The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  By this point, Washington had many reasons to be pleased. In her prize-winning history of the ratification, Pauline Maier observed that, due to the influx of newspapers, letters, and visitors, “Mount Vernon became a fine vantage point for watching the drama unfold.”65 During the first month after Washington’s return, virtually every report reaching Mount Vernon boded well for ratification. Most American newspapers published both the Constitution and Washington’s transmittal letter without comment, which gave an appearance of approval. “From what I hear,” Humphreys reported to Washington in late September on ratification, “opposition will be less than was apprehended.”66 By early October, Knox fairly gushed to Washington about the Constitution. “The people of Boston are in raptures with it,” he wrote. “The people of Jersey and Connecticut . . . embrace it with ardor.”67 Departing from his customary cynicism about the voice of the people, Hamilton soon sent word from New York, “The New Constitution is as popular in this City as is possible for any thing to be—and the prospect thus far is favourable to it throughout the state.”68 Also in mid-October, Madison advised Washington from Congress, “The Reports continue to be rather favorable . . . from every quarter.”69 When General Pinckney visited Mount Vernon in October on his way home from the Convention, he likely vouched for South Carolina as only a Pinckney could.70

  From his Mount Vernon retreat, Washington often replied to correspondents with stories about responses to the Constitution in his part of Virginia. “In Alexandria,” he informed Hamilton, “and some of the adjacent Counties, it has been embraced with an enthusiastic warmth of which I had no conception.”71 He seemed especially pleased when voters in his county instructed their legislators to support calling a ratifying convention.72 One of those legislators, Washington all but chuckled in a note to Madison, was Mason. And Randolph, Washington wrote, now “wishes he had been among the subscribing members” at the Convention.

  In the afterglow of the Convention, Washington allowed himself to hope that even Patrick Henry might support ratification and depicted Richard Henry Lee and Mason as isolated. “It may be asked which of them gives the tone?” Washington commented on Lee and Mason. “Without hesitation I say the latter; because the latter, I believe, will receive it from no one. He has, I am informed, rendered himself obnoxious in Philadelphia by the pains he took to disseminate his objections . . . [and] his conduct is not less reprobated in this County.”73 Letters to Washington from both men explaining their dissent did little to appease him.74 Their opposition seemed to steel his resolve, which only increased after Henry told him that he, too, opposed ratification. By this point, Washington identified with the Constitution and tended to take criticism of it personally.

  These letters of dissent from three fellow Virginians had common threads. Unlike Yates, Lansing, and Maryland’s Luther Martin, who had stormed out of the Convention implacably opposed to the emerging new union, Mason and Lee recognized the need for an enhanced general government and claimed to favor much in the new Constitution. Henry was less conciliatory but offered to keep an open mind.75 Each letter had a cordial, respectful tone. Yet all three of these Revolutionary Era leaders concluded that the Constitution contained fundamental flaws that should be addressed prior to ratification.

  Henry, Lee, and Mason wanted a bill of rights to protect individual liberties from the new government and adjustments to the balance of power both among its branches and between it and the states. Mason harped on the refusal of federalists to consider his amendments during the final days of the Convention, and Lee picked up this lament after Congress acted in a similar fashion. “It was with us, as with you, this or nothing,” Lee complained to Mason following Congress’s action. “In this state of things the Patriot voice is raised in vain for such changes and securities as Reason and Experience prove to be necessary against the encroachments of power upon the indispensable rights of human nature.”76

  Further, these dissenters feared, federalists would bar amendments to the Constitution at state ratifying conventions, too. “It was improper to say to the people, take this or nothing,” Mason implored fellow delegates at the Convention.77 In Congress, Lee compared it to “presenting a hungry man 50 dishes and insisting he should eat all or none.” Forewarned by Mason, Lee asked the Convention delegates in Congress, “Is it the Idea of the Convention that not only Congress but the States must agree in the whole, or else to reject it—and . . . [that] amendments are precluded?”78 They never gave him a clear answer. Madison, King, and Johnson said that Congress could not amend the Convention’s constitution because that would create two plans for the states: the original and the revised. They left the issue of state-by-state amendments hanging.

  By circulating their objections and proposed revisions, Mason, Lee, and Henry hoped to encourage a coordinated response by the states. Gerry joined them in this mission, as did a fractious mix of big-government skeptics and states’ rights advocates. To stop the federalist juggernaut, they needed to prevail in five of the thirteen states or, for all practical purposes, any two of the big four: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, or Washington’s Virginia. Like it or not, the clash would draw in Washington.

  THE KEYSTONE STATE of Pennsylvania came first. Meeting upstairs in the State House while the Convention occupied the first-floor Assembly Room, the state’s legislature had less than two weeks left in its annual session when the delegates signed the Constitution on September 17. On that same day, with the ink hardly dry on the Constitution downstairs, Pennsylvania’s eight delegates to the Convention delivered a joint letter to their Assembly stating that they “were ready to report” on the proposed new federal government.79 One of those delegates who also served in the Assembly, Thomas Fitzsimons, suggested making that full report on the next morning, which was before the new constitution would even reach Congress in New York. The Assembly agreed and the race to ratify began.

  Sitting in seats that Convention delegates had occupied a day earlier, members of the Pennsylvania Assembly, with the room’s shutters now open and a large audience in the gallery, heard the Constitution and Washington’s transmittal letter read publicly for the first time. As senior delegate and president of the state, Franklin delivered a copy of the Constitution to the Assembly and proposed that Pennsylvania donate a ten-mile-square tract of land as a seat for the new federal government. Another Convention delegate, Thomas Mifflin, who served as the Assembly’s Speaker, then read the Constitution aloud as members followed along on printed copies. Philadelphia’s federalist-leaning newspapers hailed the event as historic.

  Carefully orchestrated petitions from voters soon began flooding the Assembly requesting that it quickly call a ratifying convention. On September 28, with one day left in the session, Convention delegate and Assembly member George Clymer moved separate resolutions for the election of deputies to a state ratifying convention and the subsequent convening of that body. Unless the resolutions passed by the next day, however, the calling of the convention would have to wait until the Assembly’s next session, when a new group of members would meet following the October state elections. The current Assembly favored ratification; the new one might not.

  State constitutional issues already split Pennsylvania politics into two distinct parties. One party, rooted in rural central and western Pennsylvania, supported the existing state constitution, which centered power in a locally representative one-house legislature. Another party, tied to Philadelphia’s commercial interests, sought a new, balanced government with a two-house legislature and independent executive. The reformers held a majority in the Assembly and stacked the state’s federal Convention delegation with its partisans.80 Franklin had a foot in each camp but the other Convention delegates despised the old state constitution as much as they wanted a new federal one. Their thinking on state constitutional issues informed their essential contributions to the federal Convention. In contrast, backers of the old state constitution, excluded from the Convention, brought skeptical eyes to the proposed f
ederal government, with its two-house legislature, strong executive, and elite senate. The lack of a bill of rights heightened their concerns. Mason’s written objections found a ready audience in members of this group and circulated widely among them.

  Clymer’s last-minute resolutions caught minority members by surprise, or so they said.81 They had some inkling of what was brewing at the Convention during the summer and, following its adjournment on September 17, over a week to digest the new federal Constitution. They maintained, however, that states could not call ratifying conventions until Congress authorized them. This would push the matter over to the next session. After all, they argued, Congress might amend the Constitution. Rather than comment on the document, these skeptics initially raised procedural concerns and asked for time so that voters in remote districts could hear about the proposal first. No petitions had come from their constituents. Every Assembly member representing the western counties where Washington owned land opposed Clymer’s motions.

  Undeterred, federalists pushed for an immediate vote on calling a ratifying convention and offered to defer the vote on when and where to hold it only until after a midday break. The people wanted a new federal constitution, Daniel Clymer argued in support of his cousin’s resolutions, and Congress had no say in the matter. The Convention simply referred the Constitution to Congress as a means to convey it to the states, he claimed. Even the states could not amend it. “They must adopt it in toto or refuse altogether,” Clymer said, “for it must be a plan that is formed by the United States, which can be agreeable to all, and not one formed upon the narrow policy and convenience of any one particular state.” Then he invoked Washington and the other framers—“the collective wisdom of a continent,” he called them—as the authority for the document: “a venerable band of patriots, worthies, heroes, legislators and philosophers—the admiration of a world.”82 The deification of the Convention had begun, but strictly for partisan purposes.

  With members already split into factions over state issues, Clymer’s first resolution passed on a near party-line vote. Without hope of defeating the second resolution, its opponents sought to delay it by boycotting the afternoon session. This deprived the Assembly of a quorum. The sergeant at arms attempted to retrieve the seceding members. When these so-called seceders refused to return, the Assembly recessed until the next morning. With nineteen members still absent on September 28 and the session scheduled to end that day, the sergeant at arms forcibly brought in two seceders—enough to make a quorum—and held them until the second resolution passed. Under its terms, Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention would convene in federalist-friendly Philadelphia on November 20. The means used to call it, however, unleashed the first round of pamphlets and articles opposing ratification. Indeed, to explain their actions, the seceders themselves promptly published a broadside critical of the Constitution. Raising many of the same concerns as Mason, it asked voters if the proposed “continental government” would be “likely to lessen your burthens or increase your taxes or . . . be competent to attend to your local concerns?”83

  Despite the rising opposition, Washington welcomed events in Pennsylvania. He read about them mainly through the filter of federalist newspapers, most likely the daily Pennsylvania Packet and weekly Pennsylvania Gazette, which he received at Mount Vernon. Initially blaming outsiders for arousing the dissent, Washington complained that Mason in particular took “pains . . . to disseminate his objections among some of the leaders of the seceding members of the legislature.”84 While in Philadelphia, Washington associated almost exclusively with leaders of the reform party—Wilson, Fitzsimons, George Clymer, Robert Morris, and the like—and saw the dispute through their eyes. The seceders, in contrast, surely reminded Washington of those unruly tenants and squatters on his lands in Pennsylvania, who he kept at a distance.

  The always aristocratic and often overly dramatic Gouverneur Morris sharpened Washington’s view of the situation. “With Respect to this State,” he wrote to Washington on October 30 about the prospects for ratification in Pennsylvania, “I dread the cold and sour Temper of the back Counties, and still more the wicked Industry of those who have long habituated themselves to live on the Public, and cannot bear the Idea of being removed from the Power and Profit of State Government.”85 Morris was speaking of the plebeian party, of course, but a similar depiction of profiting from the public trough applied to his patrician partisans as well. Such was Pennsylvania.

  As he grew to identify more completely with the Constitution, Washington increasingly shared Gouverneur Morris’s outlook regarding the opposition in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. He soon wrote from Mount Vernon to his nephew about those resisting ratification, “Their objections are better calculated to alarm the fears, than to convince the judgment of readers. They build them upon principles which do not exist in the Constitution—which the known & literal sense of it, does not support them in; and this too, after being flatly told that they are treading on untenable ground.”86 Of course, for months, Washington, Hamilton, and other federalists had warned of anarchy and disunion should the Convention falter or the Constitution fail. Both sides appealed to emotion as much as reason to advance their cause.

  As opposition to the Constitution emerged, Washington enlisted supporters to defend it. “Much will depend,” he wrote to Humphreys in mid-October, “on literary abilities, & the recommendation of it by good pens.”87 An early October speech by Wilson refuting the seceders’ claims so delighted Washington that he distributed copies of it to others. Wilson’s speech, he wrote to a trusted federalist confidant, David Stuart, “will place the most of Colo. Mason’s objection in their true point of light.” He urged Stuart to republish it widely “if you can get it done.”88 While never putting his own pen to this public use, Washington encouraged others to publish essays on behalf of ratification and privately endorsed their best efforts.

  THE RUN-UP TO THE Pennsylvania ratifying convention in late November spawned the first sustained public airing of federalist and antifederalist arguments. This debate intensified when Delaware and New Jersey set their ratifying conventions for early December. Since all three states largely revolved around Philadelphia, the debate centered in its newspapers. Most of these papers favored ratification but two leaned against it and one, the Independent Gazetteer, printed contributions from both sides. Newspapers at the time rarely spoke with an objective voice: they mainly contained public notices, paid advertising, articles lifted from other papers, letters to the editor, and contributed essays. As the Pennsylvania convention neared, the letters and essays more and more consisted of pleas for or against ratification written under pseudonyms, such as “An American Citizen” and “A Plain Citizen” for federalists or “Centinel” and “An Old Whig” from antifederalists. Washington’s stance on the Constitution and prospective role as President figured conspicuously in the exchange.

  From start to finish, the federalist case for ratification in Pennsylvania relied on public trust in Washington and, to a lesser extent, Franklin.89 In a widely reprinted essay from the Independent Gazetteer, “Centinel” attempted to counter this argument by portraying these framers as the unwitting tools of special interests. “I would be very far from insinuating that the two illustrious personages alluded to, have not the welfare of their country at heart,” he wrote, “but that the unsuspecting goodness and zeal of the one, has been imposed on; . . . and that the weakness and indecision attendant on old age, has been practiced on in the other.”90 Writing in the Independent Gazetteer, another antifederalist questioned if “both or either of those distinguished patriots” even backed the Constitution. Since their signatures on the document only attested to the unanimity of the states in supporting it, he argued, “It is not unfair to suppose that both General Washington and Dr. Franklin were in the minority on several great questions.”91

  The federalist response came fast and furious. Within days of Centinel’s first blast, a letter to the Independent Gazetteer denounced the antife
deralists: “They do not reason, but abuse—General Washington, they (in effect) say, is a dupe, and Doctor Franklin, an old fool—vide the Centinel.”92 Many like it appeared.93 In his own defense, Centinel asked in a second essay, “Is it derogating from the character of the illustrious and highly revered WASHINGTON, to suppose him fallible on a subject that must be in a great measure novel to him?”94 This only elicited more attacks.95 “Not even the illustrious SAVIOUR OF HIS COUNTRY has been exempted from the most illiberal torrents of abuse, that envy or malice, could suggest,” roared “A Plain Citizen” in reply.96 Try as he might to stay out of it, Washington could not escape a prominent part in Pennsylvania’s ratification debate.

  Writers on both sides of this partisan debate assumed that Washington would become the first President. For some, this represented reason enough to ratify the Constitution.97 Anticipating charges that the office was too monarchical, Tench Coxe, a Philadelphia entrepreneur friendly with Washington, took up its defense in the first installment of an early series of essays published under the name “An American Citizen.” Starting with Washington’s well-known argument that America needed a “national government” to preserve “liberty, property, and the union,” Coxe presented the presidency at its “head” as a fundamentally republican institution. Britain’s hereditary monarchs, he noted, appoint bishops and lords, hold legislative and judicial power, and rule for life. “In America our President will not only be without these influencing advantages,” Coxe wrote, “but . . . will always be one of the people at the end of four years.” He can be removed from office, cannot dissolve Congress, and is elected “by the people” through electors. Senators must approve his appointees and all treaties. “Our President will fall very far short indeed of any prince,” Coxe concluded, and “whatever dignity or authority he possesses is . . . transiently vested in him by the people themselves for their own happiness.”98