The scholarly Madison, who had been studying the history of governments for a decade, soon contacted Alexander Hamilton and others discontented with the Articles of Confederation. In 1786, everyone was galvanized when a revolt against local taxes led by a bankrupt former Continental Army officer, Daniel Shays, roiled western Massachusetts and spilled into the western sections of other states. Congress, without an army or money to raise one, could only watch helplessly. Some people asked Washington to use his influence to calm the situation. “Influence is no government,” he scathingly replied.9
With Washington presiding, fifty-five delegates met in Philadelphia in the late spring of 1787. Only eight had signed the Declaration of Independence, but thirty had served in the Continental Army, which made them especially aware of the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. For three months they debated and discussed and sometimes argued violently about a new constitution. Behind the scenes, at dinner meetings after the days’ sessions, Washington pressed the case for a strong president with powers equal to Congress. He saw the lack of this office as the near-fatal flaw of the Articles of Confederation.
The presidency proved to be a very explosive issue. A great many people feared the office could become a dictatorship. Occasionally, when they met as a committee of the whole, where everyone spoke freely off the record, Washington was able to express his opinions. (As chairman, he could not participate in the floor debates.) There, he urged investing the president with the power to veto acts of Congress even if the lawmakers unanimously disagreed with him. Not a few delegates were troubled by this idea.10
There were ferocious conflicts on other issues. Small states were fearful that the large states would dominate the government. Eventually, the delegates reached compromises on the disputed points. They agreed to let Congress override a presidential veto if the lawmakers could muster a two-thirds vote. Small states and large states were reconciled by giving each state two spokesmen in the Senate, while the House of Representatives would be chosen on the basis of population.
At this point the South interposed a serious objection. Their large number of black slaves put them at a disadvantage, unless they too could be counted as part of their populations. More than a few northern delegates objected to this idea. Finally, the convention agreed to give Southern states the right to count three-fifths of their slaves in estimating the number of delegates they could send to the House of Representatives.
This compromise triggered acid remarks from some northern delegates. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts asked if northerners should have the right to count their horses and cattle as voters. New York’s Gouverneur Morris demanded that “free” be inserted before the name of any citizen counted as a voter. He declared he was ready to pay taxes to liberate every Negro in America rather than countenance slavery in the Constitution. The motion was voted down ten to one.
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina warned that if the South did not receive some “security” for the right to own slaves, he would not support the new Constitution. The convention responded by proposing a clause that forbade Congress to ban or even to tax the importation of slaves. This stirred a negative response, even from some Southerners. George Mason of Virginia noted that the people settling the new lands in the Southwest were already calling for slaves. There was a real danger that they would “fill the country” with a surge of Africans. He sarcastically noted that not a few New Englanders were supporting this new demand because their ships made huge profits in the “evil traffic.”
The men of the Deep South rose to answer Mason’s assault. Pinckney reminded the delegates that slaves were “property” and the South had a right to expect all its property to be “as sacredly preserved and protected to them as that of land or any other kind of property in the Eastern States.” John Rutledge spoke with even more precision. “Religion and humanity” had nothing to do with this issue, he declared. “The true question at present is whether the Southern states shall or shall not be parties to the Union.” North Carolina made it clear that her delegates felt the same way.11
There it was, the specter of disunion that Washington and Madison had feared and went to Philadelphia hoping to dispel. A hastily concocted committee came up with another compromise. The slave trade would be permitted until 1808—an additional twenty years. At that time Congress would have the authority to ban or continue it. Madison and Mason fought this extension. But Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth rose to voice the opinion of most delegates. They were in Philadelphia to make political, not ethical decisions. The nation’s paramount need was political union.12
Was this a catastrophic moral failure, as more than a few people in future generations would claim? That is an exercise in the most tempting of all historical fallacies, hindsight. A majority of the delegates had expressed their abhorrence of slavery. Even the intransigent spokesmen for the Deep South made no attempt to defend it on moral grounds. Everyone wished—or hoped—that slavery would somehow come to a peaceful end, even though the practical details of emancipation remained obscure.
• • •
The chief creators of the Constitution were proud of the way they had defeated the primary threat that had brought them to Philadelphia—disunion. Few were more pleased with the outcome than George Washington. “No member of the convention” signed the final version of the Constitution “with more cordiality than he did,” Madison reported. “Nor [was] more anxious for its ratification . . . he never wavered in giving it his sanction and support.”13
It might be worth pausing at this point to ask why Washington and his contemporaries saw the union as so crucial to America’s future. Their experience in the Revolution and the postwar years is the answer. They were all too aware of how often Britain had tried to lure various states and individuals to abandon the revolution with guarantees of extravagant rewards. The example of South Carolina’s 1779 readiness to defect into neutrality to keep an invading British army at bay was a stark reminder of how easily a state could be seduced by a combination of fear and self-interest. It was all too obvious that the collapse of the union would turn America into another Europe, with states making and unmaking alliances and fighting ruinous wars with neighboring states in pursuit of more power and wealth.
• • •
That word, “wealth,” requires another pause to discuss an invention that began transforming southern agriculture and southern thinking about slavery, virtually from the moment it appeared: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Born in Connecticut, Whitney was one of those geniuses who saw better ways to make or improve everything from farm machinery to muskets. The big problem with raising cotton was the need to separate the fibers from their seeds, a job that required hours of painstaking labor. Whitney’s gin combined a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes removed the lint to prevent jams. The gin multiplied the productivity—and profits—of raising cotton fifty times above the previous wearisome reliance on human hands.
This intrusion of such a totally unexpected invention (during Washington’s first term as president) is perhaps the best reply to those who claim the founders failed to do enough to eliminate slavery. In 1790, there were only six slave states. The number steadily rose with the enormous profits from raising cotton. With the rise came an ever-growing need for more slaves to plant and pick the cotton. The arrival of “King Cotton” is a prime example of the way unexpected events and ideas intrude on a people and a nation, rendering assumptions about the future obsolete.14
• • •
For George Washington, slavery remained a troubling question, even while he took on the task of making his vision of a strong president into a working reality. An important reason why slavery remained in the forefront of his thoughts was the influence of the Marquis de Lafayette. By the time the war ended, the Marquis was calling Washington his “adopted father” and unburdening his mind to him on all sorts of subjects. Nothing troubled him more than slavery. Lafayette was especially upset to
discover Americans had returned to the slave trade after the war ended. How could any American “perpetrate” such a thing “under our dear flag of liberty, the stars and stripes?” he asked.
As early as 1786, the year before the Constitutional Convention, Washington wrote to a friend, John Francis Mercer, that he hoped “never to possess another slave by purchase.” Among his first wishes was to see a plan adopted by the Virginia legislature “by which slavery . . . can be abolished by slow sure & imperceptible degrees.” He voiced a similar sentiment to Robert Morris, America’s leading financier, in that same year. “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it [slavery].”15
These words are evidence of how far George Washington had traveled from the complacent slave owner of the 1760s, enjoying the wealth and the dozens of slaves that widowed Martha Custis had brought to their 1759 marriage. The master of Mount Vernon was a tough taskmaster, who appraised his slaves’ work with a critical eye. He had no illusions that the plantation’s blacks enjoyed their bondage and were eager to work hard for him. “There are few Negroes who will work unless there is a constant eye on them,” he told Martha during his presidency.
Washington did not flinch from having disobedient or recalcitrant slaves whipped. But he also told his overseers that he wanted “to feed & cloath them well, & be careful of them in sickness.” Washington’s account books record a steady flow of payments to both black and white doctors for ailing slaves. He clearly disagreed with the British West Indian attitude of treating slaves as easily replaced parts of the plantation business, giving them minimum care or consideration as human beings.
Washington also recognized the validity of slave marriage, which had no legal standing in Virginia. As he grew older, he became very sensitive on this point. He refused to break up marriages by selling the husband or wife. “To disperse families I have an utter aversion,” he told one correspondent. He also tried to vary his slaves’ diet by giving them permission to hunt and fish and tend gardens. Some Mount Vernon slaves owned boats and guns. One recalled that Washington often asked his permission to use his boat for a row on the Potomac, and always made a point of returning it exactly where the slave had left it.16
The Master of Mount Vernon was also ready to recognize talent and leadership among his blacks. He appointed several slaves as overseers of his outlying farms, and rewarded them if they did a good job. He remarked that one appointee, Davy, “carries on his business as well as the white overseers.” To improve his dinner table, Davy received extra livestock, such as three hogs when they were slaughtered each year, and he enjoyed larger and more comfortable quarters than his fellow slaves. When it came to talent and willingness to work, Washington was remarkably free of race prejudice. Advertising for a good bricklayer, he told one man he did not care whether the artisan came from “Asia, Africa, or Europe.”17
CHAPTER 5
The Forgotten Emancipator
No matter how much he grew in his appreciation and understanding of blacks as human beings, George Washington remained aware that slavery could not be eliminated without endangering the still-fragile American union. As president, he devoted most of his time and energy to establishing the new office as a key factor in this political enterprise. The nation swarmed with people hostile to a strong executive, and they soon found a leader in Thomas Jefferson, who had been in Paris as America’s ambassador when the new national charter was created. Although Jefferson had agreed to serve as Washington’s secretary of state, he had deep reservations about the wisdom of the new Constitution. He would have preferred simply to update the Articles of Confederation.
When President Washington declared America neutral in the war that erupted between England and Revolutionary France in 1793, Jefferson formed a pro-French political party. His followers were soon attacking the president savagely in newspapers and pamphlets. Pro-French mobs surged through the streets of Philadelphia to demonstrate in front of Washington’s residence. In a letter to a European friend, Jefferson described the president as a “Samson who had allowed himself to be shorn by the harlot, England.” One Jeffersonian journalist, James Thomson Callender, offered a toast at a public dinner “to the speedy death of President Washington.”1
• • •
In the midst of this foreign policy turmoil, over the Allegheny Mountains came an even starker threat to disunion—the upheaval in western Pennsylvania that many people called “The Whiskey Rebellion.” The name was in some respects a misnomer. The western counties had long had a surly relationship to the distant state and federal governments in Philadelphia. When Washington’s secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, imposed a tax on the whiskey western farmers distilled from their grain, surliness rapidly became hostility.
Rabble-rousers denounced the “eastern aristocrats,” and federal agents who tried to collect the taxes became targets for threats and harassment. From Canada, the British watched this development with considerable interest. They had hopes of confining their former colonies to the eastern seaboard, and they were arming and arousing the Indian tribes in the Ohio River Valley to launch a war of terror and murder against the Americans entering these fertile lands. A secession of the western counties of Pennsylvania, and perhaps of Virginia and North Carolina, fit neatly into this nasty plan. Some sort of satellite nation could be fabricated from these malcontents, financed by British pounds sterling.
President Washington soon saw the whiskey rebels as a menace to the Union. He summoned fifteen thousand militia from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania and put one of his best soldiers in command of it—Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, a brilliant cavalry leader during the Revolution. When this well-armed host descended on the whiskey rebels, their bravado vanished. In a few days they were pleading for mercy. The president pardoned them all, satisfied that he had made a very large point: the federal union was perpetual and its laws were to be obeyed by everyone in the nation.
Jefferson and his followers pointed to the lack of resistance and claimed that Washington had made a political mountain out of this local molehill. President Washington let them talk. He was content to have set an example to which other presidents could turn. It fit nicely into the central purpose of his presidency—to create an office that had the power to deal with crises without waiting for an indecisive Congress to make up its collective mind.2
Unfortunately, this foreign and domestic turmoil convinced Washington that it would be a grave mistake to bring an issue as divisive as emancipation before the public. Recently, historians have found evidence that the president was seriously considering it. In 1794, he discussed with his confidential secretary, Tobias Lear, the possibility of selling his western lands to enable him to “liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.” But he reluctantly abandoned this idea, which might well have given slavery a mortal wound, if not a deathblow.3
• • •
In 1796, the final year of his second term, Washington found himself bombarded with pleas to run for president again. Shrewd politician that he was, he saw this would play into the hands of the Jeffersonians, who would orate about him becoming “president for life.” He was also a very tired man. But he remained deeply concerned about the future of this nation to which he had devoted forty-five years of his life. He decided to issue a statement explaining why he chose not to seek a third term—and also advising the American people on the course he hoped they would pursue to reach that elusive goal proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—happiness.
The result was a document instantly christened “The Farewell Address” and printed in virtually every newspaper in the nation. It contained a great deal of good advice, based on Washington’s experience as a general and president. He urged everyone to avoid “passionate attachments” to foreign nations. He praised “morality and religion” as the “great pillars of human happiness.” But at the head of his list of concerns was the issu
e that remained central to his vision of America’s future—the federal union.
“The unity of government which constitutes you one people . . . is a main Pillar. . . of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home; your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize.” It must be guarded with “jealous anxiety” to shatter “any attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” Washington admitted that the South, the North, the East, and the West might have special interests or strengths. But they must be first of all American “by an indissoluble community of interest as one nation.”4
None of the other large topics Washington touched on came close to inspiring the emotional intensity he poured into the passages exhorting Americans to preserve this bedrock foundation of his hopes for America—and his vision of a nation united by “fraternal affection.”
• • •
Two years after Washington left the presidency, Thomas Jefferson challenged this principle of the primacy of the Union. President John Adams and the Federalist Party majority in Congress, enraged by the abuse Adams was receiving from the Jeffersonian press for his refusal to alter the policy of neutrality in the ongoing war between Great Britain and France, passed two laws that have become known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. One gave the federal government the power to deport any alien whom it deemed dangerous to the security of the republic. The second empowered the government to prosecute anyone who libeled the president and other officers of the government.
A Disease in the Public Mind Page 7