The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  In June 1788, after spending nearly ten years as a senior diplomat in Europe, Adams returned home to a hero’s welcome in Massachusetts just four days before neighboring New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution. Son of a pious Puritan farmer, educated at Harvard, and trained in law, the hardworking and highly ambitious Adams was an early advocate of American independence. In the First and Second Continental Congresses, he had joined with Samuel Adams, Arthur Lee, and Richard Henry Lee to form the radical Adams-Lee faction in Revolutionary War politics that clashed with the conservative patriots like John Dickinson and Robert Morris who later led the drive for a new Constitution.

  His time in Europe had tempered him, though.79 From 1786 to 1788, Adams wrote a three-volume Defense of the Constitutions of Governments of the United States, which praised checks and balances in republican government, espoused an almost kinglike executive, and closed with a ringing endorsement of the new federal constitution. Splitting with R. H. Lee, who opposed ratification, and his cousin Samuel, who supported early amendments, Adams maintained that the new government should receive a fair trial before any amendments. These positions plus his experience, popularity in New England, and willingness to serve under Washington made Adams stand out as a viable vice presidential candidate for federalists.

  Yet Adams had drawbacks, too. Vain, opinionated, and thin-skinned, as a diplomat in Europe Adams had clashed bitterly with his colleagues and irritated America’s allies. He still hated Britain at a time when most federalists wanted to restore cordial ties with America’s former imperial master. Even worse, as president of the Board of War during the American Revolution, Adams had often criticized Washington’s leadership and his ideas on army organization.80 These concerns led Hamilton to send Knox on a visit to Adams with instructions to sound him out on the vice presidency.81 “The Lees and Adams’ have been in the habit of uniting; and hence may spring up a Cabal very embarrassing to the Executive,” Hamilton wrote about the prospect of Adams as Vice President.82 Knox reported back that Adams wanted the job and promised to support Washington faithfully as President.

  Massachusetts federalist Theodore Sedgwick also assured Hamilton that Adams could be trusted.83 This brought Hamilton around. “On the whole I have concluded to support Adams; though not without apprehensions,” he wrote in November. “If he is not Vice President, one of two worse things will be likely to happen. Either he must be nominated to some important office for which he is less proper, or will become a malcontent and possible expouse and give additional weight to the opposition to the Government.”84 Newly returned from Europe, Adams had nothing to do other than tend his family farm and nurture a burning desire for the seemingly exalted position of Vice President.85 He felt it his due.

  Perhaps because he saw the vice presidency as a legislative office, Washington did not seem to care who held it so long as that person supported the Constitution. As early as September, Lincoln wrote to Washington expressing the “general” view that the Vice President should come from Massachusetts and named Hancock and Adams as the leading contenders.86 “So little agency did I wish to have in electioneering,” Washington wrote back, “that I have never entered into a single discussion with any person, nor expressed a single sentiment orally or in writing respecting the appointment of a Vice-President.” Provided that the person was “a true Federalist,” Washington declared, he would “acquiesce in the prevailing sentiments of the Electors without giving any unbecoming preference or incurring any unnecessary ill-will.”87

  Over the following months, Knox, Madison, and other party leaders wrote to Washington about Adams as Vice President, and Washington seemed agreeable to the choice. Indeed, alert to the risk of an antifederalist winning through a split vote by federalists, before electors voted in February, Washington let some of them know that he favored a unified vote for Adams. “I consider it to be the only certain way to prevent the election of an Antifederalist,” Washington wrote in January.88 This was the limit of his efforts for Adams or against Clinton.

  Hamilton, however, began to have doubts about too strong a vote for Adams. Ostensibly he feared that Adams might come in ahead of Washington. Hamilton may have also wanted to humble Adams somewhat so that he would know his place in the federalist hierarchy. “You know the constitution has not provided the means of distinguishing [between votes for President and Vice President] & it would be disagreeable even to have a man treading close upon the heels of the person we wish as President,” Hamilton wrote to Madison in November. “We must in our different circles take our measures accordingly.”89 For his part, Hamilton sent confidential letters or trusted messengers to several states urging federalist electors to scatter some second votes. “For God’s sake, let not our zeal for a secondary object defeat or endanger a first,” he wrote to James Wilson. “It is much to be desired that Adams may have the plurality of suffrages for Vice President; but if risk is to be run on one side or on the other can we hesitate where it ought to be preferred?”90

  The secret plan worked so well that fewer than half of the electors voted for Adams. With the other federalist votes scattered and New York not voting, Adams still finished second, far ahead of Hancock or Clinton. Unaware of the scheme and humiliated by his total, Adams talked of refusing office.91 After learning who caused it, he never forgave Hamilton.

  WHILE WASHINGTON KEPT QUIET about the contest for President and Vice President, he could not refrain from commenting on the battle for Congress. He desperately wanted federalists to win, especially in his home state of Virginia, where they faced long odds.92 The new Constitution was at stake, he believed, not only because Congress would enact the laws needed to implement it but also because Congress held the power to initiate amendments. Washington favored giving the Constitution a fair trial without amendment and felt that only federalists could be trusted with that responsibility. “It is my most earnest wish that none but the most disinterested, able and virtuous men may be appointed to either house of Congress: because, I think, the tranquility and happiness of this Country will depend upon that circumstance,” he explained to a Georgia federalist.93 In context, this read as a plea to elect only federalists. “As the period is now rapidly approaching which must decide the fate of the new Constitution as to the manner of its being carried into execution & probably as to its usefulness,” he wrote to Lincoln in October about the upcoming elections for Congress, “we should all feel an unusual degree of anxiety.”94

  As soon as the old Congress passed the Election Ordinance in September 1788, states with legislatures in session began appointing their federal senators and organizing elections for their federal representatives and presidential electors. Others followed over the fall as their legislatures convened. Despite Washington’s dream that disinterested nationalism would somehow prevail in federal politics, it did not take long for party spirit and local interests to exert themselves. In some states, division over the Constitution and federal authority allied itself with preexisting political parties; in other states, it incubated factions that evolved into parties.

  Pennsylvania’s unicameral Assembly acted first. Since the Revolutionary War, two organized parties had battled for control of this powerful body. One party embraced federalism; another included most of the state’s antifederalists. With a small majority in the Assembly—yet facing an uncertain fate in the upcoming October elections—federalists rushed to select the state’s two senators in late September, scarcely two weeks after Congress passed the Election Ordinance. In this vote, lawmakers split along party lines, 37 to 31, to select Washington’s friend Robert Morris for one seat, but they unanimously settled on a little-known supporter of rural interests as their other senator. “You will have great Satisfaction in hearing that Mr. [William] Maclay, our Agricultural Senator, is a decided federalist,” a Morris associate perhaps overoptimistically informed Madison after the vote. “I consider this election of Mr. Maclay by all the opposition as of great importance, as a sort of Acceptance of the gove
rnment.”95

  Party spirit soon returned, however, as federalist legislators then voted to have candidates for the House of Representatives run statewide rather than in districts, which made a federalist sweep of all eight seats likely. The results encouraged Washington. “From the good beginning that has been made in Pensylvania, a State from which much was to be feared, I cannot help foreboding well of the others,” he noted.96

  Two states, Connecticut and Delaware, selected senators and adopted election laws in October. With federalists in complete control, lawmakers in each state lifted their two senators from the ranks of former delegates to the Constitutional Convention and opted for statewide races for the House of Representatives. Delaware had only one House seat, but in Connecticut this method assured the election of five federalists to Congress. District voting should have yielded at least one antifederalist. Washington followed these developments closely and hailed the outcome. “I was extremely happy to find that your state was going on so well as to federal affairs,” he wrote to Connecticut’s Trumbull. “In general the appointments to the Senate seem to have been very happy. . . . A few months will, however, shew what we are to expect.”97

  With Patrick Henry still railing against the Constitution, the Virginia legislature met in early November to elect federal senators and to call elections for Congress. Even though antifederalists controlled both houses, Washington hoped that, with Governor Randolph’s support, Madison could win a Senate seat. Antifederalists Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson were the only other candidates and the dynamics of a three-way race for two seats should have helped Madison finish second as each of the two antifederalists sought to elbow past the other. Turning his legendary oratory against Madison in advance of the vote, however, Henry managed to keep his forces in line.98 Madison finished third. Compounding the assault, the legislature opted for district elections for Congress and, at Henry’s urging, put Madison’s Orange County plantation in a district dominated by antifederalists and barred him from running in any other one. “In short,” Randolph now wrote to Madison, “nothing is left undone, which can tend to the subversion of the new government.”99

  Washington was furious. “Our Assembly,” he wrote on the fourteenth, “has proved itself to be . . . very much under the influence of Mr Henry. . . . Federalists in the Assembly, as I am given to understand, were exceeding mortified that Mr Madison should have lost his Election by 8 or 9 votes. It is now much dreaded by the same characters, that the State (which is to be divided into districts for the appointment of Representatives to Congress) will be so arranged as to place a large proportion of those who are called Antifederalists in that Station.”100 Washington urged Madison to return to Virginia from New York, where he served in the old Congress, and campaign for a seat in the new one.101 Although Washington wanted Madison in the Senate, where he could consult on appointments and treaties, membership in “the other House,” as Washington called it, would have to suffice.102

  New Hampshire and Massachusetts came next. After pitched battles over ratification in both states, some saw them sending antifederalists to the Senate.103 In early November, however, Madison privately assured Washington that supporters of the new government would win in both.104 Madison was right, but barely. Voting separately, the lower house in each state selected one firm federalist and one candidate who either opposed the Constitution or wanted to amend it. In both, the upper houses confirmed the former but rejected the latter and offered federalist alternatives. The standoff went on for days in Massachusetts. It ended quicker in New Hampshire, but in both states the lower house ultimately relented. “In our General Assembly,” one New Hampshire antifederalist complained, where for a “long time there was a decided majority against the new system, opposition has ceased—and the language [about the Constitution] is ‘it is adopted, let us try it.’”105 Turning to their election laws, New Hampshire legislators then approved federalist-friendly statewide voting for Congress while Massachusetts lawmakers crafted congressional districts favoring federalists. Reporting these developments to Washington, Knox rejoiced, “I can assert from personal observation that affection for the new system is increasing in those states and that it is dayly becoming highly popular.”106

  Driven in part by support for Washington, the federalist tide swept through Maryland in December. “It is hoped by every true Federalists, that GENERAL WASHINGTON will be called to fill the high and important office of President,” one campaign publication declared, “but to induce him to accept that trust, there ought to be a certain prospect of his meeting men in both House of Congress, in whom he can place confidence, from their well known character and attachment to the New Constitution.”107 Such reasoning carried the day. Over the bitter resistance of Attorney General Luther Martin, who had stormed out of the Philadelphia Convention in opposition to the Constitution, the Maryland legislature named two federalists to the United States Senate and all but ensured the election of six federalist to Congress by having representatives run at-large even though they represented districts. With Maryland being the eighth state to choose its senators and enact its election law, 1788 ended with federalists already certain to control the new Senate and in a commanding position to take the House.

  “The elections have been hitherto vastly more favorable than we could have expected,” Washington noted in January. “Federal sentiment seems to be growing with uncommon rapidity.”108

  Georgia and South Carolina elected four more federalists to the United States Senate in January 1789, leaving only New York to act. There the process bogged down much as it had for naming electors. Led by Clinton, antifederalists in the state assembly demanded a joint vote on senators, which would allow them to pick both. Led by Hamilton, federalists in the state senate demanded a separate vote on senators, with each house getting the final say on one seat. “I assure you upon my honor that . . . the [Senate] majority will in no event accede to the unqualified idea of a joint ballot,” Hamilton warned an antifederalist leader in late January. “Allow me to hope that you will dispassionately weigh all the consequences of an obstinate adherence to the ground taken in the assembly.”109

  As with the manner of choosing electors, both sides held fast, leaving New York without any federal senators until after state elections installed a new legislature in July.110 At least in part because neither knew what approach would serve its interests, the two sides managed to settle on district elections for Congress. Meanwhile, fearing that antifederalists would sweep a statewide vote, South Carolina’s federalist-led legislature also adopted district elections for its state, while the Georgia legislature prescribed at-large voting for the three representatives from its state.

  THROUGHOUT THE FIRST FEDERAL ELECTIONS, which spread over the fall and winter of 1788–89, Washington stayed close to home. Indeed, reaching the age of fifty-eight in February, he acted as if his time at Mount Vernon would go on for years. Looking far ahead, for example, he assigned crops for each field through 1795, laid out an added field at one farm, and oversaw construction of a huge brick barn: “the largest and most convenient one in the country,” he boasted.111 Heavy spring and early summer rains had reduced his current crop, especially his root vegetables. “The same unfavorableness of the Season has rendered it unimportant to give a detail of my experiments this year in flax,” he wrote in December to the editor of an English farm journal.112

  A steady stream of visitors came to Mount Vernon, including Comte de Moustier, France’s new arch-royalist minister to the United States, and his consort Madame de Bréhan, the married sister of his deceased wife. “It is not necessary to tell you, Sir, how much we have been pleased with his person and his settlement,” the minister and his consort wrote to Jefferson about Washington and Mount Vernon. “Every thing there is enchanting.”113 The couple’s open intimacy scandalized many Americans but apparently not the Washingtons, who sat for drawings by de Bréhan, a noted artist.114

  Except when hosting important guests, confined by bad weather
, or engaged in urgent business, Washington continued to ride the circuit of his five farms almost daily—often through mud and sometimes in snow—inspecting crops, livestock, and field work. His longest trips were to nearby Alexandria, where he cast his individual ballot for a presidential elector on January 7 and, four weeks later, joined the festivities as voters from across the community participated in the district’s first congressional election. In both contests, he voted for federalists, and they won handily. Otherwise, Washington remained at Mount Vernon.

  “I have endeavoured in a state of tranquil retirement to keep my self as much from the eye of the world as I possibly could,” he explained in one letter from the period. “For I wish most devoutly to glide silently and unnoticed through the remainder of my life.”115 Other letters, however, reveal a fully engaged political leader more concerned with his country’s future than his own retirement.

  Though Washington voted in Virginia’s Fourth Congressional District, he cared most about the outcome in the state’s Fifth District, where Madison fought the race of his life for Congress. Antifederalists in the state legislature had not only drawn the district to make it as hard as possible for him to win, but also recruited his old friend and future political ally James Monroe to run against him. Both men were protégés of Jefferson and had served in Congress, but Monroe opposed the Constitution at the state convention and called for structural amendments as well as a bill of rights. Informed Americans already viewed Madison as one of the Constitution’s principal architects. Defeating him would send a strong message to Congress and the country, Henry believed.116

  To have any hope of winning, Madison would have to stump for votes in the dead of winter. “I am pressed much on several quarters to try,” he wrote to Washington on December 2, “and am apprehensive that an omission of that expedient may expose me to blame. At the same time I have an extreme distaste to steps having an electioneering appearance.”117 Still, he would do his duty. Heading south from Congress in mid-December, Madison stayed with the Washingtons for a week at Christmas before reaching his district and the dreaded campaign.