He urged each of his girls to “cultivate your mind by the perusal of those books which instruct while they amuse.” He urged them to avoid novels and plays, which, he said “tend to vitiate the taste. History, geography, poetry, moral essays, biography, travels, sermons, and other well-written religious productions will . . . enlarge your understanding, to render you a more agreeable companion and to exalt your virtue.”1
After his daughters’ weddings, Henry stunned the Virginia political world by announcing his decision not to seek a third term as governor. “I shall resign my office next month and retire,” he explained to his sister Anne Christian, “my wife and self being heartily tired of the bustle we live in here. I shall go to Hanover to land I am likely to get . . . or if that fails, towards Leatherwood again. My wife has five very fine and promising children. I rejoice to hear yours are so. Pray, my dearest sister, let me know how I may serve you or them. . . . God bless and preserve you, ever beloved sister.”2
Several factors had combined to provoke his resignation: fatigue with “the bustle” of Richmond life was but one of them. Money had become a prime consideration after the marriages of his two older daughters. After providing them each with a dowry of £1,000, he found himself in the same position as most “wealthy” Virginia planters—land rich and cash poor. All but phobic about falling in debt, he faced just that if he depended on only his governor’s salary for another year to support his wife and five small children—and pay maintenance and entertainment expenses of the governor’s mansion. In addition, he had two older sons by his first marriage—fifteen-year-old Edward and his older brother, William, in his early twenties—whom he planned to send to college. To do so, he would have to turn his farms into profitable enterprises and resume practicing law.
Recognizing that a permanent move to Leatherwood would cut his ties to the state’s political hub and isolate Dolly, he found a 1,700-acre plantation with twenty-seven slaves called Pleasant Grove in Prince Edward County. Only about eighty miles southwest of Richmond overlooking the Appomattox River tobacco country, it was near Hampden-Sydney College, the college he had helped found and where he planned to send his sons. To pay for the property, he hammered out an agreement to provide the equivalent of about $100,000 (today’s dollars) in goods and services. According to his records, payment included several slaves, some lands he had bought in and around Richmond, his own legal services, two horses, and a barrel of rum. Within a year he added nearly 600 more acres to expand farm output. On a hill near the Appomattox River, the two-story house faced the world through a stately, two-story portico supported by tall Grecian columns.
On February 21, 1787, the Confederation Congress recommended that the states send delegates to a convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation . . . ”3 Henry had only just settled into his new home when he received a letter from his long-time friend from their days in the House of Burgesses: the new governor Edmund Randolph. “I most sincerely wish your presence at the federal convention,” Randolph wrote.
From the experience of your late administration, you must be persuaded that every day dawns with perils to the United States. To whom, then, can they resort for assistance with firmer expectation than to those who first kindled the Revolution? In this respectable character you are now called upon by your country. You will therefore pardon me for expressing a fear that the neglect of the present moment may terminate in the destruction of Confederate America.4
As he had when he refused to run for a third term as governor, Henry again shocked the nation by refusing to go to the Constitutional Convention—without even offering a reason for his refusal. Next to Washington, he had received the most votes in the Assembly—ahead of Randolph himself and such legendary figures as George Mason, George Wythe, and John Blair. Washington tried to convince Henry to change his mind, as did James Madison. Both met with outright rejections. “I am entirely convinced,” Madison wrote to Washington,the hopes of carrying this state into a proper federal system will be demolished. Many of our most federal leading men are extremely soured with what has already passed. Mr. Henry, who has been hitherto the champion of the federal cause, has become a cold advocate, and, in the event of an actual sacrifice of the Mississippi by Congress, will unquestionably go over to the opposite side.5
In fact, Henry had already gone “over to the opposite side.” Indeed, the Jay-Gardoqui affair had so infuriated him that he questioned whether the states should abolish rather than strengthen the Confederation. If the all-but-impotent Confederation had come so close to stripping Virginia’s western farmers of their “natural rights” to ship goods to market, he reasoned that a strengthened national government could succeed where the Confederation had failed. He now argued that Virginia remained America’s largest, richest, most heavily populated state, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and northward to the Ohio River. As such, he saw no benefits in ceding her sovereignty and uniting with other states into a huge, unwieldy federal system. Whenever necessary or to her advantage, Virginia could, whenever she saw fit, join in a common defense against attack by foreign powers and participate in joint ventures like the Potomac Company.
Although he remained open to the idea of reforming the Confederation, he believed that the convention in Philadelphia was a fraud. Its delegates were all men of great wealth who exploited the economies of their states and, he believed, would collude to dominate the economy of the entire continent—at the expense of western farmers. “Mr. Henry’s disgust exceeds all measure,” Madison reported to Washington. By not attending the convention, Madison surmised, Henry would remain aloof from the proceedings and free “to combat or espouse the result of it.”6
Henry was not the only American leader who refused an invitation to the convention. Richard Henry Lee, like Henry, a father of independence who had proposed the resolution for independence at the Continental Congress, also declined. George Washington, who had initiated the process of constitutional reform, also refused—changing his mind only after influential friends warned him that his refusal would doom the convention to failure and provoke the very anarchy he sought to prevent.
Although the Jay-Gardoqui negotiation was Henry’s overriding political motive for not going to Philadelphia, Henry also faced financial problems. The combined tobacco production of his Prince Edward and Leatherwood plantations was not yielding enough revenue to support him and his family in the midst of the economic downturn. He simply could not afford to spend several months wining and dining with the nation’s wealthiest men in Philadelphia. He could barely support his family—let alone send his boys to college—unless he resumed his law practice, and that would require his full-time attention.
Beginning on May 25, 1787, fifty-five delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia without the man who had sounded the clarion call for independence and become the symbol of liberty to almost all Americans. His absence was notable; his name was on everyone’s lips, and his spirit seemed to hover about in the sweltering summer atmosphere of the convention hall. Although absent in person, Henry remained in continual contact with confederates at the convention who opposed a strong national government, and Madison conceded that “the refusal of Mr. Henry to join in the task of revising the Confederation is ominous.”7
From the first, the conflicts that threatened the nation with anarchy were evident in delegate relationships—or lack of relationships—in the convention hall: the regional conflicts between North, South, East and West; the commercial conflicts between agrarian and urban interests; the political conflicts between large and small states. Indeed, Rhode Island, the smallest state, refused to send a delegate to the convention.
As one of the primary organizers of the convention, however, James Madison presented an optimistic front: “There never was an assembly of men,” he boasted, “who were more devoted . . . to the object of devising and proposing a constitutional system which wo
uld . . . best secure the permanent liberty and happiness of their country.”8 Henry mocked Madison by asserting that there had never been an assembly of men who were more devoted to preserving and enhancing their own wealth. For as Henry noted, the delegates at Philadelphia were the wealthiest, most powerful and best educated men in America. None represented the less affluent farm regions in the western parts of the twelve states. Twenty-one held college degrees; twenty-nine were lawyers or judges, and nearly all held political offices or had served on Revolutionary War committees. With Washington presiding, they would sit five to six hours a day, six days a week, from May 25 until September 17, 1787, except for a nine-day adjournment between July 29 and August 6, to let a committee arrange and edit the resolutions into a readable draft constitution.
Convention rules gave each state one vote, determined by a majority of delegates from that state. Of all rules adopted, the two most important were the secrecy rule, to protect delegates from political reprisals for speaking or voting their consciences or private interests, and a rule allowing delegates to reconsider previous issues and change their votes. Although the convention allowed James Madison to take notes of the proceedings, he would keep the notes secret for his entire life. Among other reasons, he sought to prevent political enemies of the delegates—and the Constitution—from quoting elements of speeches out of context. Madison outlived all other delegates, surviving until 1836, forty-eight years after the convention.
Recognizing both the stature of Washington as the most unifying figure in the Confederation and the status of Virginia as its most powerful state, delegates elected him president. Although he did not participate in debate, at least three dozen of the fifty-five delegates had served under him in the Revolutionary War. All knew his views, which became paramount in the proceedings. Indeed, he had sent all the governors and other state leaders an outline of the kind of government he favored. It came as no surprise then that, after the initial election of officers and adoption of rules, Washington recognized immediately Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph to present the “Virginia Plan” of government, which fleshed out Washington’s own outline for a new national government.
Born to a long line of English noblemen who had served as king’s attorneys, Edmund Randolph had attended the College of William and Mary and studied law under his father, who fled to England with his close friend Lord Dunmore when the Revolution began. Twenty-two years old at the time, Edmund enlisted in the Continental Army, becoming an aide to Washington before returning to Virginia as State Attorney General, then mayor of Williamsburg until he succeeded Henry as Governor. After discussions with Henry, Randolph had gone to Philadelphia agreeing to seek only minor revisions of the Articles of Confederation, but, overwhelmed by the powerful personalities in his delegation, he reluctantly agreed, as governor of his state, to present the far-reaching Virginia Plan favored by Washington.
Instead of “revising the Articles of Confederation,” as instructed by Congress, the Virginia Plan called for scrapping the Articles and creating a new form of government. It was nothing short of a bloodless coup d’état—a second American revolution without firing a shot.9 Knowing the plan would meet with opposition, but unwilling to split with Washington, Randolph sought to retain links to all political factions and “expressed his regret that it should fall to him . . . to open the great subject of their mission. But,” he said, “his colleagues had imposed this task on him.”10
The Virginia Plan proposed fifteen resolutions which, among other things, called for replacing the unicameral Confederation Congress with “a national government consisting of a supreme Legislative, Executive and Judiciary.” The national legislature would have an upper and lower house and be the most powerful branch of government, with sole power to elect both the executive and the judges of a supreme court. The people would elect the lower house, with the number of delegates proportionate to the number of “free inhabitants” in each state. The Lower house would elect members of the upper house from nominees chosen by the legislatures of each state. Most astonishing, the new Congress would have the very powers that Henry despised most about the British government—namely, “to negative all laws passed by the several states . . . and to call forth the force of the Union against any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duty under the articles thereof.”11
Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia refused to endorse and sign the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia—only to change his position at the Virginia ratification convention the following year and vote for ratification. After George Washington won election as President he appointed Randolph the first U.S. Attorney General. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
The Virginia Plan was nothing less than Washington’s revenge for congressional failure to provide him and his troops with adequate funding during the Revolutionary War. Under the Virginia Plan, the laws of Congress would be supreme and Congress would be free to use military force to enforce them. Washington believed that “the primary cause of all our disorders lies in the different state governments, and in the . . . incompatibility in the laws of different states and disrespect to those of the general government.” The result, he declared, had left “this great country weak, inefficient and disgraceful . . . almost to the final dissolution of it. ...”12
Delegates responded to the Virginia Plan with shocked silence. In effect, the plan called for the overthrow of the legally constituted American government. It would not only create an entirely new form of government, it would strip the states of their sovereignty. Outraged delegates from North and South denounced the plan, calling its presentation out of order and a violation of the mandate of Congress limiting the convention’s role to revising the existing Articles of Confederation. “The act of Congress recommending the Convention,” said South Carolina’s Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a Revolutionary War hero and prominent attorney, did not “authorize a discussion of a system founded on different principles” from the Federal Constitution [Articles of Confederation].” His cousin Charles Pinckney—a young Charleston attorney—demanded to know whether Randolph’s plan was meant “to abolish state government altogether.”13
In the days that followed, all semblances of collegiality disappeared, with southerners demanding that slaves (who had no vote and went uncounted when apportioning representatives in state assemblies) be counted in determining proportionate representation in the lower house. Small states rejected the concept of proportionate representation, arguing that two or three states with the largest populations—Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts—could dominate the entire Union. They argued for perpetuation of the one-state, one-vote rule of the Confederation Congress. Delegates from large states countered that the one-state, one-vote rule would allow a handful of small states with only a minority of the nation’s population to dictate to the majority.
As the debate raged, delegates grew increasingly mean-spirited, with some northerners even mocking the accents of delegates from the deep South, to which southerners countered by pretending they could not understand Boston’s delegates and asking them to repeat themselves. When Pennsylvania’s abolitionists demanded an end to slavery, South Carolina’s delegates threatened to walk out, and early in July, two of New York’s three delegates did leave—stomping out in an angry protest against attempts to crush state sovereignty. Faced with a breakup of the Convention—and the Confederation itself—calmer heads prevailed, and the remaining delegates went to work to find compromises for their outstanding disputes. In the end they decided on proportionate representation in the lower house and state parity in the upper house. They gave the lower house sole power to originate appropriations legislation, thus keeping control over the nation’s money—and, therefore, all government activities—in the hands of the electorate. As for slaves, northerners objected to counting nonvoting slaves in the population because it would give the owners of Virginia’s huge Tidewater plantations inordinate political powers. George Mason, whose plantation was almost adjacen
t to Washington’s Mount Vernon, argued that the inclusion of slaves in the population count would give them an indirect influence in legislation and that “such a system would provide no less carefully for the rights and happiness of the lowest than of the highest orders of citizens.14 As southerners cheered his disingenuous position, Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth responded tartly, “Mr. Mason has himself about three hundred slaves and lives in Virginia, where it is found by prudent management they can breed and raise slaves faster than they want for their own use and could supply the deficiency in Georgia and South Carolina.”15 To prevent a walkout by southerners, the convention compromised by allotting lower house votes based on the total free population of each state and three-fifths of the slave population. Spurred by messages from Patrick Henry, the South demanded another concession from the North, making it necessary for the upper house to confirm foreign treaties by a two-thirds vote instead of a simple majority. Southerners had not forgotten how northern states in Congress had almost ceded Mississippi River navigation rights to Spain two years earlier. Only the two-thirds requirement of the Confederation Congress had prevented the treaty from becoming law.
With each passing day, delegates found something new to dispute, until Washington lost all patience and collared delegates outside the meeting hall—at the City Tavern and at dinners in private homes—and demanded that they reach a compromise. As he later put it, “Every state has some objection. That which is most pleasing to one is obnoxious to another and vice versa. If then the union of the whole is a desirable object, the parts which compose it must yield a little in order to accomplish it.” The reading of a statement by the aging Benjamin Franklin made the same point more humorously. The impasse, he said, reminded him of the Anglican leader who explained to the Pope, that “the only difference between our churches lies in the certainty of their doctrines—that the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong.”16
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