TWO MORE STATES HELD ratifying conventions in January: Connecticut and Massachusetts. Washington would play only a minor role in the former, but when Massachusetts became the first real test for the Constitution’s ratification, he showed his hand openly.
With its convention beginning on January 3, Connecticut came first. For months, his trusted confidant in the state, David Humphreys, had assured Washington that Connecticut would swiftly ratify. “All the different Classes in the liberal professions will be in favor of the proposed Constitution,” Humphreys advised Washington. “The Clergy, Lawyers, Physicians & Merchants will have considerable influence on Society.” Boasting of having “no inconsiderable agency” over several local newspapers, Humphreys added that the press would toe the line.7 It did. During the fall, Connecticut newspapers repeatedly reminded readers of Washington’s support for the Constitution while publishing a steady stream of federalist appeals and virtually nothing from the other side. In December, five of the state’s papers featured a long essay written by Constitutional Convention delegate Oliver Ellsworth, under the pseudonym “A Landholder,” that not only noted Washington’s support for ratification but blamed the opposition of Richard Henry Lee on “his implacable hatred to General Washington.”8 Two of these papers also published Ellsworth’s later charge, “Had the General not attended the Convention nor given his sentiments respecting the Constitution, the Lee party would undoubtedly have supported it, and Colonel Mason would have vented his rage to his own Negroes and the wind.”9 By month’s end, Madison assured Washington that Connecticut “is pretty certain.”10
Events played out as predicted in Connecticut. On January 9, six days after the state convened, Washington’s former aide-de-camp Jonathan Trumbull Jr. wrote to the General from Hartford, “With great satisfaction I have the Honor to inform—that last Evening the Convention of this State, by a great majority, Voted to ratify & adopt the new proposed Constitution for the United States—Yeas 127—Nays 40.” He added that, “in the list of Affirmants in this State, stand the names of all our principal Characters.” As son of Connecticut’s longest-serving governor and a future twelve-term governor himself, Trumbull knew these characters well.11
In his letter to Washington, Trumbull expressed his “hope” that the resounding vote in Connecticut would “have a happy influence on the Minds of our Brethren in Massachusetts.”12 He neglected to add that most of the dissent in his state came from delegates representing towns along the border with western Massachusetts, where Shays’s Rebellion had centered. Towns across that border had already elected some former Shaysites to Massachusetts’s convention, which began on January 9.
In his reply to Trumbull, Washington expressed a similar “wish” that Massachusetts would follow Connecticut, but sounded less optimistic. “The decision, it is even said, is problematical.” He predicted that “the result of the deliberations in that state will have considerable influence on those which are to follow—especially in that of New York where I fancy the opposition to the form will be greatest.”13 Knowing the importance of ratification by Massachusetts, Washington was willing to lay his reputation on the line and step up his involvement.
OF COURSE, WASHINGTON ALREADY had been deeply involved in the ratification effort since returning home in September. He had personally endorsed the Constitution to public officials and influential people in Virginia and elsewhere. He had urged supporters with “literary abilities” to take up their pens on behalf of ratification, and then helped to distribute and republish their best efforts, including Wilson’s defense of the Constitution and the Federalist essays written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay under the pseudonym Publius.14 He had never objected when federalists publicly invoked his name and had dispatched scores of letters of his own in support of ratification. “No subject is more interesting,” Washington had remarked to Madison in early November.15
Indeed, although he stayed near home during the ratification process, Washington never took his attention off the unfolding state-by-state contest for the Constitution. “Nothing either interesting or entertaining in these quarters to communicate,” he wrote of his life at Mount Vernon in one mid-January letter, “our faces being turned to the Eastward for news.”16 News from Massachusetts, he meant, where the Constitution hung in the balance.
To win in Massachusetts, Madison advised Washington in late December, more might be required of him. “I have good reason to believe that if you are in correspondence with any gentleman of that quarter, and a proper occasion offered for an explicit communication of your good wishes for the plan,” Madison wrote, “that it would be attended with valuable effects.” Then, as if he had crossed a boundary, Madison added, “I barely drop the idea. The circumstances on which the propriety of it depends, are best known to, as they will be best judged, by yourself.”17
The boundaries here of Cincinnatus-type public service were hazy. Like many other Virginia lawmakers, Washington had openly campaigned for his seat in the House of Burgesses prior to the Revolutionary War, including throwing parties and providing food and drink for prospective voters. And in recent months he had urged Madison and other federalists to campaign actively for the Constitution. Yet he made a point of staying home during the entire ten-month ratification process and wanted desperately to appear above the fray. In letter after letter, he told correspondents that he had not traveled more than six or ten miles—the number kept changing—from Mount Vernon since his return from Philadelphia, which allowed him to reach Alexandria, but no farther.18 He vowed that he would not lobby for ratification yet called on others to do so.19
This reticence arose less from objections to peddling the Constitution than from a desire to remain above reproach. Everyone so fully assumed that Washington would become President that his efforts on behalf of ratification might appear self-serving. Further, the Cincinnatus ideal demanded that he not seek power and taking sides now might limit his ability to serve as a unifying leader later. Thus, as he wrote to his wartime aide James McHenry about his life since the Convention, “I never go from home except when I am obliged by necessary avocations, and . . . meddle as little as possible with politics that my interference may not give occasion for impertinent imputations” of self-interest.20
In a mid-1788 letter that spoke of him becoming a target for “shafts of malice” from antifederalists who had “stigmatized the authors of the Constitution as Conspirators and Traitors,” Washington repeated his oft-stated denial of interest in the presidency. “At my age, and in my circumstances, what sinister object, or personal emolument had I to seek after, in this life?” he asked about his part in forging a new government. For himself, Washington wrote, he only wished to live his remaining years as a private citizen at Mount Vernon.21
Responding to Madison’s request for sending a letter of support to Massachusetts, Washington at first demurred. “I have no regular corrispondt in Massachusetts,” he wrote to Madison in early January; “otherwise, as the occasional subject of a letter I should have had no objection to the communication of my sentiments on the proposed Government as they are unequivocal & decided.”22 Then Washington received a personal note from one of his former senior officers, Benjamin Lincoln, who recently had been elected to the Massachusetts ratifying convention. Seizing the opportunity, Washington promptly replied to Lincoln with a long letter endorsing the Constitution, stressing the importance of ratification by Massachusetts, and offering advice about how Bay State federalists should comport themselves.
Developments in Pennsylvania colored Washington’s advice. Early in the new year, reports began circulating in newspapers that a mob of unreconstructed antifederalists had disrupted a federalist victory rally in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and burned federalist leader James Wilson in effigy.23 Soon it became apparent that this riot was not an isolated event. The problems went back to the previous year, when Pennsylvania federalists used high-handed means to force an early state convention and then rammed the Constitution through that body without li
stening to the opposition or letting it offer amendments. Dissenters then published their amendments, collected petitions signed by thousands asking the state assembly to rescind ratification, and worked with antifederalists in neighboring New York and Virginia to defeat the Constitution. Word of these developments reached Washington early in the new year and convinced him that victory alone was not enough. He would have to rule these people, and he knew from the Revolutionary Era that a disaffected minority could fatally disrupt public order. When the local militia from nearby counties freed the imprisoned rioters in Carlisle and prevented their prosecution, the lesson should have become clear to all, yet some federalists wanted the rioters punished as an example.
Washington knew better. For the new government to function, he reasoned, antifederalists would need to accept the ratification process as fundamentally fair. After having initially hailed the results in Pennsylvania despite the strong-arm tactics, Washington now changed his emphasis. In his letter to Lincoln, Washington struck a note of conciliation. “The business of the Convention should be conducted with moderation, candor & fairness (which are not incompatible with firmness),” he wrote to Lincoln, “for altho’ as you justly observe, the friends of the New system may bear down the opposition, yet they would never be able, by precipitate or violent measures, to sooth and reconcile their minds to the exercise of the Government.” This reconciliation, Washington stressed, “is a matter that ought as much as possible to be kept in view.”24 Winning at all costs would not serve the public interest, he concluded. Whatever he thought of antifederalists, and various private letters betrayed his antipathy toward them, Washington knew better than to show it. He wanted to form an American nation by uniting its people, not dividing them.
ALTHOUGH WASHINGTON’S LETTER to Lincoln arrived too late to influence the convention in Massachusetts, confirmation of his position reached the members from another source. Washington often wrote private letters to influential friends, particularly in Virginia, discussing ratification along with other matters. Most of these messages remained strictly confidential. Key parts of one such letter to Virginia planter and former legislator Charles Carter, which endorsed the Constitution after a long discourse on crops, was published in a Virginia newspaper on December 27 and quickly spread. Within days, the extract surfaced in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and during the state’s convention appeared in nine Massachusetts papers, beginning with the Centinel on January 23. “There is no alternative between the adoption of it and anarchy,” Washington wrote of the Constitution, “and clear I am, if another federal Convention is attempted, that the sentiments of its members will be more discordant or less accommodating than the last. In fine, that they will agree upon no general plan.”25
Federalists were hungry to hear such words from their icon. By March, some fifty papers published the letter. “I am fully persuaded it is the best that can be obtained at this time,” the extract went on to say about the Constitution, “that it is free from many of the imperfections with which it is charged, and that it or disunion is before us to choose from.”26 In one sentence, Washington encapsulated the federalists’ position.
Washington was furious about the disclosure. Although the letter accurately expressed his beliefs, he had never meant to speak so bluntly in public. He demanded an explanation from Carter, who apologized profusely, but neither man denied the extract’s authenticity even though the published version was an inexact transcript of the original. Washington actually pointed to it, in his letter to Lincoln, as an expression of his “sentiments upon the Constitution.”27
Having wasted a vast inheritance, Carter was down on his luck by this time and soon sold his plantation. Within a year, he was taking in boarders at a house in Fredericksburg and living off the income from the day labor of slaves who he had already sold. Washington could hardly hold him to account and quickly let the matter slide. Appearing as it did in Massachusetts during the state’s ratifying convention, publication of the extract touched off a flurry of exchanges in the Boston press between opponents denouncing its arrogance and supporters hailing its insight.28 Indeed, its rapid, widespread distribution gave federalists everywhere testimony directly from that “Great and Good Man”—as writers at the time often called Washington—on the imperative of ratification.29
THE MASSACHUSETTS CONVENTION played out as a pivotal act within the larger drama of federal ratification, complete with plot twists, intrigue, and a cliffhanger ending. From Mount Vernon, Washington followed the story closely in newspapers and private letters. At first, the prospects in Massachusetts looked rosy, with Washington receiving ever more upbeat reports over the course of the fall, especially after the federalist-minded majority in Cambridge, Massachusetts, excluded Gerry from its local delegation, which left the state’s leading antifederalist without a seat at the 354-member convention.30 The election of the other three Massachusetts delegates to the Constitutional Convention—Nathaniel Gorham, Rufus King, and Caleb Strong—to the state convention gave federalists an edge in expertise. Gerry was invited to attend as a resource strictly to answer questions about the federal convention, but that role proved so limiting to him that he soon stalked out of the chamber and never returned.
As the election returns from western Massachusetts and Maine came in during December, however, it became apparent the legacy of Shays’s Rebellion was energizing the opposition: neither side would hold a clear majority in the assembly.31 “Many of the insurgents are in Convention, even some of Shay’s Officers,” Lincoln warned Washington.32 In a letter that reached Washington through Madison, Gorham put the number at “18 or 20 who were actually in Shay’s army.”33 An article in the Massachusetts Gazette went so far as to observe, “the Federalists should be distinguished hereafter by the name of WASHINGTONIANS, and the Antifederalists, by the name of SHAYITES.”34 The sides were closely matched. With a foot in each camp and influence commensurate with his legendary ego, Governor Hancock—who would serve as the convention’s president—might decide the outcome. That gave federalists both pause and hope.
When the convention opened on January 9, Hancock was bedridden with gout and antifederalists likely held a slender majority. Federalists opted to stall by agreeing to discuss the Constitution clause by clause before voting. With more practiced speakers on their side and ready answers to every charge, they hoped to win over some members and play for time.
They got the delay they wanted. The discussion of Article I alone consumed two weeks as members wrangled over the authority of Congress, particularly its expansive taxing power. “In giving this power we give up everything,” one antifederalist thundered. It is “as much power as was ever given to a despotic prince,” another added. Federalists replied that since Congress would represent the people, any authority it held would serve the public. “Under the old Confederation, the delegates were our servants; now they are our masters,” shot back a member who once led a militia that supported Shays’s Rebellion; “they have all our money, a standing army, a Federal town.”35 Shaysites had objected to the concentration of power in the eastern, moneyed elite under the state’s 1780 constitution and feared a similar result under the new federal one. Many demanded amendments prior to ratification. They would not be persuaded by words, but the federalists still hoped to gain a few wavering moderates with promises. By the last week of January, everyone knew the vote would be close.
Washington waited at Mount Vernon for news, which he received in letters dispatched almost daily. “No question ever clasped the people of this State in a more extraordinary manner, or with more apparent firmness,” King wrote in a January 16 note that reached Washington through Madison. “But what will be [the Constitution’s] fate, I confess I am unable to discern.”36 By the twenty-seventh, Lincoln wrote to Washington to say he now had “higher expectations” the Constitution would pass, but he added that “it is yet impossible to determine absolutely its fate.”37
These higher expectations arose from a secret deal with Hancock, who, in
exchange for support from federalists in the next governor’s race, would rise from his sickbed, endorse ratification, and propose amendments to the Constitution. The amendments would not be added “as a condition of our assent & ratification,” a subsequent letter from King explained, “but as the Opinion of the Convention subjoined to their ratification.” In short, the delegates would simply recommend that the First Congress consider them. “This scheme may gain a few members,” King added.38 Federalists initially attached little importance to these “recommendatory” amendments, as Washington termed them, beyond their role in winning votes from moderates for the Constitution.39 Letters to and from Washington referred to them only in the most dismissive terms (with Washington lamenting their adoption and Madison calling them a “blemish” on ratification) and never identified their content, much less analyzed their substance.40 At the time, both viewed them as a mere sop to the opposition. Taken together, however, they offered the outlines for a bill of rights. Massachusetts’s antifederalists—not its federalists—and Hancock’s secret deal deserve credit for advancing this idea.
According to their later boasts, federalists also flattered Hancock, suggesting he would likely become Vice President under the new regime and, should Virginia not ratify, perhaps President. “If Mr Hancock does not disappoint our present expectations,” King wrote on January 30 in another letter that reached Washington through Madison, “our wishes will be gratified.”41 He didn’t, and they were. Hancock played his part to perfection by making a grand entrance at the convention swaddled in sick-clothes and borne on a daybed just in time to carry the Constitution with his compromise proposal for recommendatory amendments. Wealthy beyond the dreams of most Americans of his day, Hancock always had a flair for the dramatic.42
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