Washington was hardly back from the Revolution when he received a letter from Jefferson warning that unless Virginia got moving at once, New York might engross the western trade with her own canal. If Washington would put his prestige behind a revival of the Potomac plan, “what a monument to your retirement it would become!” Washington did not have to be urged twice. He undertook the leadership of the Potomac Canal project in a manner that made Madison comment, “The earnestness with which he espouses the undertaking is hardly to be described, and shows that a mind like his, capable of great views and which has long been occupied with them, cannot bear a vacancy.”
Washington’s prestige was now so great that it overran the opposition of the Baltimore merchants: the Potomac Canal Company was chartered by both Maryland and Virginia. When in 1784 Washington went west to attend to his land holdings, he spent many happy days exploring to find the shortest and most practical connection between the eastward- and the westward-flowing rivers. However, final determination of that matter could wait: the immediate needs were to raise the necessary capital and then open the Potomac to navigation.
Although free capital was extremely scarce in the United States, Washington’s name lured so many investors that twice the required shares of stock were sold. But the physical river presented very serious problems.
Conventional canal engineering created on one bank of a natural waterway what was in effect an aquatic flight of stairs. The steps were level ditches, each extending as far as the lay of the land allowed, and flanked by paths for the horses that towed the boats along. The boats were carried from step to step by locks, walled pits in which the water level was raised or lowered. Such engineering was well suited to the short distances and not-too-precipitous terrain of well-settled Europe, but the Potomac was a mountain river that would have to be opened for two hundred miles. In its craggy banks, ditches could only be dug at great expense, and the ground dropped so sharply that the proliferation of locks would be murderously expensive. Furthermore, the river was subject to tumultuous floods inclined to lick any works down off the banks. The problem was, indeed, as new to canal building as the American terrain had been to conventional warfare. Washington had won the war by improvising and he intended to build his canal the same way.
Washington admitted that locks would be needed to get around the Great Falls and that a European engineer would probably have to be imported to design them. For the rest, he intended merely to clear the best channel of all impediments. This meant that the often tremendously swift current would not be conquered. Some novel way would have to be found to propel boats upstream.
Washington was wringing his brains when he met that inventor of mechanical boats, James Rumsey. In a burst of wild enthusiasm, Washington concluded that Rumsey would solve his problem by one scheme or another, perhaps through his projected use of steam. Should Rumsey’s propellants all fail, capstans set in rocks at suitable intervals could be turned by horses to pull boats against the current.
As Rumsey pottered with his inventions and labored, on being appointed the official engineer, to clear the roaring channel, Washington labored to clear away various governmental problems. In so doing, he did much to set the stage for the Constitutional Convention.
Washington’s promise to his officers that he would do all in his power to procure what was owed them was in effect a promise that he would labor to promote a national government powerful enough to pay its debts. That the advice he had given in his so-called “legacy” concerning the strengthening of the Union was not immediately heeded did not immediately worry him. He considered it only natural that the states, like heirs just come into an inheritance, would (as he himself had done with the money that had come to him from his marriage) squander for a while. Yet surely the American people would soon reform themselves since “there is virtue at the bottom.” In the meanwhile, conspicuous abuses were to be welcomed as well as deplored: they would clearly demonstrate the need for better governmental organization. “The people,” Washington believed, “must feel before they will see; consequently, are brought slowly into measures of public utility.”
This attitude allowed Washington to relax into the joys of retirement. But he became increasingly disturbed. The movement he had confidently expected towards sound government and national unity was failing to develop. The Continental Congress was so neglected by the states that there were rarely enough delegates present to make a quorum. New York violated the Articles of Confederation by making a private treaty, to her own advantage, with the Indians. Various states, rather than compel voters to pay pre-war debts to British merchants, violated the peace treaty in a way which the British used to justify their own refusal to evacuate frontier forts that had been surrendered to the United States. When the British passed customs laws discriminatory against American shipping, the United States could not retaliate since the states would permit no central customs authority: New York, for instance, wanted no interference with her own laws that milked Connecticut and New Jersey. And the state governments tended to remain rudimentary, following the whims of the majority to a neglect of minority rights. Minorities, sometimes frontiersmen, sometimes the urban prosperous, were so displeased that the gates seemed to be opening to what Washington had long dreaded: class conflict.
Writing privately, Washington mourned, “We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation. Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coercive power. I do not conceive we can exist long as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole Union.”
However, he had no conscious intention of intervening.
The development of inland navigation necessarily violated state boundaries. Washington’s passionate predilection for the Potomac project—he bored visitors to Mount Vernon with statistics to prove its superiority to all other possible canal routes—did not keep him from foreseeing a centrally planned system of canals and improved rivers that would go everywhere, bringing “navigation almost to every man’s door.” In the meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s cooperation had to be secured if the Potomac Canal were to have connections with the Ohio. And the innumerable issues involved in administering waters on which both states abutted brought Maryland and Virginia together in what came to be known as the Mount Vernon Conference. The delegates agreed that their states should meet annually “for keeping up harmony in the commercial relations.”
When ratifying the decisions that Washington had presided over at Mount Vernon (although he was not officially a delegate), Maryland decided to invite Pennsylvania and Delaware to the annual conferences. Virginia thereupon proposed a conference of all thirteen states states “to consider how far a uniform system in their commercial regulations may be necessary to their common interest and their permanent harmony.” This resulted in the Annapolis Convention, which met in that Maryland city during September, 1786. Preserving his private role, Washington did not attend the convention, but he expressed a wish that more than commercial relations be considered. Only five of the thirteen states sent delegates, yet they took the bold step of calling another convention to meet in Philadelphia and “render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”
The meeting thus summoned has gone down in history as the Constitutional Convention. But no one could then have called it that, since no one knew that it would write a new constitution. It was, indeed, not authorized to do so. In agreeing to the call, the Continental Congress had provided that the convention was merely to revise the Articles of Confederation.
There was much reason to foresee that the new convention would only be one more abortive move in the long vain effort to find national unity. Washington feared that the maneuver might actually do harm by chalking up another failure. “We are certainly in a delicate situation,” he wrote, “but my fear is that the people have not yet been suffic
iently misled to retract from error.”
Late in 1786, a crisis developed which seemed so menacing that Washington wondered whether all efforts to strengthen the government might not be, in fact, too late. Dislocations in the currency of Massachusetts (each state had its own financial system) had created a situation where many western settlers could not, however hard and effectively they worked, secure cash with which to pay their debts. Farms were seized and the owners sometimes thrown into debtor’s prison. In what came to be known (after its leader Daniel Shays) as Shays’ Rebellion, mobs arose, terrified courts that might foreclose on their property, and, as they milled around, threatened to capture the Continental arsenal at Springfield, where there were “ten to fifteen thousand stands of arms in excellent condition.” Reports came in to Washington that, if the insurgents joined with people of similar sentiment in the western counties of adjoining states, they would constitute a body of twelve to fifteen thousand men well suited to fighting, a larger force than Washington had commanded during much of the Revolution. Secretary of War Knox, who had been sent by the Continental Congress to investigate, wrote Washington that the object of the uprising was to drown all debts in a flood of paper money. The argument was that all property had been saved from British domination by all the people and it thus belonged to all. According to Knox, the insurgents insisted that anyone who opposed this doctrine “ought to be swept from off the face of the earth.”
To historical hindsight, the most amazing thing about this still-minor insurrection (which was to prove little more than an anguished protest) was the terror into which it threw almost all responsible leaders, including those whom modern historians classify as being on the political left. The explanation was that Americans had long been worried by the reiterated prophecy, standard in Europe, that government by the people could have only one outcome: anarchy. And it was a too-obvious fact that, if Shays’ Rebellion really spread, there was no power in the United States capable of putting it down. The Continental Congress could not hope to raise an army since it had no way of paying the troops.
Washington was in despair. Had someone warned him, when he retired from the army, “that at this day, I should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws and constitutions of our own making … I should have thought him a bedlamite, a fit subject for a madhouse.” He had believed that the British and the Tories judged the republican institutions “from the depravity of their own hearts,” but now he feared that perhaps they were “wiser than others.” He cried out, “What, gracious God, is man that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct?”
An institution from the days of the Newburgh Addresses, when Washington had risked his command to stop the potentially “fascist” alliance of army officers and financiers, had remained active into the time of Shays’ Rebellion. As the officers had prepared angrily to go home unpaid, they had organized the Society of the Cincinnati. Washington, assured that the society was a charitable organization aimed at ameliorating the hardships into which the deprived officers might fall, had gratefully accepted the post of president-general. But no sooner was he back at Mount Vernon that it was charged that the Cincinnati was actually an effort to graft a hereditary aristocracy on the United States.
When Washington reread the charter, now suspiciously, he saw there were dangerous provisions: membership was to pass, like titles in Europe, by primogeniture, and there were clauses that would permit the expansion of the society by the election of nonmilitary citizens. To make this seem all the more ominous, the Cincinnati was the only important organization in addition to the Continental Congress that extended across all the thirteen states.
At the first convention of the Cincinnati, in 1784, Washington had fought hard to have the provisions that had any political bearing removed. When it seemed that he had succeeded, he accepted reelection as president-general. But the state societies managed to veto what had been passed by the national meeting. And now, in 1786, Shays’ Rebellion coincided with the appointed time for the next national meeting. Here was an opportunity to fight fire from the left with at least the threat of fire from the right. But Washington refused to countenance the meeting of the organization which had refused to become apolitical. He announced that he would not go. As a result the Cincinnati’s meeting was poorly attended and came to little.
Shays’ Rebellion also petered out. The insurgents, when faced with a small, privately financed Massachusetts force, decided to have recourse to the ballot box (which was to serve them well). But, since national vulnerability had been demonstrated, national fright went on. Madison, for instance, foresaw the development of a more “awful crisis.” Support for the convention to strengthen the government sprang up all over the land.
When it had seemed probable that the convention would not amount to much, there had been little pressure on Washington to take part. Regarding the weight of his influence as perhaps their greatest asset, the supporters of strong federal government did not want to squander that asset on what might be an inconclusive move. But as a result of the new developments, Washington was strongly urged to abandon his retirement and head the Virginia delegation. This put Washington into such a quandary that his health, which had been perfect since his return to Mount Vernon, broke down. The “fever and ague” (malaria?) from which he had suffered as a young man, returned in a “violent attack,” and he was afflicted with such rheumatism that he could hardly turn over in bed.
Washington was assured that his attendance at the convention could be an isolated act from which he would return unperturbed to his retirement. But he had little doubt that his desire “to view the solitary walk” would be for years frustrated. His only rival as the most conspicuous man at the convention would be Benjamin Franklin. Since Franklin was eighty-one years old, the leadership would surely fall on Washington. If (as still seemed very possible) the convention failed, the reputation for which he had so painfully labored would be grievously damaged. (He stated frankly that he felt he had more to lose than delegates who were less famous.) And if the convention did, under his leadership, establish a stronger government, he would be committed to doing everything in his power to help that government succeed.
It was surprising the variety of worries that crowded into Washington’s mind. Since he had publicly stated that he would never return to public life, would he be accused of indecision, of devious ambition even? Or, if he stayed home, would he be accused of failing to put his shoulder to the wheel because he wished the American republican experiment to collapse so that he could make himself king? More serious: would the convention be defeated before it started by each state’s binding its delegates with so many instructions that the men from the different regions would be prevented from agreeing on anything? And then there was the fact that his beloved wife was in a state of consternation: she had grounded her happiness, so she tearfully reiterated, on the belief that nothing could possibly happen that would destroy her tranquillity by calling her husband back to public life.
Yet, however much Washington repined and struggled, he had no choice once it became clear that the convention presented a solid hope of matching the military victory of the Revolutionary army he had led with a political victory that would not only stabilize the nation but demonstrate for all the world to see that a people’s government was not synonymous with anarchy.
Washington’s ultimate agreement to attend had a tremendous effect on American public opinion, all the more because his hesitations and reluctance were well known. In a statement involving three future Presidents, Madison wrote Jefferson about Washington: “To forsake the honorable retreat to which he had retired and risk the reputation he had so deservedly acquired, manifested a zeal for the public interest that could, after so many and illustrious services, scarcely have been expected of him.”
TWENTY-SIX
The Constitution of the United States
(1787–1788)
Washington, who had been consistently ill as the time for his
departure from retirement approached, was sick on the road, but as soon as he reached Philadelphia, in May, 1787, purposeful activity cured him over night. The delegates were, it is true, slow in assembling—eleven days passed before there was a quorum—but as they came in one by one, Washington made two hopeful discoveries. However much they disagreed on specifics, they all agreed that “something is necessary” because the existing government “is at an end, and unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy and confusion will inevitably ensue.” And they were not tied down, as Washington had feared they might be, by instructions that would make eventual unity impossible.
During the 1930’s, it became fashionable to argue that the Constitutional Convention was a right-wing plot to put shackles on the people. Actually, the convention gave no countenance to the conception, almost universal in those days, that only men possessed of a certain amount of property could vote: decisions on this matter were left to the states. Since the delegates came from areas as widely separated as England was from the tip of Italy, their regional predilections were too various for them to share any single economic outlook. Furthermore, in those days before business specialization, most delegates had, as had Washington, widely diversified interests that urged contradictory financial measures. The only economic conviction all shared was that personal property should not be expropriated by governmental action.
Everyone saw as a major danger the tendency of legislative majorities to dictate by moving from enthusiasm in a zigzag course, and in the process trampling on minority rights. Fortunately, such political theorists as England’s Blackstone and France’s Montesquieu had worked out on paper a solution. The government should consist of branches, chosen in different manners at different times for different terms of office, which would check and balance each other and would all have to agree before a proposition became law. Foreign theory and also American experience as it came down from the colonial era urged an executive, a legislature made up of two houses, and a judiciary. Washington, who had brought this conception with him to the convention, found that most of the other delegates agreed. In order to establish such a government, the convention would have to go beyond its instructions by jettisoning the Articles of Confederation, but should the delegates do so, they had a blueprint on which to proceed.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 22