If not on the advice of Washington then surely with his full knowledge, Madison launched his campaign for Congress by switching his position on amending the Constitution.118 He had opposed a bill of rights at the Constitutional Convention and dismissed it as a meaningless “parchment” barrier in one of his Federalist essays, but the Convention’s records remained secret and the Federalist essays appeared under a pseudonym.119 Antifederalists, in contrast, typically demanded both a bill of rights and structural amendments restoring power to the states. In response to the outpouring of support for some alteration in the Constitution, both Madison and Washington had belatedly signaled a willingness to accept nonstructural amendments.120 Now, to open his campaign, Madison dispatched a flurry of letters that not only embraced a bill of rights but disingenuously suggested that he “was an unsuccessful advocate” for one at the Convention.121 With Monroe calling for structural amendments and a second federal convention, Madison seized the middle ground.122 Further, voters were told, once in office, Madison would have more stature than Monroe to wring a bill of rights from a federalist Congress. This became the major issue of the campaign: who could better protect the people’s rights under the new Constitution?
Madison relied mainly on letters and newspapers to get out his new message—“epistolary means,” he called them in a mid-January letter to Washington—but he also made appearances in three key counties and debated Monroe.123 Despite snow and freezing temperatures for one outdoor debate, Madison later recalled, voters “stood it out very patiently [and] seemed to consider it a sort of fight, of which they were required to be spectators.”124 Appealing to religious voters, Madison stressed his support for a constitutional amendment to secure “the rights of Conscience in the fullest latitude.”125 Lending their support, key Baptist ministers reminded voters of Madison’s role in enacting Virginia’s 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom, which ended state support for the Episcopal Church and guaranteed “that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion.”126 The district’s many Baptists and Lutherans rallied to Madison, as did voters in his home county of Orange, which he carried nearly unanimously.
Madison won by 336 votes. Attributing his victory to his “appearance in the district” and ability to counter “the calumnies of antifederal partizans,” he went to Congress committed to support a bill of rights.127 Along with drafting the Virginia Plan, it would become his greatest contribution to American liberty.
Washington rejoiced in the outcome. “All the political maneuvres which were calculated to impede, if not prevent the operation of the new government, are now closed,” Washington crowed three days after Virginians voted on February 2, “and although the issue of all the Elections are not yet known, they are sufficiently displayed to authorise a belief that the opposers of the government have been defeated.”128 Despite Henry’s best efforts, federalists won six of Virginia’s ten House seats. By that point, with only three states yet to elect representatives, friends of the Constitution had won all but a handful of contests, with their losses all coming in district rather than statewide races.
“Because so many of the elections of Senators and Representatives to Congress are already made,” Washington wrote to Rochambeau in late January, “there is the best reason to believe, the wisdom, the patriotism, and the virtue of America will be conspicuously concentered in that Body.”129 While his name did not appear on ballots anywhere, Washington effectively headed the federalist ticket everywhere. In Baltimore, for example, the Maryland Journal reported, federalists “appeared at the Polls with a Figure representing the Goddess of Federalism and an excellent Painting of General Washington.” When they then won all six of the state’s seats in Congress, the newspaper added the couplet, “Now all our factions, all our wars shall cease / And FED’RALS rule our happy land in peace.”130
The trend continued through the remaining contests, which concluded in March with federalists even winning four of six sharply defined House races in Clinton’s New York, giving them an overall four-to-one margin in Congress. As President, Washington would have a supportive House as well as Senate. “I cannot help flattering myself the new Congress on account of the self-created respectability and various talents of its Members, will not be inferior to any Assembly in the world,” he boasted to Lafayette.131
To complete the federalist triumph, it only remained for electors to cast their ballots for Washington on February 4 and Congress to open and count the votes after it convened at some point after March 4. When Madison visited Mount Vernon in February following the Virginia elections, even though Washington still publicly shunned the presidency, he asked Madison to review a seventy-three-page draft inaugural address.132 Clearly Washington was thinking about the task ahead.
Later print of George Washington’s triumphant entrance into Trenton on his journey from Mount Vernon to New York for his inauguration as President.
CHAPTER 9
The Inaugural Parade
CHRISTMAS AT MOUNT VERNON was typically a tranquil time for George and Martha Washington. Even though they surely suspected that it would be their last one there for some time, the 1788 holiday season followed the normal routine. They stayed home, as usual, and invited family and friends to visit. The weather, however, turned unusually cold and snowy before Christmas, keeping some guests away, before warming after the twenty-fifth, with sleet and rain replacing snow. Madison arrived on December 19, but headed home on Christmas morning for a month of campaigning for Congress in his district. Washington’s faithful wartime aide, Connecticut’s David Humphreys, stayed through the holidays and into the new year. Five years earlier, he had ridden with the General from Annapolis to Mount Vernon after Washington’s resignation as commander in chief, arriving on Christmas Eve 1783, and had remained through those especially joyous holidays. Collecting notes for a book on Washington, Humphreys returned in 1787 for another Christmas at Mount Vernon and was back again in 1788. Other visitors came and went.
For the Washingtons and their guests, Christmas at Mount Vernon meant feasts and relaxation. They dined together but otherwise remained free to do as they pleased. The main house had more than a half dozen guest rooms and a separate family suite.1 Visitors could enter and exit without bothering their hosts. Having British tastes, the Washingtons liked meat pies for dinner, and celebrated Christmas with truly enormous ones. One recipe for Christmas Pie from a cookbook used at Mount Vernon called for a bushel of flour to make the crust, which encased a Russian doll–like nesting of five successively larger birds—pigeon, partridge, duck, goose, and turkey—each skinned, boned, and inserted in the next, and then cooked for four hours in a very hot oven.2 “I lament the effect . . . which has deprived us of your aid in the Attack on Christmas Pyes,” Washington wrote to Humphreys on December 26, 1786. “We had one yesterday on which all the company (and pretty numerous it was) were hardly able to make an impression.”3
Washington often took his male guests foxhunting one or more times over the holidays—twice in 1787—but the bad weather apparently curtailed this activity in 1788. Cards, board games, and dancing commonly occupied the evenings, but few lavish parties. Washington paid for a traveling exhibitor to bring a camel to Mount Vernon over the holidays in 1787, but nothing of that sort occurred in 1788.
For many eighteenth-century Americans, Christmas was mainly a religious holiday, but not for Washington. In the mid-1770s, he stopped going to church on Christmas, and never resumed the practice while at Mount Vernon. About the same time, he ceased taking Communion and stopped attending Sunday services regularly. Many contemporary observers and later historians attributed these widely noted but never explained changes to a loss of faith in the divinity of Christ.4 Washington retained an intense personal belief in God and divine providence but perhaps not the Trinity. Episcopal prelate William White, who had the closest ties to Washington of any minister, later noted that he knew of no “fact which would prove General Washington to have
been a believer in the Christian revelation.”5 Respecting the religious origins of Christmas, however, and in line with English tradition, the Washingtons reserved family gift-giving for Twelfth Night, which fell on their wedding anniversary. For them, Christmas focused on family and friends.
Like most American businesses of the era, Mount Vernon operated on a six-day workweek with only Sundays free from the normal routine. Washington also allotted his workers four days off at Christmas, usually from December 25 to 29. Field work ceased and everyone—slave, indentured, or free—received extra food or pay. On Christmas 1788, for example, Washington gave twelve shillings to his secretary, Tobias Lear, and six shillings each to two of his favorite slaves, Peter and Giles. Nearly all of Washington’s several hundred workers lived on the plantation and remained there over the holidays. As their only long break from work during the year, Christmas could become a riotous affair for some. Alcohol flowed freely, with even field slaves receiving whiskey. Washington’s contract with his head gardener, for example, written in 1787 and in force for the holidays in 1788, provided that this free white employee would receive “four Dollars at Christmas, with which he may be drunk 4 days and 4 nights.”6 Of course, giving workers four days off meant that Washington did not need to ride the circuit of his plantation overseeing their work. He could stay home with his guests, which he did in 1788 from the time Madison arrived on the nineteenth until the workers returned to the fields on December 29. With the new government about to take over, Washington had much to discuss with Madison and Humphreys.
HUMPHREYS STYLED HIMSELF A WRITER, though little survives to justify that view. His projected book on Washington never got beyond a jumble of notes. His ponderous poetry, which won him entry into a home-state literary circle called the “Hartford Wits,” quickly lost favor. His only lasting fame came from his service as an American diplomat in Europe and his close ties to Washington. “’Twas mine,” Humphreys wrote in a 1786 poem about his relationship with Washington, “return’d from Europe’s courts, / To share his thoughts, partake his sports, / And sooth his partial ear.”7
Around the Christmas holidays in 1788, Washington asked Humphreys to draft an inaugural address. Much as Humphreys’s 1786 poem suggested, what remains of the seventy-three-page speech, though never delivered, provides a window into Washington’s thoughts as he approached the presidency. The General and his trusted aide likely worked closely together, with Humphreys serving as something between a scribe and ghostwriter for Washington’s ideas. Washington then made Humphreys’s draft his own by copying it in longhand, perhaps revising as he went, and sending a copy for comment to Madison, who deemed it too long, specific, and politically indiscreet for use. By laying out his vision for the new government, it showed how broadly Washington interpreted the Constitution. Three decades later, the first editor of Washington’s papers, after deciding with Madison’s approval to destroy the only copy, cut it in pieces for souvenir hunters seeking samples of the General’s handwriting. Surviving parts of this magisterial address make up less than half of the whole. Historians treasure the remainder as authoritative: it articulated Washington’s vision for America and outlined the future course of his administration.8
Washington’s draft inaugural began by denouncing the Articles of Confederation for giving the central government too little direct power and by embracing the Constitution for greatly expanding central authority. “No other or greater powers appear to me to be delegated to this government than are essential to accomplish the objects for which it was instituted, to wit, the safety & happiness of the governed,” the address declared in a direct refutation of antifederalist claims to the contrary. And in a world of self-justifying monarchies, the stated goal of serving the people’s interests signaled a sea change for government. “I rejoice in the belief,” the new President was to say, “that mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few; and that they will not continue slaves in one part of the globe, when they can become freemen in another.” Toward this end, the speech exclaimed, America would play a part, “the salutary consequences of which shall flow to another Hemisphere & extend throughout the interminable series of ages!”9 Washington never made a clearer proclamation of what made the United States special.
Republican rule founded on secure institutions stood at the heart of Washington’s vision for an American empire destined to grow through free immigration and western expansion rather than at the expense of other nations. “This Constitution is really in its formation a government of the people; that is to say, a government in which all power is derived from, and at stated periods reverts to them,” his address declared, and “the balances, arising from the distribution of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial powers are the best that have been instituted.” Given its prospects for advancing republican ideals, Washington’s address urged Congress and the states not to amend the Constitution until “a fair experiment of its effects,” except perhaps to add a bill of rights. Instead, Congress should “take measures for promoting the general welfare” by utilizing its powers afforded under the Constitution to regulate coinage and currency, set just weights and measures, improve education and manners, boost arts and sciences, enhance postal services, provide patents for useful inventions, and cherish institutions favorable to humanity.10 In these terms, the speech articulated the clear path to national felicity that Washington alluded to in his January letter to Lafayette.11
WASHINGTON FIRST ASKED MADISON to review the draft address in early January, but did not send a copy to him until mid-February. By then, the presidential electors had voted, though their votes remained uncounted. Whether selected by the people or the legislature, federal law required that each state choose its electors on January 7 and that all electors cast their two ballots on February 4. Although both federalists and antifederalists sought these coveted new positions, they disagreed only on whom to vote for Vice President. “For President, not a name is even whispered in any part of the union but Washington,” Georgia congressman Abraham Baldwin commented from New York.12 “All parties and descriptions of men revere him,” one self-proclaimed Republican wrote about Washington in a Boston newspaper; “there is hardly one but ardently wishes his election, whether Federalists or Antifederalist, Aristocratic or Republican.”13 Americans would not know many times like this.
In four of the ten participating states—Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware—voters chose the electors. These races generated most of the newspaper stories about the presidential contest. To turn out their own voters, for example, federalist papers in these states circulated rumors that antifederalists “secretly” sought to elect Patrick Henry as President. “Oh ye Gods, what a worthy competitor with a WASHINGTON!!” Philadelphia’s bellwether Federal Gazette sarcastically sneered in a widely reprinted mid-December article. “It is highly necessary that the friends of the constitution, in every state, should be active in choosing federal electors only who will undoubtedly elect the man of the people.”14 Later in the month, the Maryland Gazette warned its readers against “sending any man, as an elector, whose federalism was even equivocal, lest he should vote for Mr. Patrick Henry as president . . . and against the great and good General Washington.”15 Antifederalist candidates tried to counter these accounts by pledging their support for Washington, with one going so far as to denounce any report to the contrary as an “illiberal, ungenerous Lie.”16 Only after the January elections did the Federal Gazette concede, “It seems the anties have relinquished Patrick Henry, esquire, and have resolved not to deprive general Washington of an unanimous vote.”17 By then, the people had voted.
Electors ran statewide in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, with each side endorsing a formal slate of candidates and contesting every position in the two larger states. In Maryland, although several antifederalists polled well in some counties and might have prevailed in one or more contiguous districts, federalists won by a two-to-one margin statewide and carried every race.18 T
hey did even better in Pennsylvania. In a contest marked by low turnout apparently caused by disengaged antifederalists mostly staying home on a cold, damp election day, federalist candidates carried more than 90 percent of the statewide vote and all but swept Philadelphia and surrounding counties.19 With no organized antifederalist opposition in Delaware, the contest for electors in that small state turned on local matters, with voters in each of its three counties unanimously choosing one of the state’s three electors.20
The federalist tide even reached Virginia, where the antifederalist legislature had carved the state into electoral districts designed to serve its partisan purposes. To Washington’s delight, the plan failed miserably. While “much pain has been taken and no art left unessayed to poison the mind, and alarm the fears of the people into opposition,” he wrote to a close friend after the election, “in the list of Electors which has been published by the Executive authority of this State, there appears eight decided friends of the New Constitution.”21 Washington’s in-law and close friend David Stuart won easily in the district incorporating Mount Vernon. Henry carried his home district and two antifederalists prevailed in southern Virginia, but this netted Clinton only three out of twelve possible electoral votes for Vice President in a state where he had hoped to rack up a sizable majority.22 Even Henry and his partisans ultimately cast their other votes for Washington. After all, they were first and foremost Virginians.
The Return of George Washington Page 28