One senses that these official excuses were convenient covers for deeper reasons that could not be aired so publicly and that lay within him in two overlapping pools of reticence. The first was the conviction that, once he had assumed the role of American Cincinnatus, he could not change the script. In 1783 he had promised to leave public life forever, so attending the Constitutional Convention would, as he put it to a friend, “be considered as inconsistent with my public declaration, delivered in a solemn manner at an interesting Aera of my life, never more to meddle in public matters”; this was a declaration that “not only stands in the files of Congress, but is I believe registered in almost all the Gazettes and magazines that are published.” Cincinnatus, in effect, could never come back.49
A second private reservation flowed directly out of the first, though in a slightly more strategic direction; namely, he could not risk his reputation in a venture that might not succeed. Henry Knox, his old wartime colleague, warned him that the different state delegations were likely to be divided into three factions: moderates, who wished only modest changes in the Articles; conservatives, who wished no change at all; and radicals, who wished a major transformation and an energetic national government. Only if one could be assured that the latter group would triumph was the gamble of Washington’s prestige worth the risk. Knox preferred military metaphors, comparing the decision to attend the convention to the decision to engage the enemy in battle, which should only occur when the outcome was likely and conclusive. Washington observed that the current government was more “like a house on fire.” If one could be assured the delegates intended to extinguish the blaze, he could join the effort. But if not, perhaps the best course was to let the house burn down and hope that others would build a new one later. Why risk his reputation, especially when “gliding down the stream of life in tranquil retirement is so much the wish of my Soul, that nothing on this side of Elysium can be placed in competition with it?”50
But the reputation argument, the more Washington thought about it, was double-edged. On the one hand, his singular status—what he referred to as “the peculiar circumstances of my case”—cut toward caution, since his legacy as America’s greatest revolutionary hero was already secure, so investing this priceless asset in an uncertain cause appeared imprudent. On the other hand, suppose the convention succeeded in producing a viable political framework that secured the Revolution? Knox acknowledged that such an outcome would also secure the Washington legacy, which would be diminished if, in his terms, the house was permitted to burn down: “But were an energetic, and judicious system to be proposed with your Signature, it would be a circumstance highly honorable to your fame, in the judgment of the present and future ages; and doubly entitle you to the glorious republican epithet—The Father of Your Country.” Washington had already begun to gauge the consequences for his reputation if he stayed away from Philadelphia, wondering “whether my non-attendance in this Convention will not be considered as a dereliction to republicanism—nay more—whether other motives may not (however injuriously) be ascribed to me for not exerting myself on this occasion in support of it.”51
These crisscrossing thoughts began to move in a discernibly positive direction in mid-March 1787, largely as a result of Madison’s influence. No one was more adept than the precocious Madison at assessing the nettlesome details that spelled the difference between success and failure in a political contest. He informed Washington that his canvas of the roster of state delegations revealed an impressive array of talent heavily weighted in favor of much more than tinkering, indeed disposed to a thorough transformation of the existent political system. This piece of intelligence tipped the balance. Though he retained his reservations about “again appearing on a public theatre after a public declaration to the contrary,” and though he cringed at the realization that his participation in the convention “will have a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs,” Madison’s report altered his sense of the odds. Once convinced that the convention would address the fundamental problem, that it would “adopt no temporizing expedient, but probe the defects of the Constitution to the bottom, and provide radical cures, whether they are agreed to or not,” Washington decided to cast his lot, and his reputation, with Madison and the Virginia delegation.52
Once on board, an informal council of advisors quickly formed around him that included some of the sharpest political minds in the country. For his part, Washington knew what he knew, essentially that the Articles must be replaced rather than revised, and that the new government needed to possess expanded powers sufficient to make laws for the nation as a whole. Beyond that—more specifically, what the shape of the political architecture constructed on the new foundation might look like—he acknowledged his need for education. Since it was a foregone conclusion that he would be chosen to preside over the convention, Jay and Madison volunteered their services to give him a tutorial in republican theory.
Washington was accustomed to leading by listening. During the Revolution he had chaired countless councils of war in which junior officers presented options to the commander in chief. Before the war George Mason had helped him understand the constitutional arguments against parliamentary taxation. In 1787, as in these previous instances, he already possessed a firm grasp of the elemental forces at work and a clear set of convictions about the strategic direction in which to lead those forces. Where he needed assistance—and he was completely comfortable requesting and receiving it—was in mastering the theoretical vocabulary that more formally educated colleagues possessed, learning the intellectual road map to reach the destination he had already decided upon.53
In a remarkably prescient letter, Jay described the preferred conclusion in Philadelphia as a federal government comprised of three separate branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. The executive branch should stop short of monarchy, but only slightly. The national government should have a veto over all state laws, much like the British king’s veto over colonial legislation. The knotty question of sovereignty—did it reside in the states or the federal government?—might be ingeniously resolved by locating it in the fountainhead of all authority, “The People.”54
Madison was equally thoughtful in anticipating the major controversies likely to dominate the debates in Philadelphia. He predicted that the big fight would center on the question of representation in the legislative, whether by state or population. If the former option prevailed, it meant that the new constitution would fail, since only a congress that accurately reflected the population as a whole could claim to be a national institution. Like Jay, Madison also wanted a federal veto over state laws. And on the sovereignty problem, he had begun to entertain an unprecedented solution, which was to dispense with the assumption that sovereignty must be clear and indivisible: “I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities whenever they can be subordinately useful.” Here was the core principle of what became “federalism,” mutual and shared sovereignty between the state and federal governments.55
No one could have received a better briefing on the arguments that would shape the political agenda of the Constitutional Convention. It was, to be sure, a briefing from the nationalist side of the argument. But Washington, who as the presiding presence at the convention would have to project otherworldly detachment—one of his best and favorite roles—was in fact a charter member of the nationalist camp. Soon after arriving in Philadelphia he conveyed his personal convictions to Jefferson, who was watching from Paris: “Much is expected by some—but little by others—and nothing by a few. That something is necessary, all will agree; for the situation of the General Government (if it can be called a government) is shaken to its foundation. . . . In a word, it is at an end, and unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy & confusion will inevitably ensue.” Whether the situation in the spring of 1787 was as desperate as the situation in the spring of 1775 was a debatable quest
ion. They were, however, linked together in Washington’s mind as two critical chapters in the same ongoing story called the American Revolution. His very presence in Philadelphia certified the connection between the two founding moments, the first to win independence and the second to secure it. He was stepping forward again to play his accustomed and indispensable role. The first time his life had been at stake. This time it was his legacy.56
VOTES AND VOICES
WASHINGTON WAS simultaneously the most important person at the Constitutional Convention and the least involved in the debate that shaped the document that emerged. His importance was a function of his presence, which lent an air of legitimacy to the proceedings that otherwise might have been criticized as extralegal, if not a coup d’état. (The convention was legally empowered to revise the Articles of Confederation, not replace them.) His silence during the debates was partially a function of his congenital reticence, but mostly the result of his role as president, whose job was to gavel the sessions to order, then listen as others spoke. The role suited him, for it allowed him to remain above the fray in the transcendent location that he preferred and that almost everyone accorded him. He entered the debate on only one occasion, the last day of the convention, when he endorsed a revision of the final draft that reduced the number of representatives constituting a congressional district from forty thousand to thirty thousand, a gesture probably designed to assure that he was on record as a participant as well as a signer. Otherwise, he enjoyed the best seat from which to hear the most consequential political debate in American history.57
What was he thinking? To the extent that his diary entries and correspondence during the summer of 1787 are guides, his mind was elsewhere: on the oppressive heat and humidity; on the renovations of his prized chariot; on the opportunity Philadelphia accorded to purchase rare items like a gold watch chain and two velvet jockey caps; and on Mount Vernon, where his nephew and new manager, George Augustine Washington, needed instruction about where to plant the pumpkins and peas, when to harvest the potatoes, and how to manage the mating of his reluctant jackass. On one occasion, June 4, a witness described the crowds that gathered around him on Market Street when he was going to dinner, but Washington himself made no mention of his thoughts or feelings about experiencing public adulation after four years off the stage. Of course his mind was not really as blank or distracted as the written record suggests, for the record reflects the vow of confidentiality all delegates were under to avoid any disclosure of the deliberations while the convention was in session.58
There were two breaks in the code of silence which provide clues to his state of mind on the substantive issues before the delegates. On July 10, he wrote Hamilton, who had recently left the convention, pleading with him to return. Washington seemed to believe a crisis was at hand that required Hamilton’s presence. “In a word,” he confessed, “I almost despair of seeing a favourable issue to the proceedings of the Convention, and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business.” Ironically, this remark occurred just after what most scholars have come to regard as the major breakthrough of the convention, the Great Compromise, which resolved the impasse over representation by making it proportional to population in the lower house and by state in the senate. Washington initially interpreted the compromise as a defeat instead of a great victory, because it diluted the principle of federal supremacy over the states.59
Then, on August 19, when the delegates were engaged in a protracted debate about the powers of the executive and the mode of selecting him, Washington expressed his frustration with the timidity of some delegates and the somewhat diluted character of the document likely to result. “I am fully persuaded it is the best that can be obtained at the present moment,” he told Knox, “under such diversity of ideas that prevail.” A letter he wrote to Lafayette the day after the convention adjourned repeated the same equivocal endorsement: “It is now a child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others. What will be the General opinion on, or reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say anything for or against it—if it be good I suppose it will work its way good—if bad it will recoil on the Framers.”60
Over the subsequent decades, and now centuries, the Constitution has been most admired for its artful ambiguities, in effect for refusing to resolve the question of state versus federal sovereignty, for sketching rather faintly the powers of the executive and judicial branches, for establishing a framework in which constitutional arrangements could evolve over the years, rather than providing clear answers at that time. If this has proved to be the genius of the document, Washington thought it was its major weakness. He wanted the ambiguities clarified and the sketches filled out, at least sufficiently so to assure the creation of a national government empowered to force the states and citizenry into a budding American empire.61
Chairing the convention provided him with an extended education in political realities that exposed his preference for coercive clarity as an impossibility. For he witnessed a bewildering variety of regional interests and accents that could only be bundled together by compromises designed to leave the lines of authority blurred. In truth, there was as yet no such thing as an American nation that the Constitution could consolidate. No matter what Washington thought about America’s providential future, it remained a latent prospect still haunted by potent fears of centralized power that even the most thoughtful observers—though not Washington himself—considered the core political legacy of the American Revolution. The debates in Philadelphia demonstrated, then, that a unified nation was still a work-in-progress. And in that sense the ambiguous document that emerged accurately reflected both the limitations and the implications of that unsettled condition.
On the return trip to Mount Vernon there was a mishap at Head of Elk in which the bridge collapsed, seriously injuring Washington’s horse. Luckily, or perhaps providentially, Washington had just dismounted before the accident, which led some observers to speculate that the old soldier was still destiny’s child, obviously being preserved for one last chapter of public service. At some unspoken level Washington realized that his reentry into public life at Philadelphia had forced a rewriting of the Cincinnatus script from which he could never turn back. Though he had purchased a four-volume translation of Don Quixote before departing Philadelphia, Washington was temperamentally incapable of tilting at windmills or living by illusion, which meant that he knew full well that the ratification of the Constitution would carry him inexorably into the presidency. If he harbored any doubts on that score, his former aide disabused him in the inimitably assertive Hamiltonian style: “I take it for granted, Sir, that you have concluded to comply with what will no doubt be the general call of your country in relation to the new government. You will permit me to say that it is indispensable you should lend yourself to the first operation—it is of little use to have introduced a system, if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment, at the outset.”62
If history and the American electorate were determined to hustle him down the path to power again, Washington was determined to take it one step at a time. The ratification of the Constitution, after all, was hardly a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the debates in the state conventions were likely to provide a more robust picture of the ideological disagreements than those at the Constitutional Convention, because the most outspoken enemies of reform had stayed away from Philadelphia. Washington had vowed to play no public role in the ratification process, but he had not promised to remain a disinterested observer. As he told Hamilton, “I have read every performance which has been printed on one side and the other of the great question lately agitated.” He was most impressed with the series of essays by Publius, later entitled The Federalist Papers, which he correctly predicted would outlive the current crisis to become a classic: “When the transient circumstances and fugitive performances which attend the crisis shall have disappeared,” he apprised Hamilton, “that work will merit the notice of Posterity.
” He was fully aware that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were the authors of the Publius series, for they also formed the entourage of talented advisors that again surrounded him, making Mount Vernon into the electoral headquarters for plotting strategy and tracking the state-by-state results as they rolled in throughout the spring of 1788.63
Washington’s ongoing assessment of the ratification process benefited from the peerless advice of Madison, who was proving himself the shrewdest political thinker in Virginia, perhaps in the nation. It also drew upon his own experience at winning a contest that, on the face of it, looked dubious at best. Like the War of Independence, he explained, the ratification struggle mobilized latent talents—he mentioned Publius—that would otherwise have remained dormant. And such desperate occasions as Shays’s Rebellion, much like the winter encampment at Valley Forge, actually created the conditions for ultimate victory. He expressed confidence that, despite formidable opposition in such key states as Virginia and New York, ratification enjoyed certain strategic advantages. Because only nine states were necessary for ratification, and because the most problematic debates in Virginia and New York occurred late in the convention cycle, enormous pressure to join the winning coalition would be exerted on opponents there. Washington paid particular attention to the debates in Virginia, where two old friends and former colleagues, Patrick Henry and George Mason, were leading the opposition. In an oblique reference to the burden of slavery being carried by Virginia’s planter class, he noted that it was “a little strange that the men of large property in the South, should be more afraid that the Constitution should produce an Aristocracy or Monarchy, than the genuine democratical people of the East.” He also expressed the opinion that Virginia’s most prominent Tidewater planters, many on the verge of bankruptcy, retained an unrealistic and inflated sense of their current prowess: “I am sorry to add in this place that Virginians entertain too high an opinion of the importance of their own country.” Instead of regarding itself as primus inter pares among the states, Virginia should recognize that “in point of strength, it is, comparatively weak” and in fact had more to gain than lose by joining the union.64
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