Early on, then, Hamilton had created a generic blueprint for what would eventually, four years later, become the Constitution. But in the current context, Hamilton’s version of political leadership was so far ahead of both public and political opinion that it was never even debated by the Congress. “Resolutions intended to be submitted to the Congress at Princeton,” he scribbled at the end of his draft, “but abandoned for want of support.”2
Over the course of the next two years, several proposals calling for a convention to revise the Articles floated through the Congress, one by Madison emphasizing the need for federal control over commerce, another by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina prompted by the sectional split over the Mississippi Question. None of these proposals were as specific or sweeping as Hamilton’s, but all met the same fatal fate. It was an eighteenth-century version of Catch-22. The moribund character of the Confederation Congress required reform by a separate and independent body, but such an effort could not muster support within the Congress unless or until it was reformed.3
Finally, a breakthrough of sorts came in January 1786, when Congress approved a convention at Annapolis to discuss the rules governing interstate commerce. This was hardly a mandate for sweeping reform in the Hamiltonian mode, but rather an effort at incremental improvement by establishing federal authority over the commerce of the states, which were currently in the process of passing tariffs restricting trade with one another. Madison saw it as a small-scale experiment in political reform. “If it succeeds,” he wrote Monroe, “it can be repeated as other defects force themselves on the public attention, and as the public mind becomes prepared for further remedies.” Then he added: “…I am not in general an advocate of temporizing or partial remedies. But rigor in this respect, if pushed too far, may hazard everything.”4
In effect, since all previous efforts at a more comprehensive reform of the Articles had failed miserably, perhaps a more limited approach focusing only on commercial reform was worth trying. “To speak the truth,” Madison confessed to Jefferson, “I almost despair that if it [Annapolis] should come to nothing, it will I fear confirm Great Britain and all the world in the belief that we are not to be respected, nor apprehended as a nation in matters of commerce.”5
The Annapolis convention justified Madison’s worst fears. Both he and Hamilton were appointed as delegates to the convention, but only five states showed up (Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey). All the delegates could do was meet and then adjourn. “Your co-missioners,” explained Hamilton, “did not conceive it advisable to proceed on the business of their Mission, under Circumstances of so partial and defective a recommendation.”6
It was now clear that even modest attempts at political reform were impossible in the current context. The state legislatures were staunch opponents of any federal government that challenged their sovereignty, and that inchoate congregation called “the people” were indifferent to any political project that required them to think outside their own local orbits.
At this dispiriting moment, Hamilton rose to the occasion in a display of almost preposterous audacity. Before the delegates at Annapolis dispersed, they gathered for one final conversation and reached the conclusion that, as Hamilton put it, “the Situation of the United States [is] delicate and critical, calling for an exertion…of all the members of the Confederacy.” There was, Hamilton intoned, a prevailing sense that the confederation was on the verge of dissolution, and reforms were necessary “to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” In order to address and resolve these outstanding issues, Hamilton claimed there was unanimous support within the Annapolis delegation for “a future Convention” with a roving mandate to address all the most salient issues, scheduled to meet in Philadelphia on the second Sunday in May 1787.7
This was Hamilton’s out-front brand of leadership in its most flamboyant form. A convention called to address the modest matter of commercial reform had just failed to attract even a quorum, and now Hamilton was using this grim occasion to announce the date for another convention that would tackle all the problems affecting the confederation at once. It was as if a prizefighter, having just been knocked out by a journeyman boxer, declared his intention to challenge the heavyweight champion of the world. Given the overwhelming indifference that had suffocated all previous attempts at comprehensive reform of the Articles, no one with any semblance of sanity could possibly believe that Hamilton’s proposal enjoyed even the slightest chance of success.
This resounding verdict became somewhat less clear because of a discernible shift in the political atmosphere in the fall of 1786. The cause was an insurrection by farmers in western Massachusetts protesting mortgage foreclosures and tax increases by the state legislature aimed at retiring the war debt. Dubbed Shays’ Rebellion after Daniel Shays, one of its leaders, it is best understood not as a forerunner of the Populist movement, as some historians have argued, but rather as an epilogue to the American Revolution. Shays, for example, was a veteran of Bunker Hill and Saratoga who regarded the taxes imposed by the Massachusetts legislature as the second coming of the taxes imposed by Parliament. About two thousand farmers rallied to the cause, which reached its crescendo during an ill-fated attempt to seize the federal arsenal at Springfield.8
The insurrection was quickly put down by the Massachusetts militia under the command of Benjamin Lincoln, and the state legislature then saw fit to pardon most of the ringleaders and even meet many of their demands. Shays’ Rebellion really was, as Jefferson (safely ensconced in Paris) so famously put it, “a little rebellion” of minor significance.
But initial press reports vastly exaggerated the size of the rebel force and the scale of its political agenda. Instead of two thousand insurgents, the gossip mills in the Confederation Congress imagined a force of twenty to forty thousand, with plans to secede from Massachusetts or even march on Boston. Madison and several other delegates believed that the rebellion was instigated by British agents in Canada who were plotting to bring western Massachusetts and Vermont back into the British Empire. “There is good reason to believe that the rebels are secretly stimulated by British influence,” Madison speculated, a development that “furnished new proofs of the necessity of such a vigour in the Genl. Govt. as will be able to restore health to any diseased part of the federal body.” Then he added: “An attempt to bring about such an amendment of the federal Constitution is on the Anvil,” referring to the proposed convention at Philadelphia in May.9
Madison’s frenzied response to Shays’ Rebellion, however misguided, was apparently authentic, meaning that he truly believed this minor incident was in fact a major threat to the survival of the American republic. So, for that matter, did Washington, whose stolid serenity customarily made him immune to such wild overreactions:
The accounts which are published, of the commotions…in the Eastern States, are equally to be lamented and deprecated. They exhibit a melancholy proof of what our trans Atlantic foes have predicted; and of another thing perhaps, which is still more to be regretted, and is yet more unaccountable; that mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government. I am mortified beyond expression whenever I view the clouds which have spread over the brightest morn that ever dawned upon my Country…. For it is hardly to be imagined that the great body of the people can be so enveloped in darkness, or short sighted as not to see the rays of distant sun through all this mist of intoxication and folly.10
Perhaps the best explanation for all this melodramatic excess is that both Madison and Washington had been warning that the confederation was on the verge of collapse for so long that they were poised to impose that verdict on whatever crisis appeared. Alongside their sincere misperception of Shays’ Rebellion, the correspondence of some delegates in the Confederation Congress suggests more manipulative motives, urging that the political turmoil it created “must be used as a Stock upon which the best Fruits are to be engrafted.” Most advocates fo
r reform of the Articles still embraced some version of the “ripened fruit” metaphor, counseling patience until some providential event made the time appropriate for such an effort. In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion, that time seemed more imminent.11
The watchword for those predisposed toward apocalyptic scenarios was anarchy, the complete collapse of the confederation leading to civil wars between the states and predatory intrusions by European powers, chiefly Great Britain and Spain, eager to carve up the North American continent in the conventional imperialistic European mode. The more realistic scenario was dissolution into two or three regional confederacies that created an American version of Europe. New England would become like Scandinavia, the middle states like western Europe, the states south of the Potomac like the Mediterranean countries. The New England press enhanced the credibility of such prophecies, observing that the attempt at a national union was obviously a failure because regional differences made political consensus impossible. The only option was a union of the five New England states, “leaving the rest of the continent to pursue their own imbecilic and disjointed plans.” The prevailing assumption was that the attempt to sustain some semblance of a national union after the war had failed because allegiances remained local and, at best, regional, and no government could convincingly represent this diversity of interests once common cause against Great Britain was removed from the political equation.12
Jay had alerted Washington that he had a crucial role to play if and when some crisis forced a choice between political dissolution and some new version of national union. Madison had insisted that Shays’ Rebellion constituted just that crisis, interpreting the insurrection as symptomatic of looming anarchy or dissolution of the current confederation into a series of smaller sovereignties. Hamilton had, quite boldly and unilaterally, proposed a date in May 1787 for a convention to consider a major overhaul of the Articles. All these efforts had happened separately, without collusion or cooperation. In a substantive sense, they all shared a common conviction that the full promise of the American Revolution was being betrayed. But that conviction was controversial, since resistance to any coercive version of government power could claim to be the central impulse of the American Revolution. What brought them together in the last months of 1786 was the common recognition that one man possessed the potential to transform the improbable into the inevitable. If the attempt to reform—or better yet, replace—the Articles was to levitate above the lethal combination of entrenched parochialism and studied indifference, it had to be led by the same man who, against all odds, had won the war for independence. Thus began the courting of George Washington.
The specific event that launched the campaign was the announcement by the Confederation Congress of a resolution authorizing the state legislators to appoint delegates to attend a convention in Philadelphia, in effect endorsing the proposal Hamilton had made at the Annapolis convention.
While most of the state governments regarded the status quo as wholly acceptable, and any enhanced authority at the federal level as both threatening and unnecessary, within the Confederation Congress there was an emerging sense that reform of the Articles was probably necessary in order to ensure the survival of the confederation. Correspondence among delegates mentioned enhanced control over commerce, greater federal authority over taxes—though that would be hard—and some kind of mechanism to provide a single voice in foreign policy, Jay’s hobbyhorse. In what was obviously a very fluid situation, the delegates seemed to recognize that something had to be done, and they seized upon Hamilton’s proposal for a convention to reform the Articles on the assumption that some kind of modest reform defined the parameters of the possible.
The lack of a quorum delayed a vote on the bill for two months, an ominous sign, but Madison wrote Washington on November 8, 1786, while the bill was pending, to inform him that history was about to happen:
We can no longer doubt that the crisis is arrived at which the good people of America are to decide the solemn question, whether they will reap the fruits of that Independence…and of that Union which they have cemented with so much of their common blood, or whether by giving way to unmanly jealousies and prejudices, or to partial and transitory interests, they will renounce the auspicious blessings prepared for them by the Revolution, and furnish its enemies an eventual triumph.13
This was an ingenious way to frame the issue, essentially describing the looming convention in Philadelphia as the ultimate arbiter of Washington’s legacy. Nor was that all. Madison claimed to know on good authority that the Virginia legislature fully intended to take the convention seriously and, as the largest state, to name a seven-man delegation with Washington’s name at the head of the list. Washington had deflected Jay’s earlier probe the previous spring by agreeing that the issues were huge but firmly refusing to abandon his role as the American Cincinnatus, permanently retired at his beloved Mount Vernon. “Yet having happily assisted in bringing the ship into port,” he explained to Jay, “and having been fairly discharged, it is not my business to embark again on a Sea of troubles.” The Virginia legislature could do as it pleased, and Washington acknowledged that he would be honored by the nomination. But the script for this play had already been written by the ancients. Cincinnatus could never come back.14
Even a glance at Washington’s postwar correspondence reveals that there was more to his reticence than a desire to stay on script. The phrase that keeps recurring in his letters is “gliding down the stream of life,” his way of realizing that, to shift the metaphor, the sands in his hourglass were running out. He was profoundly aware that no male in the Washington line had lived beyond his fifties, so he was much closer to the end than the beginning. After an extended visit by Lafayette, whom he regarded as an adopted son, he waxed eloquent, almost elegiac, on the likelihood that they would ever meet again:
I called to mind the days of my youth, & found they had long since fled to return no more, that I was descending the hill I had been 52 years climbing— & that tho’ I was blessed with a good Constitution, I was of a short lived family—and might soon expect to be entombed in the dreary mansion of my fathers—These things darkened the shades & gave a gloom to the picture…but I will not repine—I have had my day.15
He regarded these intimations of mortality less as morose moods than as realistic recognitions of his limited time. When he learned that Nathanael Greene had died of sunstroke outside Savannah in 1786, he lamented the loss of his ablest lieutenant during the war, and the passing of an era in which he was an aging survivor. He was, so he thought, living out the last chapter of his own story, posing for painters “whilst they are delineating the lines of my face.” His time had come and gone, or so he firmly believed, and any attempt to lure him back into public life ran against the grain of his deepest emotional convictions.16
These were not the kind of personal concerns that he felt comfortable talking about with Madison, whom he had met and come to admire only a year earlier during a conference at Mount Vernon about improving navigation routes on the Potomac. Instead of unburdening himself in ways that required personal confessions that he regarded as inappropriate, Washington took refuge behind a scheduling conflict. A meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati had been scheduled in Philadelphia in early May 1787, and he had already apprised the members of that venerable, if controversial, organization that he was unable to attend. “I could not appear at the same time & place on any other occasion,” he explained to Madison “without giving offence to a very respecting & deserving part of the Community—the late officers of the American Army.”17
Madison claimed to understand Washington’s awkward predicament but urged him not to decline the Virginia nomination, so that “at least a door could be kept open for your acceptance hereafter, in case the gathering clouds should become so dark and menacing as to supersede every consideration but that of our national existence and safety.” His sense of loyalty to the Society of the Cincinnati was understandable, Madison explained, but
Washington needed to weigh that loyalty against the survival of the republic. Left unsaid, but obvious to all, was that Washington’s inclusion instantly transformed a highly problematic cause into something suddenly serious. With Washington on board, the embarrassment at Annapolis would not be repeated at Philadelphia. And if the assembled delegates decided not just to revise the Articles but to replace them altogether with a new government, Washington’s presence would provide an invaluable veneer of legitimacy for extensive reform that was, strictly speaking, a violation of the mandate soon to be issued by the Confederation Congress.18
Jay rejoined the campaign to lure Washington out of retirement in January 1787 with a long letter arguing that nothing less than root-and-branch reform would do. “Would the giving any further degree of power to congress do the Business?” he asked rhetorically. “I am much inclined to think it would not.” The structure of government provided by the Articles was inherently inadequate, almost designed to be so. There were, to be sure, occasions that required caution and prudence, but this was not one of them. As in 1776, this was the time for leaders to step forward.19
This message harmonized with the patriotic notes Washington was hearing from several quarters. “From the gloomy prospect still admits one ray of hope,” wrote Edmund Randolph from Richmond, “that those who began, carried on & consummated the revolution, can yet rescue America from impending ruin.” Madison chimed in, adding that “having your name at the front of the appointments [serves] as a mark on the earnestness of Virginia.” Even if he eventually decided to withdraw his name, allowing it to stand for the present had immeasurable political advantages, virtually ensuring robust attendance at the convention in May. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Madison was spreading the word that Washington was on board, and at the same time he was conferring privately to have Benjamin Franklin appointed as chair of the convention if Washington backed out.20
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