/1812/Washington.html\n\n[another modification to provide some more details]\nI'm not a historian, so I will not pretend to be an expert on this subject.  However, I am learning more details as I go along in the effort to more fully answer your question.  At this point, this is more of a challenge and just plain fun, so it doesn't matter if you should choose this as a best answer or not.  The thrill is in the hunt.\n\nWhat I've determined so far is that the burning of Washington (and the White House) was performed by parts of the British Army stationed along the East Coast. Although the Canadian militia did fight on the side of the British, it seems that they were primarily in the Great Lakes regions where they comprised nearly half of the British forces.  The Great Lakes region was a separate theatre of operations during the war. \n\nThe war was conducted in four theatres of operations:\nThe Atlantic Ocean \nThe Great Lakes and the Canadian frontier \nThe coast of the United States \nThe Southern States \n\nThe commander of the British forces on the East Coast was General Robert Ross who served under Admiral Cockburn.  These two men are credited with leading the forces responsible for the burning of Washington.  From my reading, it appears that Ross probably actually led the forces, while Cockburn received credit as the commander of British Naval forces along the US coastal, providing the means for the landing of the ground forces, and as Ross' superior officer.\n\nRoss, himself, commanded a 4500-man army, comprised of the 4th (King's Own) Light, 21st Royal North British Fusiliers, 44th (East Essex) Regiment of Foot, and 85th Regiment of Foot.\n\n(The British commander of the Great Lakes forces was Major-General Sir Isaac Brock.)\n\nThere doesn't seem to be any significant work, citable references, or other resources that indicate any ties between the Canadian militia that served in the Great Lakes with Ross' East Coast forces that participated in the burning of Washington.\n\nFrom additional reading, it would seem that the attack on Washington and Baltimore was performed by components of the British as a diversion so that the British forces in the north (with Canadians) could repel the continual attacks from US forces and make an incursion into the US.\n\n\nSo, it would seem, in my opinion, that it was not Canadians that burned down the White House.  Although Canadians fought alongside the British in the Great Lakes region, they were not instrutmental in Cockburne's and Ross' forces on the East Coast that actually did the burning.  Further, just because the British Army in one region contained Canadian militia members, I don't think it would be correct to conclude, in any respect, that Canadians should get 'credit' for burning down the White House.  That would be like saying that Latvia gets the historical credit for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Hussein.  They had men in the coalition forces, after all.