The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  By 1785, severe deflation in the value of hard money had caused a nationwide recession that a well-regulated emission of paper credit could ameliorate. Many cautious Americans doubted, however, that elected state legislatures could regulate it well. They remembered the inflationary effects of printing too much unbacked paper money during the war. In a June 1786 letter to Washington, Jay described these paper-money skeptics as “the better kind of People—by which I mean the People who are orderly and industrious, who are content with their situations, and not uneasy in their Circumstances.” This sort, he warned, “will be led by the Insecurity of Property” resulting from cheap paper money to question republican rule and “prepare their Minds for almost any change that may promise them Quiet & Security.”12 Washington agreed, and found it “much to be feared . . . that the better kind of people” might resort to a monarchy or worse. “We are apt to run from one extreme into another,” he wrote back to Jay. “To anticipate & prevent disastrous contingencies would be the part of wisdom & patriotism.”13

  Jay’s fears notwithstanding, the benefits from expanding the money supply through state-issued bonds and interest certificates revived popular demands for states to issue more paper money. The wartime experience with hyperinflation, which hit creditors like Washington especially hard, had soured many wealthy Americans on paper money. Having lent out money in pounds sterling prior to the Revolutionary War, for example, Washington was repaid during the war in depreciated paper money worth less than one-fourth its face value—and he never forgot it. In 1786, as demands for paper money grew, Washington depicted the practice of repaying hard cash with inflated paper money as “ungenerous, not to say dishonest.” He would not do it to his creditors and did not want his debtors to do it to him. “Paper bills of credit,” he complained, give “the shadow for the substance of a debt.”14

  Even less restrained in their words, Jay, James Madison, and many other leading nationalists denounced state-issued paper money in the strongest terms. Arguing against its issuance by his state in 1786, for example, Madison lectured Virginia’s legislature that paper money would “destroy confidence between individuals” and “disgrace republican governments in the eyes of mankind.”15 Yet under the Articles of Confederation, Congress was as powerless to prevent states from issuing paper money as it was to stop an incoming tide. Creditors like Washington, who feared that cheap paper money would erode the value of their fixed investments, very much were swimming against that tide in trying to prevent state legislatures from authorizing it. At most, opponents could try to limit its use to paying taxes or have it secured by something of value, such as state-owned land.

  The dam broke in 1786, when seven states issued paper money. “Pennsylvania & N. Carolina took the lead in this folly,” Madison wrote in August to Jefferson, who was then serving as America’s ambassador in Paris. Most of the initial emissions incorporated limits that helped them to hold value at least initially, but in debtor-controlled Rhode Island, which made its paper money legal tender for virtually all public and private debts, the bottom dropped out of the currency’s value almost immediately and hard money was driven underground. “Supplies were withheld from the Market, the Shops were shut, popular meetings ensued, and the State remains in a sort of Convulsion,” Madison informed Jefferson. “Depreciation is inevitable” in every state with paper money, Madison predicted, yet driven by popular factions, he feared that more states would join others in printing “this fictitious money.”16

  Madison perceived a pattern in the rush to paper. State governments with the fewest checks and balances tended to act first and in the most extreme manner. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, for example, placed virtually all power in a single legislative chamber, with the executive and the judiciary serving all but at its pleasure. In contrast, Madison observed in his letter to Jefferson, Maryland held back because the state senate—presumably due to the long terms, indirect selection process, and property qualifications for its members—stood as “a bar to paper in that State.” But as “the clamor for [paper money] is now universal, and as the periodical election of the Senate happens at this crisis,” Madison added with his customary pessimism, Maryland’s next senate would likely surrender.17

  This experience confirmed Madison’s view that America needed a balanced national government that could check the power of state excesses and majority factions. From Paris, Jefferson had sent Madison a shipment of treatises on government by European political philosophers, which arrived early in 1786. Now Madison began trolling through them in earnest for arguments in support of his view.

  Expressing similar sentiments at the same time, Washington wrote to former congressman Theodorick Bland in August 1786, complaining about “the present alarming troubles in Rhode Island.”18 Writing to Jay on the same day, Washington added, “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious! Would to God that wise measures may be taken in time to avert the consequences we have but too much reason to apprehend.”19

  For nationalists, the failure of paper money in states like Rhode Island and New Jersey became an object lesson in the dangers of excess democracy and a clarion call for a strong central government. Madison asked James Monroe earlier in 1786, “Is it possible with such an example before our eyes of impotency in the federal system, to remain skeptical with regard to the necessity of infusing more energy into it?”20 Echoing these sentiments in his August letter to Jay, Washington wrote, “I do not conceive we can exist long as a nation, without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole Union in an energetic a manner.” Significantly, he then added, “Retired as I am from the world, I frankly acknowledge I cannot feel myself an unconcerned spectator.”21

  IF WASHINGTON SAW RHODE ISLAND as the specter of democracy run amok, then Massachusetts soon appeared as the reality of it run riot. For him and many fellow nationalists, the debtors’ insurrection that engulfed central and western Massachusetts beginning late in 1786 became the fire bell in the night awakening them in terror and calling them back to service.

  Washington’s exhaustive biographer, James Thomas Flexner, posits that the General first learned of the uprising from a September 23 article in the conservative Pennsylvania Packet, one of the many newspapers that he generally read. The article began by lamenting the situation in Rhode Island, where courts reportedly forced creditors to accept hundreds of pounds of paper money in repayment of old debt. “That ‘Righteousness exalteth a people,’ we believe is rather doubted in that state,” the article quoted from Scripture. It then turned to events in Massachusetts, where the legislature had defeated popular proposals to print paper money and the courts strictly enforced obligations to repay debts in hard cash, which, given its shortage, was beyond the means of most debtors.

  According to the article, armed bands under the command of former Revolutionary War officers had occupied the courthouses in Concord and Taunton during the September judicial term to stop debt collection and foreclosures. “I am going to give the court four hours to agree to our terms,” the leader in Concord purportedly declared, “and if they do not I and my party will force them to it.”22 Both courts closed for the term. They would not meet again until December.

  The Pennsylvania Packet article did not tell the half of it, but sensational reports soon reached Washington from other sources, filling in some details and exaggerating others. The two courthouse raids mentioned in the article were not the first during the September judicial term. Led by former officers, more than five hundred men from central and western Massachusetts—most of them farmers, many of them veterans, some of them armed—marched in military formation with fife and drum on August 29 to Northampton, where they stopped the court from meeting. Within a week, the scene repeated itself on a smaller scale but with similar results in Worcester. Concord, Taunton, and Great Barrington followed a week later. These raids shuttered most of
the county courts west of Boston for the term. In many of the encounters, the local militia refused to defend the courts; in some, militiamen joined the insurrection. Participants included a cross section of the local community. Once the courts closed, the situation quieted down for a season.

  As dramatic as they were, these events had precedent. Protests closed courts in many colonies during the years leading up to the American Revolution, and, in various forms, the practice continued after the war. When New Jersey refused to authorize paper money in 1786, for example, protesters blocked creditors’ suits throughout the state. Vermonters, then in the process of revolting from New York rule, not only forced out New York judges but established their own hyperdemocratic state and local institutions. Suspicious fires destroyed courts in Washington’s own state during the period. All told, historian Woody Holton estimates that debtor and taxpayer groups assaulted courthouses in about half the states.23 Virtually every state experienced at least some violent resistance to the efforts by sheriffs to execute judgments, foreclose mortgages, or collect taxes.

  The court closings in Massachusetts stood out mainly because of their number, extent, and coordination. By October, Washington had become sufficiently concerned about them that he wrote to his former aide, David Humphreys, who then lived in New England. “For Gods sake tell me, what is the cause of all these commotions?” he asked. “Do they proceed from licentiousness, British influence disseminated by the Tories, or real grievances which admit of redress?”24 The responses that Washington received from his correspondents pointed him toward the first of his proposed answers; newspapers that he read suggested all three; modern historians have favored the last. Regardless of their cause, the commotions sufficiently shocked Washington to set him on the road to Philadelphia.

  At the time, Massachusetts had one of the most balanced but least populistic constitutions in the country. Written largely by John Adams and adopted in 1780, it split the legislative power between a lower house that represented population and an upper house that represented wealth; created a powerful governor advised by an elite council; retained property qualifications for voting; and provided for appointed judges and sheriffs. Tilted toward urban eastern interests, the constitution was ratified in an improvised fashion that the state’s rural western residents questioned. While John Hancock served as governor and worked to soften the system, these westerners went along. When the hard-line James Bowdoin replaced Hancock in 1785, westerners began to rebel, especially after Bowdoin pushed through a tax hike to pay Congress’s oppressive requisition of 1785, which was the first to fund many of the most unpopular wartime debts, including the officers’ commuted pensions. Even Madison feared that the requisition would “try the virtue of the States.”25 He was right. Many states refused to pay it in part or in whole, but not Massachusetts. Early in 1786, it imposed new, hard-money taxes on people and property, with revenue going to pay bondholders. After the eastern-dominated state legislature ignored petitions for relief, westerners closed the courthouses in September.

  When the insurrection continued into the December judicial term despite political efforts to defuse it, Bowdoin got tough. Bypassing the local militia, which he did not trust, the governor raised private funds to hire a twenty-five-hundred-man army that relentlessly pursued the insurgents, whose largest force was then led by a decorated Revolutionary War captain named Daniel Shays. Singled out for his role in the uprising by its opponents, Shays became the rebellion’s public face. On the advice of Secretary of War Henry Knox, the rich and portly Bostonian who had served as Washington’s second in command during the Revolutionary War, Congress pitched in by expanding its forces for possible use in Massachusetts. From Congress, Henry Lee informed Washington that some members, “knowing your unbounded influence,” wanted him to visit the insurgents and “bring them back to peace.”26 Washington shot back, “Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured.”27

  Having inspected some of the trouble spots following the September clashes, Knox took it upon himself to keep Washington apprised of developments in letters that by January arrived at Mount Vernon with every post. “The fine theoretical government of Massachusetts has given way,” Knox wrote in a dark October message to Washington that depicted the insurgents as radical levelers who believed Americans should hold property in common and that anyone who “attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equality and justice, and ought to be swept from off the face of the earth.” Knox estimated that these “desperate & unprincipled men” could field a force of fifteen thousand in New England alone. “Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property.”28 In his letters, Knox damned these rebels as lawless people who “have never paid any, or but little taxes” and had “little or no property”—a classic European rabble. “Their first acts are to annihilate their courts of Justice, that is private debts. The Second, to abolish the public debt and the third is to have a division of property by means of the darling object of most of the States paper money,” Knox added in December.29

  Washington was horrified. “Good God!” he wrote to Knox, “there are combustibles in every State, which a spark may set fire to.”30 He perceived the country teetering on the brink of anarchy or mob rule.

  The insurgency wilted before Bowdoin’s army, which marched west from Boston under the command of Revolutionary War general Benjamin Lincoln in mid-January. Desperate for arms to resist the coming assault, the insurgents tried and failed to seize the national armory in Springfield before the army arrived. With the army on its way, they then retreated north to Petersham, where the army surprised and routed them amid a blinding snowstorm on February 4.

  Many insurgent leaders fled to Vermont, where they found refuge; a few were caught in Massachusetts and hanged or imprisoned. Hundreds of participants in the insurrection faced indictments; thousands of them lost the right to vote. In the next election, at least in part as a reaction against these heavy-handed reprisals, Hancock defeated Bowdoin in the contest for governor and Lincoln lost the race for lieutenant governor. The new legislature reduced direct taxes, enacted a moratorium on debts, and cut payments to public creditors. With these reforms, peace returned to Massachusetts.

  Despite its outcome, Shays’s Rebellion, as it has become known, haunted Washington. Without a strong national government, he feared that similar uprisings could flare up elsewhere. “I am mortified beyond expression whenever I view the clouds which have spread over the brightest morn that ever dawned upon any Country,” he wrote Lee at the outset of the disturbances. “Precedents are dangerous things. Let the reins of government be braced in time & held with a steady hand.”31 To Humphreys, Washington later added, “It is but the other day we were shedding our blood to obtain the Constitutions under which we now live—Constitutions of our own choice and framing—and now we are unsheathing the Sword to overthrow them! The thing is so unaccountable, that I hardly know how to realize it.”32 He wondered if Britain secretly might have engineered the uprising in an effort to undermine the states and regain some of them. Certainly Washington worried that any domestic rebels would inevitably seek British aid. He was not alone. Reports circulated widely that British Canada offered asylum to Shays and support to Vermonters in their revolt from New York.

  Events in New England caused Washington to doubt whether Americans were capable of self-government. “Who besides a tory could have foreseen, or a Briton predict them!” he wrote to Knox. “Notwithstanding the boasted virtue of America, we are far gone in every thing ignoble & bad.”33 And so to Madison, who was already thinking about a new national political structure, Washington wrote in November, “Thirteen Sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head, will soon bring ruin to the whole; whereas a liberal, and energetic Constitution, well guarded & closely watched, to prevent incroachments, might restore us to that degree of respectability & consequence, to which we had a fair claim.”34
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  Three months after the disturbances died down, Washington wrote to Lafayette about their ongoing impact on the campaign for constitutional reform. “These disorders are evident marks of a defective government,” Washington asserted. “Indeed, the thinking part of the people of this Country are now so well satisfied of this fact that most of the Legislatures have appointed, & the rest it is said will appoint, delegates to meet at Philadelphia the second Monday in May next in general Convention of the States to revise, and correct the defects of the federal System.”35

  The Constitutional Convention represented the nationalists’ response to Shays’s Rebellion—but only in the sense that the uprising served as a critical, and for Washington perhaps an essential, final straw. The call for the convention had come months earlier in response to commercial and revenue concerns that predated the insurgency. Delegates to the failed Annapolis Convention on interstate commerce had issued it in September 1786, and several states had elected delegates before Shays’s Rebellion reached a critical point. The paper-money crisis in Rhode Island added further impetus to the reform movement. Then Massachusetts exploded. The question remained: would Washington attend? Many thought that the convention would fail without him. He did not tip his hand to Lafayette.

  WASHINGTON PLAYED HAMLET during late 1786 and early 1787 as he agonized over whether to attend the convention. The part came naturally to him. He had never been happier than during the past few years of honored retirement, and he had rarely been healthier. He had much to gain but more to lose by him returning to the public stage. So did the country.

  The decision presented Washington with something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. For his own sake and that of the country, he should not go unless the convention was likely to succeed, and yet it was not likely to succeed unless he went. No easy answer presented itself. Washington brooded over it for months with his most trusted correspondents. Meanwhile, his health deteriorated.