The Return of George Washington
Page 18
While the members accepted many parts of the Committee of Detail’s draft constitution, they deferred action on several key provisions relating to the presidency and Senate. Reaching an impasse, on August 31 they referred these postponed parts, which included basic matters regarding presidential selection and executive power, to a committee with one member from each state. It included such leading nationalists as Madison, King, and Gouverneur Morris. This committee revived the idea of using electors to choose the President, which Madison and Morris had long favored, and proposed that the President make treaties and appoint judges, ambassadors, and other major officers “with the advice and consent of the Senate”: a formula suggested earlier by delegates from Massachusetts based on how their state chose judges.96 Although no member attempted to define “advice and consent,” various comments suggested that the Senate still would have a meaningful role in the process. “As the President was to nominate, there would be responsibility” Morris explained, “as the Senate was to concur, there would be security.”97 Also in line with nationalists’ aspirations, the committee fortified the taxing power by adding expansive language authorizing Congress to lay and collect taxes “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.”98 With members anxious to finish, the Convention accepted these fundamental changes with little debate and almost no dissent.99
So long as Congress elected the President, the delegates had limited the President to a single long term. Otherwise, they feared the executive would come under the sway of the legislators who could reappoint him. Using independent electors to pick the President opened the door for short, multiple terms, which most delegates always believed would encourage better behavior in office.100 Accordingly, the committee also proposed a four-year term for the President with no limits on reelection. Indeed, in presenting the electoral system to the Convention, one committee member stated that its “object . . . was to get rid of ineligibility, which was attached to the mode of election by the Legislature, & to render the Executive independent of the Legislature.”101 With this critical final adjustment, the Convention struck its ultimate balance between executive and legislative power, and gave birth to the American presidency.
On September 9, one day after the last of these postponed parts passed the Convention, Washington wrote to his nephew in Virginia. “This,” he began, “is probably the last letter I shall write you from this place; as the probability is, that the Convention will have completed the business which brought the delegates together, in the course of this week.” In case anyone doubted his impatience for the Convention’s end, Washington added, “God grant I may not be disappointed in this expectation, as I am quite homesick.”102 A few matters remained to wrap up, but none of them particularly concerned Washington. He was eager to send the Convention’s work to the states for ratification knowing that the future of his country and, in all likelihood, the next stage of his life would turn on their decision.
Howard Chandler Christy’s 1940 painting of the signing of the United States Constitution.
CHAPTER 6
“Little Short of a Miracle”
“WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES,” the Constitution’s late-added Preamble declares, “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.”1 The handiwork of Gouverneur Morris,2 the Preamble’s one long sentence—perhaps the most famous single sentence of modern times—captured the nationalists’ goals without immediately provoking their opponents’ ire.3
In context, the Preamble’s first seven words presented an ambiguity that ran through the Constitution. Morris and other nationalists, including Washington, could read it to say that the document emanated from the people of a vast new entity called the United States. Given the vagaries of capitalization at the time, however, Sherman, New Jersey’s William Paterson, Delaware’s Gunning Bedford, and other states’-rights-minded delegates could read it as saying that the document came from the people of various sovereign, federally united, states.4 From this opening ambiguity through its purposeful appeals to justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty, the Preamble encapsulated the framers’ hopes for the government that they had crafted during nearly four months of intense negotiations.
Added without debate during the Convention’s final days, Morris’s lyrical Preamble replaced a functional one composed by the Committee of Detail as part of its draft constitution and unanimously approved by the delegates on August 7. This earlier preamble simply listed all thirteen states and stated that the people of those states ordained the Constitution for themselves and their posterity. It neither mentioned the United States nor suggested any noble purposes.5 The inclusion of Rhode Island in the list was debatable. That small state had boycotted the Convention; the Constitution, upon ratification by the other states, would take effect without it. The delegates might as well have listed Vermont since its addition to the union was then at least as likely as the incorporation of Rhode Island.6 In this and other respects, the Committee of Detail’s entire constitution, while useful as a framework for debate, lacked an authoritative style and harmonious structure. A month of piecemeal amendments had further disordered it.
With virtually every issue settled by the second week of September, the Constitution desperately needed a “last polish,” as one delegate termed it.7 The task fell to a five-member committee charged with revising the document’s style and structure without altering its content. Morris penned the Preamble as one member of this so-called Committee of Style and Arrangement. He worked with the other members in reorganizing a hodgepodge of twenty-three articles into a melody of seven: one for each of the three branches and four dealing with such miscellaneous matters as requirements for states and statehood, constitutional supremacy, and the process for ratifying and amending the Constitution.8
Compared to state constitutions and the later constitutions of most nations, the committee’s draft was brief—essentially a backbone for a government rather than a detailed plan. It ran only four pages in the printed version distributed to the delegates for their closing deliberations. In its revisions, the Committee of Style followed the first rule of the Committee of Detail: “To insert essential principles only, lest the operations of government should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable, which ought to be accommodated to time and events.”9
Washington’s closest allies at the Convention dominated the Committee of Style. Not only was Morris its most active member and scribe, but Madison and Hamilton—the latter back from New York for the Convention’s close—served on it, too.10 Washington had collaborated with all three for years in trying to forge a more perfect union. A fourth big-state nationalist, Rufus King, and the most nationalistic of the Connecticut compromisers, William Samuel Johnson, rounded out the committee.
While the committee’s ideological imbalance remains puzzling, it exemplified the revival of nationalists’ fortunes within the Convention.11 After their initial success in getting the delegates to use the nationalistic Virginia Plan as the starting point for deliberations, Madison, Morris, Hamilton, King, and the other big-state nationalists suffered a series of setbacks in the composition of the Senate and the nature of the executive. By late June, even the Virginia Plan’s reference to a “national government” was dropped from the evolving constitution.12
The Committee of Style’s limited charge restricted its ability to give a robust nationalistic tilt to the document, but at least its members would not permit further erosion on this score and, in the case of the Preamble, put a nationalistic gloss on the Constitution’s most widely read section. As such, the committee extended the nationalists’ resurgence that began in late July when the Committee of Detail included the sweeping Necessary and Proper Clause amon
g Congress’s enumerated powers and stretched into early September with the decisions to free the executive from election by Congress and shift substantial power from the state-controlled Senate to this nationally elected President. Then the Convention added language specifying that Congress could tax (and presumably spend) for the “general welfare”—a phrase that had appeared in the old Articles of Confederation, but not in reference to taxation.13 With its expansive Preamble, the Committee of Style reiterated the authority for the new government to “promote the general welfare” and replaced the people of the thirteen states with the people of the United States as the source of governmental authority.14 Washington seemed pleased. From July to September, he went from expressing “despair” over the Convention to depicting its product as “the best that could be obtained.”15
The committee had two other chances to advance nationalism at the Convention and, with Washington’s aid, made the most of both. Writing for the committee, Morris penned a cover letter from Washington for transmitting the Constitution to Congress. “The friends of our country have long seen and desired, that the power of making war, peace, and treaties, that of levying money and regulating commerce, and the corresponding executive and judiciary authorities should be fully and effectually vested in the general government,” the letter stated. “It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these States, to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interests and safety of all.” These factors, the letter claimed, justified “the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence.”16 This letter, approved in Convention and signed by Washington, effectively opened the public campaign for ratification.
The Style Committee also proposed two resolutions for the Convention to submit to Congress. The first requested that Congress forward the Constitution to the states for ratification. The second asked that, if the states ratified the document, Congress set a time for choosing presidential electors and a date for the new government to assume power. Washington’s signature on the transmittal letter and accompanying resolutions ensured they would command attention. Indeed, they made it look as if the Constitution came from him.
ONCE THE DELEGATES RECEIVED the Committee of Style’s report on September 12, the Convention raced toward closure. For three more days, the members wrangled over details in the committee’s draft, changing a word here or a phrase there but rejecting all major amendments, including the motion by Gerry and Mason to add a bill of rights, which—remarkably in retrospect—failed to gain the support of even a single state.17 The key compromises on representation, slavery, national power, and the presidency in place, a majority of the members in every delegation seemed unwilling to consider anything potentially disruptive or time-consuming. No bill of rights was needed, Sherman argued and others apparently agreed, because the new government would hold only enumerated, not unlimited, powers. “The State Declarations of Rights are not repealed by this Constitution; and being in force are sufficient,” he said.18
It was not just the nationalists’ constitution anymore, though they got much of what they wanted. The small states had equal representation in a powerful senate, the slave states had guarantees for their peculiar institution, and the commercial states had assured access to national markets. There would be money to pay bondholders, maintain an army, and provide for the general welfare. Property rights were secured, domestic order imposed, and state-issued paper money curtailed. Reflecting the broad consensus, particularly the compromise on representation, supporters of the Constitution began calling themselves federalists rather than nationalists. Opponents, who typically favored a system like the old confederation but with enhanced powers, ironically became known as antifederalists. While Washington hated partisan faction and saw himself rising above it, he inevitably became the living embodiment of federalism.
With a respectable result assured once the Committee of Style reported, Washington appeared to enjoy himself more than ever during the Convention’s final week. Determined not to waste his reputation and political capital on a failed venture, he had resisted going to Philadelphia until he had some hope that the Convention might succeed and, as recently as July, had regretted doing so when the effort appeared on the brink of failure. But composing a meaningful plan of national union and offering it to the states, Washington believed, was a sufficient accomplishment to justify his participation even if the states did not immediately ratify it. “Conduct like this,” he had written to Madison in March when announcing his willingness to attend the Convention, “will stamp wisdom and dignity on the proceedings and . . . sooner or later will shed its influence.”19
Clearly in a celebratory mood, Washington kept a full social schedule during the Convention’s closing days. On Wednesday the twelfth, with the Committee of Style’s Constitution complete, he dined with Franklin one last time and had tea with the artist Robert Edge Pine, who had painted the General’s portrait two years earlier and now wanted to touch up that work. On Thursday, Washington joined a dinner party at the home of Pennsylvania vice president Charles Biddle, whose son Nicholas would later lead the nationalist Bank of the United States, and then went to tea at Elizabeth and Samuel Powel’s mansion. On Friday, delegates accompanied Washington to a raucous dinner party given in his honor at City Tavern by Philadelphia’s elite light-horse cavalry. The revelers consumed considerable quantities of Madeira, claret, porter, beer, rum punch, and other alcoholic beverages, and ultimately received a substantial bill for breakage from the management.20 From there, presumably along with Pennsylvania delegate George Clymer, Washington went to an after-party at the home of Clymer’s brother-in-law, Samuel Meredith, a wealthy merchant who later served as treasurer of the United States in the first two federal administrations.
With the Convention’s end in sight, the delegates remained in session later on Saturday than on any other day: until 6 P.M. By then they had completed voting on the Constitution. The tally by states was unanimous, though some individual members dissented. In fact, two of Virginia’s five remaining delegates—Mason and Randolph—renounced the document for giving too much power to Congress, imposing too few constraints on the President, and falling to include a bill of rights. Mason had already dramatically vowed that he “would sooner chop off his right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now stands.”21 As the arguments swirled around him on this final day of debate, Mason expanded his stated objections into a written list that would circulate widely.
By their positions, Mason and Randolph forced Washington to cast the deciding vote in his own state’s delegation. Without him, unanimity would have been lost. Of course, Rhode Island never joined the Convention and New York lost a quorum when its two anti-nationalist members, Lansing and Yates, departed on July 10, so the final vote was eleven states to none. Still, the Constitution’s proponents made the most of the unanimous vote by the remaining states. It propelled their drive for ratification.22 After the vote, the delegates recessed until Monday, when they would return to sign a parchment copy of the engrossed document. His role at the Convention nearly over, Washington retired to his rooms at Robert Morris’s home for a late supper. He spent the next day, Sunday, catching up on personal correspondence and dining at the Morrises’ country estate, The Hills.
AS THE TWO LARGER-THAN-LIFE LEADERS whose support made the Convention and Constitution credible, Washington and Franklin were to take center stage on Monday for the signing. They do so in the monumental painting of the event by Howard Chandler Christy that, in the depths of the Great Depression, a later Congress commissioned for the United States Capitol. The shutters are symbolically open and drapes pulled to reveal a bright new day that backlights the figures in an almost holy aura; Franklin sits facing the viewer at center surrounded by the other signers. Washington stands alone in near profile to the viewer’s right, towering over all others as he surveys the scene from an overly elevated dais.
Christ
y invented the arrangement of characters and tinkered with the cast, but his painting’s spirit rings true. Washington oversaw the signing much as he had the Convention by supervising events from his elevated chair. Franklin was given the day’s lead speaking role, though frailty forced him to hand over his remarks to Wilson for reading. While his speech soon found its way into the press—as did the Constitution, final resolutions, and transmittal letter signed by Washington—the public remained barred from the Assembly Room, its shutters and drapes stayed closed, and other records were kept secret. Indeed, to maintain secrecy at least through ratification, on this final day the Convention directed Washington to hold its journals and records until instructed otherwise by a Congress formed under the new Constitution. King openly worried that “if suffered to be made public, a bad use would be made of them by those who would wish to prevent the adoption of the Constitution.”23
At the final session, Washington called on Franklin first. Suspicious of aristocracy, Franklin’s state constitution for Pennsylvania had a hyperrepresentative assembly, no senate, and weak executive—all features he had championed without success at the Convention.24 Still, he was ready to close ranks behind the Constitution and used his speech to entreat others to follow suit. “I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they be such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years,” he explained with a verbal nod toward Washington as the presumed first President. The alternative, Franklin said, was disunion, with the states “only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.” Observing that “much of the strength & efficiency of any Government in procuring and securing the happiness to the people depends on the general opinion of the goodness of the Government,” he urged the delegates to “act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution.” To gain that end, he moved that by signing, members attest to “the unanimous consent of the States present,” rather than to their personal support for the document.25