Dedication
IN MEMORY OF
Pauline Maier & Edmund Morgan
Two Extraordinary Historians of the Revolutionary Era
Who Passed During the Writing of This Book.
To Paraphrase Isaac Newton and Bernard of Chartres:
We See Further by Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.
Contents
Dedication
Preface
BOOK I
From New York to Mount Vernon, 1782–1786
CHAPTER 1
Retiring Becomes Him
CHAPTER 2
Reeling in the West
CHAPTER 3
To Go or Not to Go
BOOK II
To, From, and In Philadelphia, 1787
CHAPTER 4
The Center Holds
CHAPTER 5
In His Image
CHAPTER 6
“Little Short of a Miracle”
BOOK III
From Mount Vernon to New York, 1788–1789
CHAPTER 7
Ratifying Washington
CHAPTER 8
The First Federal Elections
CHAPTER 9
The Inaugural Parade
Epilogue
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Photographic Insert
About the Author
Also by Edward J. Larson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
ON A CHILLY SPRING morning in April 2014, I sat on Mount Vernon’s broad front piazza watching the sun rise slowly over the Potomac River. The window off George Washington’s upstairs bedroom was over my right shoulder, and the east-facing door to his first-floor office stood directly behind me. Washington would have seen much this same view 225 years earlier, knowing it might be a long time before he observed it again. The American people had called him to the presidency, and he was preparing to leave his beloved Mount Vernon plantation for the seat of government in New York on April 16, 1789. Due to private preservation efforts and public land-use restrictions, this vista over the Potomac, the one that Washington most loved and built his piazza to frame, survives virtually unchanged in the midst of Northern Virginia’s urban sprawl.
As an inaugural fellow at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, with a residency on the grounds of Mount Vernon, I was able to enjoy this and other scenes on Washington’s plantation many times over the course of a year. The view from the piazza became my favorite, too, especially at sunrise in the spring, when flowering trees and soft green leaves give off a warm glow in the early-morning light. It was obvious why Washington was reluctant to leave Mount Vernon for public service in a job that he neither sought nor wanted.
The words that Washington sent six months earlier to fellow Virginian James Madison urging him to serve in the new federal government applied equally to himself, however. Supporters of the new Constitution and the union it created, he had implored Madison, forgetting personal considerations, must combine their collective efforts through service in the new government to avert the “great national calamities that impended” without it.1 By 1787, four years since the United States secured its independence, Washington had come to believe that the country faced as grave a threat from internal forces of disunion in the mid-1780s as it had from external ones of tyranny in the mid-1770s, when he accepted leadership of the patriot army at the outset of the Revolutionary War. Now his country again called on his service, this time as the elected leader of the world’s first extended republic.
Countless books tell the story of Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and nearly as many relate the history of his role as the first President of the United States. Indeed, books about Washington could fill a library. They fill a bookcase in mine. Few of them focus on the six years between his wartime and presidential service, which is the subject of this one. Even the finest full biographies of Washington—from Douglas Southall Freeman’s six-volume classic of the late 1940s and early 1950s through James Thomas Flexner’s masterful four-volume series of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to Ron Chernow’s superb 2010 Washington: A Life, all Pulitzer Prize winners—devote the interlude between his military tenure and presidential terms mostly to presenting his life as a Virginia planter. Moreover, when biographers reach the Constitutional Convention, over which Washington presided, they typically present him as a stiff, silent figure who mainly contributed his prestige and dignity to the proceedings. The standard narrative then has him retiring to Mount Vernon through the ratification debates and first federal election until called to the presidency.
With this book, I retell the story from Washington’s resignation as commander in chief through his inauguration as President. Not meaning to diminish the importance of his domestic life during this period, I stress his crucial role as a public figure and political leader during these critical years between the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and the start of the federal government in 1789. Many accounts, such as David Hackett Fischer’s riveting Washington’s Crossing, present Washington as The Indispensable Man (as Flexner famously called him) during the Revolutionary War. Others show his similar centrality as President, perhaps most notably Forrest McDonald’s The Presidency of George Washington. I argue that Washington was equally important—equally indispensable—during the interval between these two better-known stages of his life. Often working behind the scenes but still very much in the public imagination, he helped to bind the states into a single federal republic. This period in Washington’s public life merits as much attention as those that preceded and followed it. It built on what came before and laid the foundation for what followed. From 1775 until his death, Washington was the indispensable American.
As Washington understood matters, the immediate threat to America during the 1780s flowed from the weakness of the central government. More than anyone, he led the effort to reform it. “The honor, power, and true Interest of this Country must be measured by a Continental scale,” Washington wrote in 1783. “Every departure therefrom weakens the Union, and may ultimately break the band, which holds us together.”2 Supplementing his efforts to strengthen the central government, he worked to link the country’s economy, particularly by joining the emerging regions west of the Appalachian Mountains to the settled ones on the coast by a navigable waterway. “Unless we can connect the New States, which are rising to our view in the Regions back of us, with those on the Atlantic by interest,” Washington warned in 1785, “they will be quite a distinct People; and ultimately may be very troublesome neighbours to us.”3 He worried that America, far from serving as a beacon of enlightened liberty and republican rule, was becoming “contemptable in the eyes of Europe.”4 By 1786, Washington privately vowed to do all that he could “to avert the humiliating, & contemptible figure we are about to make, in the Annals of Mankind.”5 Washington’s vision and continuing service led the way toward the new American union that endures to this day.
I CAN ONLY BEGIN to identify the many institutions and individuals that have helped me to conceive, research, and write this book, and can never adequately thank them all. The idea for it began while I was teaching American constitutional law and history to Australian students as a visiting professor at Melbourne Law School. Retelling the story to non-American students helped me to reconceive it in my own mind. Research for this book began in earnest while I was teaching as a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, where I benefited from the chance to discuss the topic with such extraordinary colleagues as Dean Larry Kramer, Jack Rakove, Michael McConnell,
and Lawrence Friedman. In my final stages of writing, I enjoyed the privilege of working as a Fellow at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, where I could call on the likes of Douglas Bradburn, Mary Thompson, Stephen McLeod, Mark Santangelo, Dawn Bonner, James Martin, Susan Schoelwer, and Adam Shprintzen for assistance. Throughout, I have enjoyed the ongoing support of Pepperdine University, where I teach history and law. My special thanks go to Pepperdine’s president Andy Benton, Law School dean Deanell Tacha, Seaver College dean Rick Marrs, and Research Librarian Jodi Kruger.
Friends and family made major contributions to this book. First of all, I am deeply indebted to historian of the Revolutionary Era Ray Raphael, First Federal Congress Project co-director Kenneth R. Bowling, and constitutional scholar Dan Coenen for reviewing vast swaths of my manuscript. When it comes to this period in American political history, Ray and Ken know the forest and every tree. Among the many other scholars who suffered my questions and gave wise counsel, Akhil Amar, William Baude, Richard Beeman, Michael Coenen, Susan Dunn, Paul Finkelman, and Pauline Maier merit special mention, as do my editor, Peter Hubbard, and my book agent, B. G. Dilworth. For starting me on this course, my belated thanks go to my teachers James MacGregor Burns, Norman K. Risjord, Robert M. O’Neil, Laurence Tribe, and John Hart Ely. Most of all, my gratitude goes to my wife, Lucy, and our children, Sarah and Luke. Research and writing take so much time away from every other part of life.
My thoughts turn to those people who have helped me so much as I write these words with dusk settling over the fields behind Mount Vernon on this, the 225th anniversary of the day that Washington took the presidential oath in New York. His wife, Martha, had remained behind until housing was arranged and perhaps, seeing a similar sunset on this date in 1789, thought about her spouse and the life that lay ahead for them in New York. He would rather have been here with her and, being here, I can understand why.
Edward J. Larson
Mount Vernon, Virginia
April 30, 2014
* * *
BOOK I
From New York to Mount Vernon
1782–1786
* * *
1782 print of General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
CHAPTER 1
Retiring Becomes Him
IT WAS AND REMAINS one of the most remarkable events in the history of war, revolution, and politics. General George Washington retired. Although a spoken act, like so much that set him apart, it was less what he said than what he did.
On Tuesday, December 23, 1783, the commander in chief of American forces during the just-concluded Revolutionary War, accompanied only by two trusted aides, David Humphreys and Tench Tilghman, strode into the Assembly Chamber of the Maryland State House in Annapolis. Congress had been meeting there ever since fleeing from its own mutinous troops in Philadelphia, the United States’ customary seat of government. Self-describedly gray at age fifty-one following nearly nine years of wartime service, Washington stood erect—still a towering figure on a solid frame. Only twenty members representing but seven states remained in attendance at the little respected and largely ineffectual Confederation Congress. Washington had arrived in Annapolis the previous Friday to a cannon salute that brought a throng of well-dressed citizens into the streets to hail him as the country’s liberator. On Saturday, in accord with his oft-stated intent, he inquired of Congress about the manner of resigning his commission and returning to private life now that the war had ended. Congress requested a formal audience.
Following a script prepared over the weekend by a congressional committee chaired by Thomas Jefferson, Washington entered the Assembly Chamber at noon on the twenty-third and took a seat opposite the seated president of Congress, his former aide-de-camp, Thomas Mifflin. The other members of Congress also sat, all wearing hats. The French ambassador, Maryland state officials, and leading citizens of Annapolis then entered the hall—men standing at the rear; women in the gallery above. Once the spectators settled in their places, the president of Congress addressed the General: “Sir, The U.S. in Congress Assembled are prepared to receive your Communications.”1 Washington rose and bowed to Congress. On this cue, the members doffed their hats but did not stand. This stiff protocol maintained that the members of Congress were respectfully superior to the commander in chief. Drawing a paper written in his own hand from a coat pocket, Washington then read his final address as a military commander. Scarcely three hundred words long, it made history.
“The great events on which my resignation depended, having at length taken place,” Washington began, his hand visibly trembling as it held the speech, “I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress, and of presenting myself before them, to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me.” Soon he needed both hands to steady the page. After noting the “diffidence” with which he initially accepted the post, acknowledging the “obligations” he owed to the army in general and his closest aides in particular, and “commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God,” Washington concluded, “I retire from the great theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”2 By this point all the spectators were weeping, one observer noted, “and there was hardly a member of Congress who did not drop tears.”3 Drawing his commission from his coat pocket, Washington then stepped forward and handed it to the president.
A future American government chose to memorialize precisely this moment in one of eight historical paintings decorating the rotunda of the United States Capitol. Turned slightly to the right toward Congress, Washington dominates the image at center framed by a broad pilaster, added to the background by the artist John Trumbull to convey stability. His left hand on a riding whip to suggest the haste with which he rode to Congress to relinquish power, Washington extends his right hand—holding the commission—toward Mifflin, who stands on a raised platform, slightly higher than the General to show civilian authority but still smaller than him and painted in flat profile within a formal group portrait of all twenty congressmen. To depict the four future Virginia presidents as united for this foundational episode, Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe are identifiable in this stylized grouping even though Madison had not rejoined Congress following its remove to Annapolis. Behind Washington on his left stand an equal number of spectators, with his wife, Martha, who was not actually there, gazing down from the gallery in domestic garb.
At this point in the real proceedings, President Mifflin stiffly read the elegant response that Jefferson’s committee had drafted for the occasion, on behalf of the entire country. “The U.S. in congress assembled receive with emotions too affecting for utterance this solemn Resignation of the authorities under which you have led their troops with Success through a perilous and doubtful war,” it began in soaring words that surely came from Jefferson, who had penned the lofty Declaration of Independence eight long years before. “Having defended the standard of liberty in this new world . . . you retire from the great theatre of action with the blessings of your fellow citizens, but the glory of your virtues will not terminate with your military command, it will continue to animate remotest ages.”4
Having turned on Washington during the war’s darkest days by trying to replace him as commander in chief with Horatio Gates, Mifflin played an awkward but necessary part in this pageant. As Congress’s chief officer before the creation of an executive branch, he personified civilian rule in America. Observing in his prepared response that Washington had accepted his post when the lack of both foreign alliances and a central—or “general”—government made the war’s outcome doubtful, Mifflin now hailed the commander in chief’s military leadership and deference to civilian authority. Concluding his recitation, Mifflin prayed to God for Washington that “a life so beloved may be fostered with all his care; that your days
may be happy as they have been illustrious; and that he will finally give you that reward which this world cannot give.”5
His resignation duly accepted, Washington bowed again to Congress and was free to go. He stayed only long enough to greet the members following their adjournment and was riding toward his beloved Mount Vernon plantation by two o’clock. He had promised Martha that he would be home for Christmas. He kept his word.
EXTOLLED BY LATER HISTORIANS as a signal event that set the country’s political course—Thomas Fleming called it “the most important moment in American history”6—Washington’s retirement was similarly praised at the time. Citing examples from Julius Caesar to Oliver Cromwell, British leaders during the war had scoffed at Americans for rebelling against one King George only to gain another in George Washington. Successful rebel leaders inevitably become tyrants, they charged. Indeed, in England, when expatriate American painter Benjamin West predicted that Washington would retire upon the cessation of hostilities, a skeptical King George III reportedly replied, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”7 Writing from London after word of Washington’s resignation reached that city, West’s American student, John Trumbull, wrote to his brother in Connecticut that the act “excites the astonishment and admiration of this part of the world. ’Tis a Conduct so novel, so inconceivable to People, who, far from giving up powers they possess, are willing to convulse the Empire to acquire more.”8 No wonder Trumbull later painted the scene with such feeling.
In America, Washington at once became a second “Cincinnatus,” the legendary ancient leader twice called from his farm and given supreme power to rescue republican Rome from its enemies only to relinquish power and return to his farm once the dangers had passed. A firsthand account from Annapolis, printed in countless American newspapers during January 1784, described the event as “extraordinary, and to the General more honourable than any that is recorded in history.”9 A member of Congress from Maryland and future secretary of war, James McHenry, writing to his fiancée on the twenty-third, spoke of it as “a solemn and affecting spectacle; such an one as history does not present.”10 An editorial in a New York newspaper soon proposed new coins for the country with Washington’s image stamped on the front and a shepherd reclining under a pine on the back. “Peace, the fruit of Glorious War,” read the proposed inscription.11
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