The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  “Our convention this day ratified the constitution 187 affirmative 168 negative,” King wrote to Washington on February 6. “The minority . . . publickly declare that the Discussion has been fair & candid, and that the majority having decided in favor of the constitution, they will devote their Lives & Fortunes to support the Government.”43 Washington welcomed this outcome. “Happy, I am, to see the favorable decision of your Convention,” he wrote back to King. “It must be productive of good effects in other states, whose determination may have been problematical. The candid, and open behaviour of the minority, is noble and commendable. It will have its weight.”44

  Given the closeness of the final vote, Washington’s endorsement likely played a critical role. The fact that the Constitution “comes authenticated” by Washington, one member had told the convention, “is a reason why we should examine it with care and caution, and that we ought not rashly and precipitately to reject it.”45 Just such careful examination led Massachusetts to become the crucial sixth state to ratify the Constitution, and the first one to do so over such a strong opposition.

  WASHINGTON PARTICULARLY WELCOMED the vote in Massachusetts because the next three states holding conventions—New Hampshire, Maryland, and South Carolina—looked reliably federal.46 Those three would bring the total to nine: the number needed for the new government to organize. Conventions in the key battleground states of Virginia and New York would then follow. “As nine states will have determined upon it,” Washington commented in February on ratification, “it is expected that its opponents in those [two] States will not have sufficient influence to prevent its adoption there when it is found to be the general voice of the Union.”47 And once they, too, ratified, Washington predicted, North Carolina and Rhode Island surely would fall in line. “The force of this argument is hardly to be resisted,” he added in early March. “Candor and prudence therefore, it is to be hoped, will prevail.”48 Simply put, Washington explained to Jay, “the favorable decision of the three which is likely to follow next, will . . . be too powerful, I conceive, for locallity and sophistry to combat.”49

  Maryland and South Carolina kept to the federalist script but New Hampshire surprised nearly everyone.50 John Langdon, New Hampshire’s former president and Constitutional Convention delegate, had assured Washington during the fall that New Hampshire would ratify. Reflecting this confidence, the state’s federalist president, John Sullivan, had arranged for a convention to meet during February in federalist-friendly southeastern New Hampshire.51 To Langdon and Sullivan, the stage seemed set for rapid ratification.

  They did not anticipate that many central and western New Hampshire towns would instruct their convention delegates to vote against the Constitution—and that no amount of persuasion could get them to defy those orders. “Just at the moment of choice for members,” Langdon explained in a letter to Washington, “a report was circulated by a few designing men who wished for confusion that . . . the liberties of the people were in danger, and that the great men (as they called them) were forming a plan for themselves together with a thousand other absurdities, which frightened the people almost out of what little senses they had.” This, Langdon wrote, led to the limiting instructions.52 Foreseeing certain defeat, federalists joined their sympathizers among the instructed members to adjourn the convention until June, by which time they hoped to get enough towns to lift their instructions for the Constitution to pass.

  The postponement distressed Washington. A flurry of letters about it came and went from Mount Vernon. “The proceedings in New Hampshire, so directly opposite to what we had reason to hope for, from every account, has entirely baffled all calculation on the subject and will strengthen the opposition here,” Washington wrote.53 Virginia antifederalists were hailing the adjournment as a victory, he reported, by claiming that New Hampshire would now wait until Virginia voted on the Constitution. “If this state should reject it,” they purportedly said, “all those which are to follow will do the same; & consequently, the Constitution cannot obtain, as there will be only eight States in favor.”54

  By giving Virginia antifederalists a reason for hope, Washington worried, this far-fetched scenario could influence elections to the state convention and the tenor of its proceedings. Virginia was back in play, he feared, even if New Hampshire ultimately voted to ratify as Langdon again assured him that it would.55 The conventions in Virginia, New Hampshire, and New York would now overlap in June, creating a bitter brew of possibilities. At least by then Maryland and South Carolina had approved the new union by wide majorities—but that, as antifederalists noted and Washington knew, still left the Constitution one critical state shy of ratification.

  Maryland presented one brief scare that, after the setback in New Hampshire, caused Washington again to break his vow of not politicking for the Constitution. Facing defeat, Maryland’s outnumbered antifederalists proposed postponing their state’s convention ostensibly to give members time to work with their Virginia counterparts on amendments. Responding to pleas from Virginia federalists, Washington wrote to two top Maryland federalists, James McHenry and Thomas Johnson, asking that their state not delay lest it further embolden the opposition in Virginia.56 “Postponement of the question would be tantamount to the final rejection of it,” Washington advised McHenry, and “would have the worst tendency imaginable,” he added to Johnson. In both letters, Washington alluded to his past reluctance to “meddle,” as he called it, in “this political dispute,” but he now confessed that, as “a man so thoroughly persuaded as I am of the evils and confusions which will result from the rejection of the proposed Constitution,” he should have done more all along.57

  “I have but one public wish remaining,” Washington wrote to Governor Johnson. “It is, that in peace and retirement, I may see this Country rescued from the danger which is pending, & rise into respectability.”58

  With wealthy federalist planter-lawyers like John Rutledge and the Pinckneys managing events in their state, Washington had less need to intervene in South Carolina than in Maryland, but in both, his name propelled ratification. During the run-up to their states’ conventions, federalist newspapers in Charleston and Baltimore trumpeted his role in drafting the Constitution and his support for ratification. One poem in the State Gazette of South Carolina, for example, after referring to the call by “Washington the great” for “an indissolvable union of the states under one federal head,” admonished readers:

  Will you not hear your father’s call,

  He loves his children one and all.59

  And Charleston’s Columbian Herald declared, “God grant that there may be wisdom and goodness enough still found among the majority to adopt, without hesitation, what a WASHINGTON, a FRANKLIN, a MADDISON, &c. so warmly recommended.”60 In Maryland, the merchants of Baltimore recognized Washington’s role in forging the new union by giving him the fifteen-foot miniature ship, Federalist, they had commissioned for the city’s ratification celebrations. Accepting the model as a “specimen of American ingenuity,” Washington moored it in the Potomac at Mount Vernon until a gale, which he called a “hurricane” and described as more “violent and severe . . . than has happened for many years,” sank it in July.61 By then, Virginia had taken center stage.

  THE STORM THAT SANK the Federalist simply added to Washington’s weather woes. The previous summer’s record drought had forced him to buy corn to feed his slaves and livestock. “I raised nothing last summer for sale,” he complained in January.62 Then the rains came in similarly biblical proportions. Entry after entry in Washington’s diary for spring 1788 spoke of all hands stopping work in the fields due to weather. “I am in a manner drowned,” Washington wrote by June. The torrents had beaten down his oats and flax. “What will become of my Corn is not easy, at this moment, to decide; I am working it ancle deep in Water & mud,” he lamented.63 The hurricane followed in July. Trees crashed down and crops were leveled. “The tide,” Washington noted, “rose near or quite 4 feet higher than it was e
ver known to do, driving Boats, &ca. into field where no tide had ever been heard of before.” Fences washed away, livestock wandered loose, and the millrace breached its banks.64 Yet in August, he wrote of agriculture being his “favorite amusement.”65 As much as he wished to deny it to others and perhaps himself, the steady stream of states ratifying the Constitution was unmooring him from his beloved Mount Vernon. Only Virginia now stood in the way, Washington believed, and he was doing everything in his power to secure its assent.

  Wartime experiences had made Washington an American—arguably the first American—but he always remained a Virginian, too. For him, Virginia stood at the nation’s heart.66 It was America’s largest, longest-settled, and most centrally located state as well as Washington’s home. He could not image a United States without it and had been more than ankle deep in the mire of Virginia ratification politics since returning from the Constitutional Convention in September 1787. Within days of his arrival home, Washington began reaching out to Virginia’s political elite, starting with a letter telling the states’-rights-minded former governor Benjamin Harrison that ratification “is in my opinion desirable.”67 Over the ensuing months, he regularly hosted Virginia federalists at Mount Vernon and continually corresponded with them about ratification.

  In November 1787, Madison began sending Washington copies of the Federalist essays from New York, with a request that he pass them on to his “confidential correspondents at Richmond who would have them reprinted there.”68 Washington forwarded them to his most trusted contact in the state capital, David Stuart, with the request that it not be “known that they are sent by me to you for promulgation.”69 Washington directly lobbied Randolph and Jefferson in letters designed to bring or keep them on board, leading to rumors that he promised them posts in the first presidential administration.

  “The plot thickens fast,” Washington wrote as Virginia’s ratifying convention neared.70 To deal with the threat posed by Henry’s spellbinding oratory, Washington all but ordered Madison to stand for election to the convention so that he could answer Henry point for point—a task that the mild-mannered Madison dreaded. When Madison’s election looked doubtful without campaigning, Washington told him to return from Congress to stump for votes—another unpleasant task.

  “The consciousness of having discharged that duty which we owe to our Country, is superior to all other considerations,” Washington wrote to Madison in words that may have reflected his current thinking on his own duty to accept the presidency.71 Washington, of course, maintained his public silence and declined nomination to the convention. To counter Henry, Mason, and their allies—most notably former congressmen William Grayson and James Monroe—federalists relied mainly on Madison, Madison’s friend George Nicholas, Virginia’s chief judge Edmund Pendleton, the rising young lawmaker John Marshall, and Henry Lee. Richard Henry Lee stayed away and Randolph moved toward the federalist camp.72 “There will . . . be powerful and eloquent speeches on both sides of the question in the Virginia Convention,” Washington predicted.73 “The Northern, or upper Counties are generally friendly to the adoption of the Government, the lower are said to be generally unfriendly.”74

  SOME 170 MEMBERS STRONG, Virginia’s ratifying convention opened on June 2 in Richmond, the first contested convention not held in a federalist-friendly coastal community. The state’s capital only since the war, Richmond retained a frontier feel. The gallery here would not cheer on the federalists: many in it had come to hear Henry once again contend for liberty. Taking the floor early and holding it often, he did not disappoint his followers during the four-week-long convention.

  After having tried to win him over early, Washington worried more about Henry’s opposition than about that of any other Virginian, to the point of fearing that the former governor might seek to lead the state into a separate southern confederacy with himself at the helm.75 While not a disciplined debater, Henry had a gift for stirring audiences with impassioned speeches that played more on emotion than reason, which was precisely how Washington depicted opposition arguments in Virginia generally.76 Henry employed this approach at the convention to transform what was supposed to be a clause-by-clause consideration of the Constitution into a free-for-all in which federalists scrambled to refute his scattered charges.

  Henry launched his assault on the first day of substantive debate. Representing the people as being “at perfect repose” and the country in “universal tranquility” prior to the Convention, Henry demanded to know why Virginia’s delegates—which of course included Washington—had proposed replacing the confederation of states with a consolidated national government. “Who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States?” he asked. “I would demand the cause of their conduct,” he said. “Even from that illustrious man who saved us by his valor, I would have a reason for his conduct—that liberty which he has given us by his valor, tells me to ask this reason.” That very liberty, Henry charged, was put at risk by the Constitution.

  “This proposal of altering our Federal Government is of a most alarming nature,” Henry declared, “for instead of securing your rights you may lose them forever.”77 He condemned the document wholly and suggested that Virginia could get along outside the union. Henry had Washington in his crosshairs.

  The challenge to Washington drew gasps from federalists and brought Randolph to his feet for a two-hour-long oration. To this point, Henry still saw Randolph as an ally and expected his support.78 Instead, the governor defended the Constitutional Convention and its delegates. “The gentleman,” he said of Henry, “inquires, why we assumed the language of ‘We, the people,’ I ask why not? The Government is for the people; and the misfortune was, that the people had no agency in the Government before.” With “the terror of impending anarchy” and no hope of saving the confederation, Randolph asked in defense of Washington, “Would it not have been treason to return without proposing some scheme to relieve their distressed country?” He had withheld his signature from the Constitution thinking that the states would insist on amendments prior to ratification, Randolph explained, but the actions of eight states now showed otherwise. “I will assent to the lopping of this limb,” he declared in a mocking allusion to George Mason’s earlier vow to cut off his hand rather than sign the Constitution, “before I assent to the dissolution of the Union.”79

  Eager to reply, Mason spoke next. Unlike Henry, Mason conceded that a new constitution was needed but, like Henry, argued that the proposed one went too far in consolidating power in a national government at the expense of individual liberty and states’ rights, particularly by granting it power to tax people directly. “This power is calculated to annihilate totally the State Government,” Mason claimed. He could not conceive of splitting sovereignty between the states and nation, as Madison argued that the Constitution would do, or that a remote central government would protect “the great essential rights of the people” without a bill of rights. “If such amendments be introduced as shall exclude danger, I shall most gladly put my hand to it,” he said of the Constitution. Virginia federalists were moving to accommodate this concern by following the Massachusetts model of recommending amendments for the First Congress to adopt.

  As he would throughout the convention, Madison promptly reported to Washington. “The Governor has declared the day of previous amendments past, and thrown himself fully into the federal scale,” Madison wrote in a same-day letter to Mount Vernon. “Henry & Mason made a lame figure & appeared to take different and awkward ground. The federalists are a good deal elated by the existing prospect.” Elated but cautious, Madison added, because the delegates from Virginia’s western district of Kentucky seemed uniformly hostile—and given the close divide, even that small contingent could prove decisive. “Every piece of address is going on privately to work on the local interests & prejudices of that & other quarters,” Madison assured Washington.80

  Between letters and newspaper reports, Washington received virtually
a blow-by-blow account of the convention. For two weeks, it did not proceed in a systematic fashion but instead followed Henry’s lead as he discharged random “bolts,” as Henry Lee called them, with federalists responding to each. It picked up speed after members began reviewing the document clause by clause and fairly raced through the final articles.81 “Henry’s confidence in the power and greatness of Virginia, which he said she might rest upon though dismembered from her sister States, was very well exposed,” one member explained to Washington in a June 7 letter. “Madison followed, and with such force of reasoning, and a display of such irresistible truths, that opposition seemed to have quitted the field.”82 Yet Madison wrote Washington a week later, “Our progress is slow and every advantage is taken of the delay, to work on the local prejudices of particular setts of members.”83 Antifederalists repeatedly reminded Kentucky members that northern states had been willing to bargain away American rights to the Mississippi, for example, while federalists countered that a strong union could better protect those rights than a weak one. “Much appears to depend upon the final part which the Kentucke members will take,” Washington concluded, particularly “respecting the navigation of the Mississippi.”84

  As the vote neared, Madison advised Washington, “We calculate on a majority, but a bare one.”85