Like Jay and Knox, Madison was obsessed with reining in the states. “The national government should be armed with positive and compleat authority in all cases which require uniformity,” he told Washington, “such as the regulation of trade.” It must have an absolute veto over all state laws, he added, and state judges should swear to uphold the national constitution. He recommended placing state militias under national control and suggested that, as in colonial days, the general government should appoint state governors. Recognizing the inexpediency of abolishing the states altogether, however, Madison called for a federal system—“some middle ground,” he called it—“which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities whenever they can be subordinately useful.”63 At least in areas under its domain, he maintained that the national government must have the power to act directly on the people and not just through the states.
More so than Jay or Knox, Madison supplied a classically liberal rationale for centralizing political power. All three men agreed that the states had ignored their duties to Congress, restricted commerce with other states, and abused the rights of citizens. Madison laid the blame on factions, chiefly majority ones. “In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law,” he wrote in his memorandum and implied in his letters, and “what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?” Madison’s examples suggested a particular concern with factions united by economic or religious passions. Through state-issued paper money, he observed, debtor factions had devalued property rights. Religion, too, he warned, especially when “kindled into enthusiasm,” is a “force like that of other passions” and “may become a motive to oppression.” Common interests were “less apt to be felt” and majority factions “less easy to be formed” in large republics than small ones, Madison reasoned.64 Increased size reduced the risk from faction. For example, he observed in his letter to Washington, “There has not been any moment since the peace at which the representatives of the union would have given an assent to paper money or any other measure of a kindred nature.”65
Madison’s letter encouraged Washington. It arrived only days after he grudgingly confirmed his intention to attend the convention. “I declare to you that my assent is given contrary to my judgment,” Washington wrote to Randolph on April 9. “I have yielded however to what appeared to be the earnest wishes of my friends, and I will hope for the best.”66
Soon Washington received three letters that gave substance to this hope. Expressing a desire to see him at the convention, Franklin advised Washington that “your Presence will be of the greatest Importance to the Success of the Measure.”67 In response to Washington’s earlier request, Knox now reported that every state except Rhode Island would send delegates and none would carry excessively limiting instruction. “It is the general wish that you should attend,” Knox wrote. “Your tried patriotism, and wisdom, would exceedingly facilitate the adoption of any important alterations that might be proposed by the convention of which you were a member, (& as I before hinted) and president.”68 Then came Madison’s letter with its well-formed outline for a true national government. These letters reassured Washington that the convention would, in fact, consider the sort of radical cures for the nation’s ills that he felt necessary. Nothing now could keep him away.
Nothing, that is, except his mother. The second wife of a wealthy planter, Mary Ball Washington survived her husband by nearly fifty years, giving her plenty of time to brood over how much of his estate he left to the sons of his first wife and how little he left to her. George, the eldest of her six children, was both the apple of her eye and a constant disappointment to her. She wanted a dutiful son who would care for his widowed mother; he wanted to cut her apron strings and make something of himself. She kept him from joining the British navy in 1746 and tried to stop him from serving under General Braddock during the French and Indian War in the position that propelled his military career. Disapproving of her son’s choice in a wife, Mary skipped his wedding and never visited Mount Vernon. During the Revolutionary War, Mary complained so much about her son abandoning her for a cause that was none of his business that many dismissed her as a Loyalist. Despite having ample resources to get by, Mary regularly badgered her son for money. Responding to her pleas with yet another payment in early 1787, Washington harshly advised her that “happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a persons own mind than on the externals in the world.”69
Shortly before his scheduled departure for the convention, Washington received word that his mother was dying. She wanted him at her bedside. The summons came late in the afternoon on April 26, just four days before he had planned to leave for Philadelphia. After dashing off a letter informing Knox that he would surely miss the meeting of the Cincinnati and probably the convention as well, Washington departed with the dawn for his mother’s home in Fredericksburg, some fifty miles away. Riding at a gallop, he arrived in less than eight hours only to find his mother doing better than expected. His sister, who had fallen ill caring for their mother, had recovered. His mother, Washington wrote, “is some what amended.”70 She would live to see him become President.
Having already excused himself from the meeting of the Cincinnati, Washington stayed in Fredericksburg with his sister for three days, leisurely returned home, and then spent another week tending to matters on his plantation. His ties to Mount Vernon showed, as did his reluctance to leave it. Spring flowers still brightened the gardens and hung on some trees. Washington’s own health had markedly improved. He could now travel without physical pain. Early on May 9, 1787, Washington finally set off by coach for Philadelphia. He sat inside the carriage, three liveried slaves rode outside, and trunks packed with enough clothes and supplies for a long stay were strapped in place. Washington had hoped to depart a day earlier, but the rain squalls that would dog his journey kept him from leaving. A clear morning dawned on the ninth, however, offering the promise of a better day. Washington’s coach rolled away from Mount Vernon shortly after sunrise.
* * *
BOOK II
To, From, and In Philadelphia
1787
* * *
The State House in Philadelphia, site of the Constitutional Convention.
CHAPTER 4
The Center Holds
WASHINGTON’S 150-MILE JOURNEY to Philadelphia for the Convention took five days. Packed for a potentially long summer stay as the guest of honor in America’s cultural capital, Washington traveled as fast as he could by carriage. This rarely averaged more than five miles an hour and often was much less. Heavy rain, muddy roads, and high winds particularly slowed his progress through Maryland. He complained of a violent headache and sick stomach. The storm had grown so bad by the time he reached the ferry at Havre de Grace on May 11 that, because of turbulence, he could not cross the Susquehanna River until the next day. Even then, Washington described the passage as difficult.
He dined and lodged quietly with friends or at public houses along the way, including one night in Baltimore with his former wartime aide, James McHenry, who would represent Maryland at the Convention. Washington traveled only with three trusted slaves: his mulatto valet, William Lee, who had cared for his personal needs for two decades; a groom named Giles; and Paris, a coachman. His wife remained at Mount Vernon. “Mrs Washington is become too Domestick, and too attentive to two little Grand Children to leave home,” he wrote ahead to Robert Morris.1 She had urged him to stay home, too.
The hardship of Washington’s relatively short trip through such a long-settled region of the country exemplified one of the challenges to forging a national government. Physically, America remained a string of separate states or groups of states. Each had begun as a virtual island of Europeans on a little-known shore already occupied by native people whom the newcomers wanted to drive out rather than live among or even subjugate. Starting with colonies in the Chesapea
ke Bay region, New England, the Hudson and Delaware valleys, Charleston, and Savannah, European settlement had expanded outward from these points but had not yet merged into a fully contiguous population even on the coast, much less in the interior.
Like spokes radiating from a common hub, the various colonies or regional groups of colonies were mainly connected through Britain before the Revolutionary War. Ten years later, land transport between the now independent states remained limited. Going from Virginia to Pennsylvania, Washington had to cross only from one grouping to the next. The roads were so bad farther south that delegates traveled to the Convention from the Carolinas and Georgia by ship. They could have sailed there just as easily from the British West Indies. Despite a brief episode of political unity during the war, physical separation kept the states apart.
Social, economic, and political factors aggravated the situation. Even though all of the Convention delegates were men of British, Irish, or northwestern European ancestry or birth—and nearly all had substantial means—the states they represented differed sharply. Savannah, Georgia, was all but a Caribbean port of call for Yankee sailors; Connecticut’s pious Calvinist culture surely seemed frozen in time to enlightened Virginians like Washington and Madison. Great wealth came from trade and shipping in both “the eastern states,” as New England was then called, and the mid-Atlantic commercial centers of New York and Philadelphia; it was rooted in plantation agriculture farther south. Pennsylvania’s boisterous egalitarian democracy stood in sharp contrast to South Carolina’s staid republican aristocracy.
Above all, slavery and race divided North from South in America. A decade earlier, in 1776, every colony allowed slavery and nearly all the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves; by 1787, Pennsylvania and the New England states had either ended slavery or mandated its gradual abolition. New York and New Jersey were moving in that direction. Only a few delegates from these states owned slaves at the time of the Convention. Some, like Franklin, were active in abolitionist societies.
In contrast, after some talk of manumission during the Revolutionary War, slavery had become more entrenched than ever in the South. Virtually every delegate from the region possessed slaves. Although he had privately expressed his “wish to get quit of Negroes” during the Revolutionary War, Washington owned more than a hundred slaves in 1787 and controlled almost two hundred more inherited as dower slaves by his wife, making him one of the largest slave owners in Virginia.2 Utterly untroubled by the institution, the Pinckneys of South Carolina, General Charles Cotesworth and his cousin Charles, each owned between two and three hundred slaves. Race mirrored slavery, with few blacks in the North and many in the South. Indeed, black slaves made up more than one-third of the population in most southern states and nearly half the people in South Carolina. As the Convention would show, these differences mattered.
His five-day trip from rural, slaveholding Virginia to cosmopolitan Philadelphia gave Washington time to meditate on what lay ahead. He was not optimistic about the prospects for the Convention. First, Washington doubted whether it could achieve anything of substance. Conditions in the states might need to grow much worse before the public would accept a true national government, he feared, and by then it could be too late to save the union. Petty state politicians, jealous of one another’s power, would surely try to derail any significant reforms.
Further, far from seeking power for himself, Washington dreaded his own growing national role. “It was not until after a long struggle I could obtain my own consent to appear again in a public theatre,” he wrote to Robert Morris just four days before leaving for the Convention. “My first remaining wish being, to glide gently down the stream of life in tranquil retirement till I shall arrive at the world of Sperits.”3
Finally, Washington recognized the revolutionary nature of the reforms needed. Only “radical cures” would do, he repeatedly told his correspondents during the months leading up to the Convention, and only the genuine possibility of fundamental changes had lured him from retirement—but Washington was no radical and did not enjoy promoting such measures.4 He would have sooner stayed home.
Yet here he was in mid-May of his fifty-fifth year, slogging over muddy roads in a rain-soaked, windblown carriage, traveling without family or friends to Philadelphia. Because Washington had not announced his route or schedule, his passage through various towns came as a surprise to local citizens. Unlike during his celebratory ride through Philadelphia to Mount Vernon four years earlier to resign his military commission and retire from public life, people did not turn out en masse to hail him along the way.
Americans knew why Washington was going to Philadelphia, however, and they excitedly discussed its significance. “It is with particular satisfaction we inform the public, that our illustrious fellow Citizen, GEORGE WASHINGTON, Esquire, has consented to serve on the ensuing Federal Convention,” the Connecticut Journal reported on May 2. “What happy consequence may not all the true friends to federal government promise themselves, from the united zeal, policy, and ability of so august an assembly?”5 Calling him “the American Fabius” after the legendary Roman general and statesman, a nationalist paper in Rhode Island printed a poem on May 5 about Washington’s much-anticipated arrival in Philadelphia:
The hero comes, each voice resound his praise,
No envious shafts can dare to chill his rays;
All hail! great man! who, for thy country’s cause,
Flew at her call for to protect the laws.
Following more than a dozen lines hailing Washington’s part in winning the war, this poem closed with a couplet about his expected role at the Convention in securing the peace:
But fly once more the Senate house with grace,
And crown the States with everlasting peace.6
“A union of abilities of so distinguished a body of men, among whom will be a FRANKLIN and a WASHINGTON, cannot but produce the most salutary measures,” the New Hampshire Gazette commented on the Convention later in May. “Their names affixed . . . will stamp a confidence in them, which the narrow-soul’d, antifederalist politicians in the several States, who by their influence, have hitherto d[amn]’d us as a nation, will not dare attack.”7
These and other widely circulated accounts show that, even before it began, nationalists expected radical cures from the Convention. “Upon the events of this great council, indeed, depends every thing that can be essential to the dignity and stability of the national character,” the Maryland Chronicle noted in an article dated on the very day that Washington passed through Baltimore.8 He was greeted in Philadelphia with an essay in one leading local paper that proposed giving Congress complete power over “those things which alike concern all the states.”9
With Washington clearly in mind to head the Convention, other essays commented on the need for an independent executive as well as an empowered Congress. Some also called for national courts.10 “The more we abridge the states of their sovereignty, and the more supreme power we concentrate in an Assembly of the States,” an essayist in a Philadelphia newspaper observed in late May, “the more safety, liberty, and prosperity will be enjoyed by each of the states.”11 Virginia’s anti-nationalist former governor Patrick Henry later reportedly commented that he declined his election to serve as a delegate to the Convention because “he smelt a rat” in Philadelphia.12 If by this he meant a loss of states’ rights, then others caught the scent and found it sweet.
The young country’s only national journal, the American Museum, devoted its April 1787 issue to the coming Convention. As a subscriber, Washington possibly read it on his way to Philadelphia. A lead article depicted the nation as “a headless body, where the tremulous motion of the severed nerves, is the only sign of remaining life.” It called for giving Congress control over interstate and international commerce, establishing a national judiciary, and, most of all, creating an independent executive. “None of our political articles supposed it possible to make a good constitution, w
ithout placing a governor at the head,” the article noted about state governments. “Yet when they united their talents to construct the federal machine, they left out the main spring upon which the continuance of its motion must depend.”13 Washington surely read these words knowing that he was expected to become that mainspring in any new national government. Succeeding issues of the journal reprinted several of the General’s earlier calls for a strong central government along with essays and poems praising him. Published by Irish émigré Mathew Carey under Franklin’s sponsorship with funds from Lafayette, the American Museum gave voice to the same sort of sentiments that gave rise to the Convention. It counted about half of the delegates among its subscribers, including at least one from every state except New Hampshire, and broadcast their nationalist ideals across the land.
EVEN THOUGH THE RAIN continued to pelt down, the trip brightened considerably as Washington approached Philadelphia on Sunday, May 13. He slept the night before in Wilmington, Delaware, at a popular inn operated by Patrick O’Flynn, who had served as a captain during the war. There, Virginia legislator Francis Corbin joined Washington for the final leg of his trip. An official delegation met them just across the state line in Chester, Pennsylvania. Thomas Mifflin, who as president of Congress received Washington’s resignation in 1783 and would succeed Franklin as president of Pennsylvania in 1788, headed the delegation. The seven-member group included Washington’s old comrades Henry Knox and David Humphreys, then in Philadelphia for the meeting of the Cincinnati, and one of his former staff officers, William Jackson, who used the occasion to lobby for the post of Convention secretary.14 After dining at Chester’s elegant Columbia Hotel, where Lafayette had recovered from wounds sustained in the Battle of Brandywine, the party traveled the remaining twenty miles to the city. Everything must have seemed familiar to Washington. After three years in retreat at rural Mount Vernon, this may have felt like returning to a comfortable second home in the city.
The Return of George Washington Page 11