His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Despite his assiduous attention to the most minute details of management, Mount Vernon made only a marginal profit in the best years before the war, and during the war it began to resemble those many Virginia plantations declining toward bankruptcy. Washington’s decision to abandon slave labor, then, fit sensibly into a larger pattern of decisions driven by his acute appreciation of the bottom line and his personal obsession with economic independence. He had recognized that tobacco would not work, and moved to wheat. He had recognized that the consignment system locked him into mounting debts with Cary & Company, and had broken that connection, indeed had eventually seen fit to break with the British Empire itself. Now he recognized that slavery was as much the source of the problem as tobacco or imperial regulations, so he needed to free himself, though not his slaves, from the costs of bondage.35

  There was a simple but sweeping quality to Washington’s grasp of the elemental realities underlying the plantation economy of Virginia, which conjured up a vision of slavery as an economic anachronism that went hand in hand with his still developing picture of slavery as a moral anachronism. Carried to its logical and imaginative limits, it was a vision of the Old Dominion as the southern outpost of a Middle Atlantic economy based on crop diversification and free labor, rather than the northern outpost of a Deep South economy based on a single cash crop and slavery. (If this vision had ever been implemented, the political chemistry of the subsequent national debate over slavery would have been dramatically different, as would the inevitability of the Civil War, which is difficult to imagine with Virginia on the Union side.) By the time he began his retirement, Washington’s mind had not changed on this score, at least in terms of what he preferred for sensible economic reasons. But neither had the swollen size of the slave population at Mount Vernon, which now numbered slightly more than two hundred men, women, and children.36

  Given Washington’s justifiable reputation for carrying through on his convictions, the question becomes: Why did he not carry through on his decision to sell his slaves? The desire to do so apparently remained alive in August 1784, when William Gordon, visiting Mount Vernon to do research for his history of the war, reported a conversation between Washington and Lafayette: “You wish to get rid of all your Negroes,” Gordon recalled, “& the Marquis wisht that an end might be put to the slavery of all of them,” a complementary set of goals that would “give the finishing stroke & polish to your political characters.” About this time, however, it was gradually dawning on Washington that any wholesale scheme for selling his slaves encountered three overlapping difficulties that, taken together, posed an intractable dilemma: first, the dower slaves inherited through the Custis estate did not legally belong to him, and were therefore not his to sell; second, the eldest slaves, who had been acquired when he was developing his Mount Vernon properties in the 1760s, were now beyond their prime work years and therefore nearly impossible to sell; third, and most importantly, the multiple and many-layered connections by blood and marriage within the slave population at Mount Vernon virtually precluded any general sale once Washington had resolved not to break up families. By the middle of the 1780s, then, he faced what we might call a truly Faulknerian situation; both he and his black workforce were trapped together in a network of mutual dependency that was spiraling slowly downward toward economic ruin.37

  Hindsight permits us the clairvoyance to see that the only escape from this trap, the solution that Robert Pleasants urged then and modern-day moralists have echoed in our own time, was to free his slaves outright. If he gave that possibility any serious consideration in the 1780s, the idea did not make it into the historical record. (It does seem plausible, though there is no evidence for it, that this was the moment when he first considered freeing his slaves in his will.) The evidence that does exist suggests a more muddled position: he vowed never again to purchase another slave, a somewhat hollow promise since, as he himself acknowledged, he was already overstocked with “this species of property”; he accepted, grudgingly, the fact that Mount Vernon would never show a profit, because it had become a retirement home and child-care center for many of his slave residents, whom he was morally obliged to care for.38

  In 1787 he admitted that Mount Vernon had run a deficit for the past eleven years, and there was every reason to expect that trend to continue. The following year he reported that his annual losses caused him “to feel more sensibly the want of money, than I have ever done at any period of my life.” An English farmer, James Bloxam, whom he hired in 1786 to improve techniques of cultivation, claimed that the soil around Mount Vernon was one obstacle, but the lackadaisical workforce was the major liability: “The General have some very (illegible) But badly manedge and he will never have them no Better for he have a Sett About him which I nor you would be trobled with. But the General is goot them and he must keep them. But they are a verey Disagreable People.” (Some of the slaves, finding Bloxam equally disagreeable, threatened to poison him if he stayed at Mount Vernon.) Washington himself noted that the youngest slaves were seldom assigned chores, “for at present to skulk from house to house under some frivolous pretence or another seems to be the principal employment of most of them.” The prewar master of Mount Vernon would never have allowed such behavior. The postwar master was mellower, more willing to accept the fact that much of what he grew on his farms would never reach the marketplace, but would be consumed on the grounds by his black laborers and their families. In sum, if he could not sell them, Washington chose to make the maintenance of slave families at Mount Vernon a higher priority than profit. At some unspoken level, he saw this as a moral posture, and a small price for a troubled conscience to pay for a measure of solace.39

  INFANT EMPIRE

  IN JULY 1784, Washington received a long letter from an anonymous admirer which took the form of a sermon in the jeremiad mode. It described the early days of the American Revolution as a magic moment when virtuous values flourished, patriots rallied to the cause, private interests were surrendered to public ideals, and Washington himself stepped forward to embody the self-sacrificing “spirit of ’76.” But since those heady times, the writer lamented, the Revolution had followed a precipitous downhill course much like the corruption of the Garden of Eden after the Fall. “Extortioners, speculators, Hucksters & Practising Lawyers” had transformed the glorious cause into a degenerate exercise in profiteering and fraud. The money changers, in effect, had taken over the temple, and only the second coming of the messiah could redeem the Revolution by recovering its original character and course. There was no doubt in the writer’s mind who the American messiah was: “I am therefore, from a Conviction that the Present is a Critical moment for America, irresistibly impeled to address you Great Sir, not only as the fittest, but I fear the only Person on Earth, that together with the inclination, possesses the Probity and Abilities sufficient to avert the impending ruin.”40

  Just as he required no instruction from Robert Pleasants about the evil of slavery, Washington did not need to hear a sermon on the decline of American virtue from some anonymous stranger. He had, in fact, lived that story as commander in chief of the chronically undermanned, underfed, undersupplied Continental army. But the lamentation about virtue, or the lack thereof, presumed that the answer to the problem was moral reformation (or perhaps an extensive series of frontal lobotomies). During the war Washington had learned, the hard way, that depending upon a virtuous citizenry was futile, for it asked more than human nature was capable of delivering. Rather than pray for moral reform, he preferred to lobby for political reform. “No Man in the United States,” he told Hamilton at the end of the war, “is, or can be more deeply impressed with the necessity of reform in our present Confederation than myself.” Making voluntary sacrifice the operative principle of republican government had proved to be a romantic delusion. Both individual citizens and sovereign states often required coercion to behave responsibly, which meant that the federal government required expanded powers of taxation and ultimate
control over fiscal policy. Lacking those powers, Washington believed that “the Confederation appears to me to be little more than an empty sound, and Congress a nugatory body which, in their current weak condition could only give the vital stab to public credit, and must sink into contempt in the eyes of Europe.” During the initial years of his retirement, Washington made no secret of his contempt for the Confederation Congress, which he described as “wretchedly managed,” or his conviction that the Articles of Confederation were “fatally flawed.”41

  However unexceptional these opinions might appear to us today, at the time they were distinctive. For a central impulse of the American Revolution, and the core meaning of “the spirit of ’76” in most minds, was an instinctive aversion to coercive political power of any sort, most especially centralized power emanating from any distant location beyond the surveillance of the citizens it affected. These fears haunted all conversations about the proper shape of republican government in the revolutionary era, making the very weakness of the federal government under the Articles of Confederation the ideal expression of revolutionary intentions. In a sense, these same fears have haunted all scholarly conversations about “the critical decade” of the 1780s ever since, as historians have argued endlessly about the motives, whether sinister or sensible, of those demanding radical reforms of the Articles of Confederation. The terms historians have imposed on the two sides of the debate—liberals vs. conservatives, democrats vs. aristocrats—have all proved anachronistic and misleading. And efforts to align the different constituencies according to wealth or discernible patterns of economic interest have also proved futile. In Washington’s case, however, the reasons for regarding the confederation government as wholly inadequate were elemental and clear, and they cast a shaft of light onto a piece of historical terrain that has sometimes been rendered darker (and bloodier) than necessary.42

  Washington regarded the American Revolution as a movement to establish both American independence and American nationhood; indeed, he did not believe you could have one without the other. Most of the officers in the Continental army shared this view, because they had also experienced the frustrations of trying to fight and win a war without a federal government empowered to provide resources in the reliable fashion of the British ministry. The fear that haunted Washington was not one of excessive federal power reminiscent of Parliament’s arbitrary and imperial policies, but rather that of a weak confederation reminiscent of the Continental Congress’s woefully inadequate performance during the war. He expressed his convictions on this score to an up-and-coming Virginia statesman, James Madison, in 1785: “We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation; which have national objects to promote, and a National character to support—If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.” In effect, Washington believed that America’s hard-won independence would be short-lived unless the “United States” became a singular rather than a plural term, because a mere confederation of states would become, as he put it, “the dupes of some [foreign] powers and, most assuredly, the contempt of all.”43

  There was one additional, and quite distinctive, ingredient in his thinking, which had its roots in the earlier war he also knew so well. The French and Indian War was a competition among three imperial powers—Great Britain, France, and the Six Nations—for domination of North America east of the Mississippi. Washington saw the American Revolution as a continuation of that contest, in which the newly independent America displaced Britain as the dominant imperial power on the continent. “However unimportant America may be considered at present,” he predicted to Lafayette, “there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires,” adding that it was already “an infant-empire.” The strategic stakes were huge, stretching geographically across a continent and chronologically across the next century, and they could only be achieved by a federal government fully empowered to harness and manage the enormous energies and resources entailed in such a large-scale imperial project. From this perspective, to dither about the danger of consolidated political power was like arguing about a few pieces of cordwood when a boundless forest lay visibly on the horizon.44

  While he was sure what the American future required, he was equally sure that any movement to reform the Articles of Confederation was not imminent, and if and when it occurred he would not be around to see it, much less be the messiah to lead it. The first indication that he might need to rethink those assurances arrived at Mount Vernon in March 1786 in the form of a letter from John Jay, who was overseeing foreign policy for the confederation government. Jay informed him of behind-the-scenes conversations in which “an opinion begins to prevail that a general convention for revising the articles of Confederation would be expedient.” Jay acknowledged that “we are in a delicate Situation,” and a premature effort at reform that failed would be worse than no effort at all. But if events did move in that direction, Jay observed, “I am persuaded you cannot view them with the Eye of an unconcerned Spectator.” Washington concurred that the situation was indeed delicate, but doubted that the time was ripe for a convention. The fiscal problems needed to fester and deepen, some unforeseeable crisis needed to galvanize public opinion in favor of reform. As for his own role, “having happily assisted in bringing the ship into port & having been fairly discharged; it is not my business to embark again on a sea of troubles.”45

  And so on this dismissive note began a year-long negotiation that eventually ended with Washington attending, and of course chairing, the Constitutional Convention, then becoming the inevitable and unanimous selection as the first president of the United States. But what has the look, at least in retrospect, of a foregone conclusion happened in a genuinely grudging and truly tortured fashion. A cynic might be tempted to argue that Washington played the role of an elusive coquette, rejecting all suitors while knowing full well that she is headed for the altar. The cynic would be wrong, however, because Washington’s personal correspondence reveals a thoroughly retired hero who felt less like a young coquette than an old soldier past his prime. He was also the American Cincinnatus, who relished his retirement as the final testament to his heroic status, the immortal whose fame derived more from his surrender than his exercise of power. What we see clearly as a glorious capstone to his career appeared initially to Washington more like a highly problematic sequel.

  Almost on cue, the galvanizing crisis that he had half hoped for occurred in western Massachusetts. In the fall of 1786, Daniel Shays, a veteran of Bunker Hill and Saratoga, mobilized two thousand indebted farmers to protest mortgage foreclosures and higher taxes by threatening to capture the federal armory at Springfield in western Massachusetts. Initial reports to Washington of what was called Shays’s Rebellion were hyperbolic and alarmist, describing “a body of 12 or 15000 desperate and unprincipled men” about to transform all New England into a bloodbath. Actually, the most alarming feature of the “little rebellion,” as Jefferson called it, was the set of principles the rebels declared, which were eerily similar to the revolutionary principles of 1776, thereby suggesting that the grievances hurled at British rulers could also be used to undermine elected officials in Massachusetts and beyond. Eventually Washington received more detached assessments of the uprising from Benjamin Lincoln, a former colleague in the Continental army who led the Massachusetts militia units that suppressed the rebellion. Nevertheless, Washington insisted on seeing the crisis as a harbinger of prospective anarchy, which seemed to confirm what British and other European observers had been predicting all along: that the infant American republic was destined to die in the cradle:

  The picture which you have drawn, & 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 unaccount
able; 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 & folly.46

  Shays’s Rebellion was less a cause for calling the Constitutional Convention than a trigger, the justification to implement those behind-the-scenes conversations that Jay had described to Washington the previous spring. As those conversations developed in the form of plans to gather state delegations in Philadelphia in May 1787, arguments formed in his mind that allowed him to resist the mounting pressure to lead the Virginia delegation. Up until the last possible minute, Washington performed a political minuet that let him dance away from all invitations and overtures to resume his public career.

  The first line of defense was the Society of the Cincinnati. In keeping with his decision to maintain a discreet distance from the aristocratic aura surrounding the society, Washington had declined the invitation to attend the annual meeting, which just happened to be scheduled for Philadelphia in May. He could not possibly attend a political convention at the same time and place without giving offense to the former officers of the Continental army, he explained, though the Virginia delegation had his heartfelt support.47

  The second line of defense was that very Virginia delegation, for he had noted that the list of delegates did not include his name. This was a rather lame and hollow excuse, since Washington had not been elected to the delegation only because the Virginia legislature had presumed that he would decline to serve. Once he tried this line of defense, Edmund Randolph used his power as governor to breach it by requesting and receiving a unanimous vote from the legislature on behalf of the one man “who began, carried on & consummated the revolution.” Though tactically outmaneuvered on this front, Washington insisted that the endorsement by the Virginia legislature, while edifying, made no difference, since rheumatism and a host of other ailments made a trip to Philadelphia impossible.48