Virginia placed the decision directly on Washington’s shoulders and left it there. In November, citing the “crisis” engulfing the confederacy, the state assembly authorized sending delegates to the proposed convention, making Virginia only the second state to do so.36 A November 8 letter from Madison warned Washington that his name would likely stand atop the delegate list. “It will assist powerfully in marking the zeal of our Legislature, and its opinion of the magnitude of the occasion,” Madison explained.37
Washington replied by return mail that “it is out of my power to do this” but gave an equivocating reason for his refusal. Given the urgency of revising “the federal System,” he wrote, if the legislature asked him to serve as a delegate, he would obey “its call” but for the coincidence that the Society of the Cincinnati was meeting in Philadelphia one week prior to the convention. As a hereditary association of Revolutionary War officers and their eldest male descendants, the Cincinnati had aroused popular ire for its aristocratic pretensions. To distance himself from the society, Washington had announced that, for personal reasons, he could not attend its meeting or accept another term as its president. If he agreed to attend the Philadelphia convention, he could scarcely avoid the Cincinnati. So he must decline both.38
Washington’s response failed to deter Virginia’s general assembly. On December 4, it named him first on a list of delegates that included Madison, Governor Edmund Randolph, and four senior leaders of the American Revolution: Patrick Henry, George Mason, George Wythe, and John Blair. Randolph broke the unwelcome news to Washington in terms clearly calculated to appeal to the General’s sense of service. Despite “the storms which threaten the United States,” Randolph wrote, the country’s “gloomy prospect still admits one ray of hope, that those, who began, carried on & consummated the revolution, can yet rescue America from the impending ruin.”39 Madison followed with a letter explaining why the legislature acted contrary to Washington’s request. The convention’s “pre-eminence over every other public object” might lead to a change of heart, he wrote, and “the advantage of having your name in the front of the appointment as a mark of the earnestness of Virginia, and an invitation to the most select characters from every part of the Confederacy, ought at all events to be made use of.”40
These reasons gave Washington pause. In a brief note to Randolph, he expressed his desire to obey “the calls of my Country,” but explained that “circumstances”—meaning the Cincinnati—would likely prevent him from attending the convention. He urged that someone “on whom greater reliance can be had” be appointed in his place.41 Going into more detail about the Cincinnati, he again wrote to Madison, “It would be improper to let my appointment stand in the way of any other.”42
Washington never flatly declined, however. Randolph took this as a yes, or at least not a no. In a second letter, he entreated Washington “not to decide on a refusal immediately”; let the offer stand. “Perhaps the obstacles, now in view, may be removed, before May,” the governor suggested, or by then “every other consideration may seem of little weight, when compared with the crisis, which may then hang over the united states.”43 Taking a similar tact, Madison wrote separately to express his “wish that at least a door could be kept open for your acceptance hereafter, in case the gathering clouds should become so dark and menacing as to supersede every consideration.”44 Washington waited.
Virginia’s delegate list had the desired effect. Newspapers throughout the states reprinted it, often with Washington’s name in capital letters. When word reached Philadelphia, for example, the Pennsylvania Herald commented, “Every true patriot must be pleased with the very respectable delegation appointed by Virginia.” Expressing hope “that the assembly of Pennsylvania will appoint some of her first political characters to meet those illustrious statesmen,” the paper proposed Franklin, James Wilson, Robert Morris, and George Clymer—all signers of the Declaration of Independence—plus Thomas Mifflin, who presided over Congress at the war’s end and accepted Washington’s resignation. Such men, the Herald commented, “will undoubtedly be able to remove the defects of the confederation, produce a vigorous and energetic continental government, which will crush and destroy factions, subdue insurrections, revive public and private credit, disappoint our transatlantic enemies, and their lurking emissaries among us, and finally (to use an Indian phrase) endure ‘while the sun shines, and the rivers flow.’”45 The legislature complied on December 30 by tapping Morris, Wilson, Clymer, and Mifflin plus Gouverneur Morris and two others. Franklin was added later, when his health improved. Even with only three state delegations named by the end of 1786, the convention was already shaping up as a meeting for the ages.
Four more states named delegates to the convention by mid-February, when Congress reconvened for 1787. These seven states—a majority of the total—acted in response to the call issued by the Annapolis Convention, which troubled some nationalists who thought the call should come from Congress. “To me the Policy of such a Convention appears questionable,” Jay wrote to Washington. “Their authority is to be derived from acts of the State Legislatures. Are the State Legislatures authorized either by themselves or others, to alter Constitutions? I think not.” Congress should declare the current national government “inadequate to the Purposes for which it was instituted,” Jay suggested, and invite the people through their states to act.46 One of the states that had already named delegates conditioned their participation on Congress sanctioning the convention; four of the seven specified that Congress must approve of the convention’s recommendations before they could take effect.
Washington, too, wanted Congress to confirm the call. It would enhance the convention’s prospects of success. After considerable debate, rather than endorse the summons of the Annapolis Convention, Congress issued its own call for a convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” It named the same time and place as the prior summons, however, and authorized previously chosen delegates to serve.47 Five more states promptly named delegates, adding such noted nationalists as Hamilton from New York and Dickinson from Delaware to the mix. Only radical Rhode Island refused.
WITH THE STAGE SET and most of the leading actors chosen, it remained for Washington to decide whether he would attend the convention and play the part reserved for him. Surely if he went, he would become the convention’s presiding officer and public face. His initial instinct was to decline, and not only because of concerns about the Cincinnati but also because of his public commitment to retire from public life and his contentment with that choice.
But he was wavering. In December, he had asked for advice from Humphreys and Knox. Washington received long and detailed responses from both of them in early January, along with a similar letter from Jay. These confidants did not urge Washington to attend the convention, but they unwittingly gave him reason to go.
Conservative nationalists like Jay, Knox, and Humphreys typically blamed the nation’s ills on some combination of Congress’s weakness and excess democracy in the states. Writing from New England in the midst of Shays’s Rebellion, for example, Knox and Humphreys had been so despondent about the nation’s prospects that they did not think Washington should risk his reputation on a project with such slight chance of success. “I concur fully in sentiments with you, concerning the inexpediency of your attending the convention,” Humphreys advised Washington. “If the people have not wisdom and virtue enough to govern themselves, or what is the same thing to suffer themselves to be governed by men of their own election; why then I must think it is in vain to struggle against the torrent, it is in vain to strive to compel mankind to be happy & free contrary to their inclinations.” Knox added, “However strongly I wish for measures which would lead to national happiness and glory, yet I do not wish you to be concerned in any political operations, of which, there are such various opinions.” Jay was equally doubtful of the convention’s prospects but saw little harm in Washington going.48
; Their pessimism sprang from a belief that the confederation was so hopelessly broken that merely revising the Articles could not save it. Yet the convention’s call spoke only of proposing amendments to the Articles subject to approval by the states, not forming a new government. “Would the giving of any further Degree of Power to Congress do the Business?” Jay asked in his letter. “I am inclined to think it would not.” An assembly of individuals representing sovereign states cannot govern, he wrote, because “as the many divide Blame and also divide Credit, too little a portion of either falls to each mans Share, to affect him strongly.” Corruption follows, Jay concluded, as each “will collectively do or omit Things which individual Gentlemen in Private Capacities would not approve.” Knox added the worry that the convention “might devise some expedients to brace up the present defective confederation so as just to keep us together, while it would prevent those exertions for a national character, which is esential to our happiness.” The “only good” that could come out of this convention, Humphreys lamented, would be to show that “we cannot remain as a nation much longer in the present manner of administering our actual government.” He had no hope that it could resolve America’s problems.49
The United States needed a true national government with internal checks and authority over the states, Washington’s correspondents agreed. “Let Congress legislate, let others execute, let others judge,” Jay implored. Both Jay and Knox proposed splitting Congress into two houses, with members of an upper house chosen for life or long terms and members of a lower house elected for one- or two-year terms. They also concurred on the need for an independent executive. Knox would have this “Governor General” elected by Congress for a seven-year term and entrusted with the power to veto laws. Jay would have the executive appoint judges. Based on their frustrations with the petty sovereignty of the states, all three men stressed the importance of consolidating power. The general government’s authority should extend to “all national objects,” Knox declared, “without any reference to the local governments.” If necessary, the war secretary added, the army should compel compliance. Jay wrote of “the States retaining only so much [authority] as may be necessary for domestic Purposes; and all their principal Officers civil and military being commissioned and removable by the national Government.” Humphreys warned that, whatever powers the national government gains on paper, without the ability to coerce obedience, “they are idle as the wind.”50
For Washington, these letters offered the rough outline for a new government that, if formed, would justify him going to the convention. Yet none of his correspondents expected such a plan to emerge from Philadelphia. Indeed, Humphreys wrote, “I am as confident as I am in my own existence” that, due to its limited mandate and how the states instructed their delegates, nothing important would come from the convention.51 Humphreys, Knox, and Jay could not even feel confidence in their own states. All three states—Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York—in the end chose delegations that contained opponents of centralized power. New York did include Hamilton, who exceeded even Jay in zeal for a strong central government, but yoked him with two anti-nationalists, John Lansing Jr. and Robert Yates, and mandated that the concurrence of two delegates would govern the state’s single vote at the proceedings. In effect, Hamilton could talk but not vote. In such a setting, Hamilton had one advantage over Jay. The high-minded Jay would likely feel bound by the convention’s legal mandate and his state’s instructions; a crafty partisan street fighter like Hamilton would not. As the list of participating states grew over the spring, Washington’s enthusiasm for the convention rose notwithstanding Humphreys’s caution that, if it did succeed with Washington in the chair, people would expect him to lead the new government.
Replying to these correspondents, Washington continued to profess his disinclination to go to the convention—yet his protests increasing lacked conviction. “It is not, at this time, my purpose to attend it,” he wrote to Knox in February, but brushed aside concerns about the convention exceeding its mandate. “That which takes the shortest course to obtain [the needed governmental reforms] will, in my opinion, under present circumstances, be found best,” he explained in Hamiltonian fashion. “Otherwise, like a house on fire, whilst the most regular mode of extinguishing it is contended for, the building is reduced to ashes.” He said as much to Jay in March, while adding that he was “a good deal urged” to go.
To Humphrey, after relating the pros and cons of attending the convention, Washington raised a new factor: With his name now publicly listed among the delegates, would his withdrawal “be considered as an implied dereliction of Republicanism” or worse? Would some think that he did not want the convention to succeed? By this time, Washington was looking for reasons to go.52
In these letters, Washington endorsed the reforms proposed by Knox and Jay, and made them his own. “Those enumerated in your letter are so obvious, & sensibly felt that no logick can controvert,” Washington told Jay. “But, is the public mind matured for such an important change?” Expressing similar sentiments to Knox, Washington stated his fear that “the political machine will yet be much tumbled & tossed, and possibly wrecked altogether, before such a system as you have defined, will be adopted.” Jealous of their power, state officials “would give their weight of opposition to such a revolution,” he predicted. “The People must feel before they will see or act under this new view of matters.”
Nevertheless, he wrote to Jay, he wished to try the convention route and find out “what can be effected.” It might represent “the last peaceable mode” of saving the republic; even in failure, it could show the way forward.53 And should it devise a vigorous new constitution under his leadership, Knox now assured Washington, he would have doubly earned “the glorious republican epithet—The Father of Your Country.”54
On March 28, scarcely forty days prior to the Convention’s scheduled start, Washington relented—with a condition. “I have come to a resolution to go if my health will permit,” he informed Randolph. In particular, Washington explained, “I have, of late, been so much afflicted with a rheumatic complaint in my shoulder that at times I can hardly able to raise my hand to my head, or turn myself in bed. This, consequently, might prevent my attendance.”55
For Washington, at age fifty-five, health was an ongoing issue and one reason he repeatedly gave for his retirement from public life. He had suffered from dysentery, pleurisy, quinsy, severe headaches, fevers, and a mild case of smallpox in the past, and the quinsy and headaches periodically returned. As recently as 1785, he had complained to Knox that “heavy, & painful oppressions in the head, and other disagreeable sensations, often trouble me.”56 Washington’s eyesight and hearing were also failing, and his teeth posed persistent and painful problems. Indeed, by the 1780s, his teeth had become so bad that he sought treatment from the itinerant French dentist Jean Pierre Le Moyer, first at army headquarters in Newburgh then on several occasions at Mount Vernon. Le Moyer specialized in the risky procedure of tooth transplants, which involved extracting a diseased tooth from a patient and replacing it with a healthy tooth obtained from a donor. Washington resorted to this procedure during the 1780s, with the healthy teeth coming from his slaves, who received thirteen shillings per tooth, or about one-third of what Le Moyer typically paid on the free market. Since Le Moyer visited Mount Vernon at least twice during the three months prior to Washington’s decision to attend the Convention, the General’s teeth may have been bothering him almost as much as his shoulder.57
Of course physical pain and illness offered compelling reasons to stay home, but in this case, health was part pretext. Five days after sending his conditional acceptance to Randolph, Washington wrote to Knox asking whether all the states would name delegates and if any would impose limiting instructions. In this letter, he spoke of only going to the convention if the delegates could reach beyond the Articles and “point out radical cures.”58 Should their authority be too limited, Washington could always use his health
as an excuse to withdraw.59
WITH THE DECISION TENTATIVELY MADE, Washington called on Madison for the advice that would set the tone for all that followed. They had conferred in February when Madison visited Mount Vernon to encourage Washington to attend the convention. Now Washington wrote to Madison, “A thorough reform of the present system is indispensible . . . and with hand and heart I hope the business will be essayed in the full Convention.” Fearing that some states might impose limits on their delegates, Washington reiterated his hope that the convention “would probe the defects of the Constitution to the bottom, and provide radical cures, whether they are agreed to or not.” By doing so, the Convention’s handiwork could become “a luminary, which sooner or later will shed its influence.”60
Washington’s words could not have found a more receptive reader than Madison. Scholarly and introspective, Madison had been working alone along similar lines for months and, with the convention approaching, now brought Washington, Randolph, and Jefferson into his thinking. In long letters to each and an even longer memorandum on the “vices” of the American state governments, he laid out his ideas for what became the Virginia Plan for a new constitution.
Struck by the similarities between Madison’s proposals and those of Jay and Knox, Washington prepared an abstract comparing them.61 All envisioned a national government with separate legislative, judicial, and executive branches. All would divide Congress into an elite upper house and a popular lower house. Madison elaborated more than the others on the judiciary. He viewed national courts as essential to avoid local bias in expounding national laws and deciding cases involving citizens of different states. Madison wrote less than the others about the executive. “I have scarcely ventured as yet to form my own opinion either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed,” he admitted to Washington.62
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