First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  The general was caught off guard by the uproar. He had endorsed the society with enthusiasm, seeing it as a harmless fraternal entity and as a vehicle for providing assistance to comrades who had fallen on hard times. He must also have relished the thought that at the society’s meetings he would be “treated with . . . uncommon marks of attention and attachment,” as he put it. His initial reaction to the public outcry against the society was merely to suggest that the people were ill informed. As public protest mounted, however, he contemplated reforms for the Cincinnati’s charter. He journeyed to Philadelphia in the spring of 1784 to preside over the first convention of the organization, and once there he bluntly told the stunned membership that its charter needed to be drastically revised, specifying in particular that the “hereditary part in all its connexions, absolutely” must be discontinued. The national conference promptly rubber-stamped his proposals, but over the next two years several state chapters dragged their feet, and some adamantly refused to endorse his suggestions. Thereafter, Washington’s position toward the society was ambivalent. He stopped wearing the order’s eagle emblem, told its members that he would not again accept the presidency of the organizations, and announced that he would not attend their convention scheduled to be held in Philadelphia in 1787. The last pledge he kept, even though he was in the city attending the Constitutional Convention when the Cincinnati assembled. On the other hand, when the order reelected him as president he accepted the post and continued in office until his death.4

  “Things cannot go on in the same train forever,” Washington prophesied repeatedly during the summer and fall of 1786. This was a new refrain for Washington, one uttered with a sudden urgency. What he most feared was a counterrevolution staged by the “better kind of people.” Already many “respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of Government without horror,” he noted, perhaps remembering that in 1782 the head of the invalid corps in the Continental army had proposed that he, Washington, become the king of America. He thought a rebellion by the “minor part,” the commonality, was less likely, but should such an insurgency occur it could snowball until its “weight is too great and irrestible to be stopped.” Nevertheless, whether the unrest came from the right or the left, the result would be the same: chaos, then despotism, the very fate the Loyalists had foreseen when the Revolutionaries of 1776 had spoken of self-government.5

  Whatever the Tories had predicted, the problem, as Washington saw it, arose neither from his countrymen’s inherent inability to govern themselves nor from innate imperfections in republican governance. Disorder and tyranny were conceivable, he had concluded, because the constitution was flawed. Just as his army had been left nearly unarmed and certainly underfed by an impotent national government, now the same defect threatened stability, perhaps even the existence of the Union. Something must be done. His solution: “the reins of government [must] be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be . . . amended.”

  Washington was prone to hyperbole. For years he had argued incessantly that without reform the war could not be won, yet victory had been secured; in 1784 and 1785 he had warned of fiscal anarchy, but by 1786 economic recovery was in the air and his own state again was exporting as much tobacco as it had on the eve of its Townshend Duty boycott in 1769. From time to time, too, he had seemed forlorn about national affairs, but his tone in 1786 was new. Before he had seen the national government’s weakness only as a potential future menace to the public weal. In 1786 he came to see the crisis as real and present.6

  Others also believed that a serious crisis was at hand. The central government remained too weak to remove British troops from the string of old royal forts that guarded the wilderness frontier, installations through which arms allegedly continued to flow to the Native Americans and from which British traders supposedly monopolized the northwestern fur trade. Nor could the United States do anything to coerce Spain into opening the Mississippi River to the commerce of America’s western farmers, without which these yeomen could not rise above a subsistence level. If Britain and Spain could not be brought to terms, moreover, few husbandrymen would hazard a move across the mountains, a fact that would do nothing for land speculators who hoped to sell frontier acreage, nor would it aid the nation’s burgeoning manufacturering class, who dreamed of selling their wares to prosperous sodbusters in the Ohio Valley and beyond. In fact, without access to the Mississippi the United States probably could not even retain the West, for as Washington reported upon his return from western Pennsylvania in 1784 “the touch of a feather, would turn” those who already had settled in the West into the arms of Spain.7

  However, it was the United States’ commercial difficulties with Great Britain that instigated the first concrete step toward real constitutional change. Some American leaders evidently had expected that the War for Independence soon would be followed by a treaty of commerce between the two former belligerents. Great Britain had other ideas. While it dumped huge quantities of goods on the American market, Whitehall also enacted a series of navigation acts that prohibited trade between its West Indian colonies and the United States. As Congress had no power to regulate trade, the new nation had no way of fighting back, with the consequence that between 1783 and 1789 America’s annual sales to Britain were only about 50 percent of what they had been during the last six years before the war. Of course, Britain was not the only nation with ports. The United States continued the commerce with France that had begun in 1788, business that resulted in a felicitous balance of trade for the new nation, despite a disappointing traffic with the French West Indies. The high seas also witnessed a brisk, though diminutive, commerce between American merchants and their counterparts in the Netherlands, Prussia, Sweden, and even China. Virginia was one of the states that seemed to do all right; by 1790 one-third again as much tonnage was clearing its ports each year as had been the case on the eve of the Revolution. Still, some men wanted even more, something that would not be realized while the national government was too weak to offer much help.8

  Since 1784 some in Congress had sought to augment the national government’s commercial powers. Their plan was to amend the Articles of Confederation so that Congress might impose duties on imports and exports, a step that might bludgeon Great Britain into countenancing a freer trade with the United States. But southern opposition foiled the plan, for many great planters fretted lest a northern-dominated Congress might use its new power to slap imposts on rice and tobacco exports.9

  Amid whispers of northern secession, the issue from time to time bobbed to the surface in Congress, but without resolution.10 Two occurrences in the second half of 1786, however, changed that.

  The Mississippi question flared up again that summer, ignited when Spain sent an envoy to the United States to discuss opening commercial relations between the two countries. But trade was of secondary importance to Madrid, inasmuch as it would agree to a treaty of commerce only if the United States relinquished its claim to free navigation of the Mississippi River. The northern maritime states were willing to embrace such a deal. The South, however, feared that the loss of the Mississippi would trigger secessionist movements all along the frontier, propelling the inhabitants of the West into the arms of the Spanish, or even back under the aegis of Great Britain. In addition, the South knew that the loss of the West would insure northeastern hegemony in the diminutive confederation of states east of the mountains. In the end nothing was resolved, for the North lacked the votes to ratify such a treaty. But this rancorous battle clearly demonstrated that without sectional compromise the Union was in great peril.11

  Only weeks after this imbroglio a violent outburst occurred in Massachusetts. The ink was hardly dry on the Treaty of Paris before it was obvious that many farmers in New England faced a more sinister foe that King George’s regiments ever could have been. Hard times ushered in by the postwar depression soon left many farmers deeply in debt. From time to time in 1784 and 1785 farmers in the Bay State
collectively beseeched their elected officials to inflate the currency and to reduce taxes. The creditors that ran the state acted otherwise, of course, and by harvest time in 1786 the court dockets in the hinterland counties had begun to groan under foreclosure cases. Hardened by war and infused with the Revolution’s spirit of activism, farmers gathered in county seats to prevent courts from sitting. In Springfield their leader was Daniel Shays, a farm boy who had risen to the rank of captain in the late war and who now marched his “company” in front of the courthouse. For three months or so the farmers were amazingly successful, often intimidating magistrates into not convening courts, seeing that impartial jurors could not be found, convincing the local militia units that it would be unwise to try to enforce the law. Then Massachusetts acted. It raised an army of four thousand men, and sent them west under General Benjamin Lincoln. The general had far better luck against the “army” of cold, hungry, and thoroughly terrified yeomen than he had experienced at Charleston in 1780, and by February 1787 the dissenters were in flight or in jail.12 Less than a month after Massachusetts crushed the rebellion, Congress approved a national convention to reform the Articles of Confederation.

  The call for that national conclave first had been issued in September 1786 by the Annapolis Convention, a parley that Virginia had urged to treat commercial problems. Only five states had sent delegates, but the small gathering in Annapolis issued a call for a convention to meet in Philadelphia in May, a conference that might recommend those changes “as shall appear . . . necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”13

  Congress received the address in October, but it took no action until early in 1787. By then Shays’s Rebellion had created alarm in some circles well beyond Massachusetts, and several states had elected delegates to the proposed convention. Virginia was one of those states. In the fall it had chosen a seven-man delegation to go to Philadelphia. George Washington’s name was at the top of its list.14

  Before the fall of 1786 Washington had consistently regarded the weaknesses of the national government only as a source of possible future trouble. Throughout this period he had consistently depicted domestic America in idyllic terms. Tranquility prevailed, he wrote, and “justice is well adminstered; robbery, violence or murder is not heard of from New Hampshire to Georgia”; moreover, prosperity was returning and the “ravages of war are repaired.” Besides, “our internal Governments are daily acquiring strength” and are “tolerably well administered.” In time, he went on, the impotence of the national government would be corrected. “Democratical States must always feel before they can see,” he reflected; “it is this that makes their Government slow, but the people will be right at last.”15 But as news of Shays’s Rebellion trickled down to Mount Vernon, mostly related in frenzied tones by Henry Knox and David Humphries, the general’s outlook changed. Both men painted the most lurid picture of events in Massachusetts, leading Washington to believe that “a formidable rebellion against reason [and] the principles of all government” was under way. In one breath Knox depicted the “desperate and unprincipled men” under Shays as levelers, in the next, incongruously, he suggested that they might even wish to “return [America] to great Britain.” Whichever was the case, it was his conclusion that because of the Shaysites “we are forced to see our national humiliation.” Each of these old comrades told Washington that the upheaval arose from the same malady. In the absence of a strong central government, a “licencious spirit” had seized the people. “The machine works miserably,” said Knox. Either there is change, intoned Humphreys, or “we cannot remain as a nation much longer. . . .”16

  “Good God!” Washington wailed. Maybe the Tories had been correct about the Revolution. He feared that a “critical moment” had arrived. Perhaps “we are fast verging to anarchy and confusion,” he conjectured. What was it about the activism of the Massachusetts farmers that so alarmed Washington? Thanks to Knox—whose descriptions of the conduct of the Shaysites he quoted in his correspondence to others, something he was not in the habit of doing—Washington worked himself into a lather over the report that these dissenters regarded the lands of America “to be the common property of all.” The seeming inability of Massachusetts to protect realty, and the certainty that the infirm national government could not be relied on for assistance in such an emergency, also frightened him. “If there exists not a power to check” these “desperate characters,” he asked, what “security has a man for life, liberty, or property.”17

  But Washington had more than property rights on his mind. His very identity was interlaced with the existence of the new nation, and in a moment of candor he acknowledged that the “end of Foederal union . . . would be a disagreeable circumstance . . . [and] particularly so for a person in my situation.” This man, whose search for renown had been the central business of his life, had achieved his self-esteem in the course of years of travail and sacrifice to create the nation. In the four corners of the land his birthday was celebrated; like a patron saint he already was regarded as the father of the new nation. Visitors filed up to his estate as if it were a holy shrine. On patriotic holidays his name was hallowed above all others. But now the Union was imperiled, and if it ceased to exist his achievements inevitably would be forgotten, a relic of the ancient past, as forgotten as the memory of the short-lived nation he had helped to create. Unable to envision himself apart from the nation, he saw disunion as death. It was akin to a virulent, fatal storm that “enveloped in darkness” all that it touched; it was to be “so fallen! so lost!” Disunion would “bury us”; worse, it would be an insult and a disgrace.18

  Washington’s concerns, however, hardly were limited to matters of self-esteem. He was one of the oldest and most persistent critics of the Articles’s shortcomings, first decrying the national government’s weaknesses about thirty months before the war ended. But it took the Shaysite disorders and the simultaneous sectional split of the Mississippi question to convert him from a concerned optimist into an alarmed and anguished pessimist, for the one crisis threatened chaos and anarchy while the other posed a threat to the Union itself. The solution, he thought, must be the establishment of a strong central government. Only such a polity could maintain order and protect property, and only such a government could hope to force Britain’s withdrawal from the West while it pressured Spain into opening the Mississippi, the steps necessary to prevent the Union from foundering over the sectional discord wrought by rival trans-Appalachian interests.19

  Almost to a person those men whom Washington most admired were among the noisiest proponents of constitutional change. Generals Sullivan and Knox, David Humphreys and Henry Lee, and especially Hamilton, the Morrises, and young James Madison had been preaching for a stronger central government for years. Their activism may have influenced Washington, and their ideological reservations about the Articles of Confederation may have helped shape his views.

  Within that circle some had come to despair for republicanism. Some feared that America’s Revolutionary virtues, particularly the ideal of noble, selfless sacrifice which had enthralled the public in 1775, had disappeared, rendering republicanism unsuitable for the new nation; others believed republicanism to be a form of government unworkable in a huge country such as America, a nation whose sprawl encompassed faction upon faction. Most, however, thought the problem was more mechanical. The new government must be a republican government, said Henry Knox, but the polity must be “modified and wrought together” in such a manner as to be “durable & efficient.” Many concluded that the problem had arisen because the Revolution had gone too far. The revulsion sparked by the English monarch and his royal governors had led the early revolutionaries to attenuate the executive authority throughout America, to make its legislative bodies too strong, to render its judiciaries too dependent on momentary popular whim, to leave its central government virtually powerless. By 1786 and 1787 voices increasingly were heard that called for a rigorous separa
tion of powers at the national level, for bicameralism, for an independent judiciary, and for a more powerful executive official. Could the convention in Philadelphia accomplish all this? No, said Knox, who saw the meeting as but “a stage in the business” of altering the Articles of Confederation. But the step must be taken, he told Washington. “To attempt less will be to hazard the existence of republicanism, and to subject us either to a division of the European powers, or to a despotism arising from high handed commotions.” His next prediction was even more chilling. The meeting in Philadelphia was the nationalists’ last hope for bloodless change. Washington’s friends, therefore, envisioned the Philadelphia convention as the first step toward ending the American Revolution. They proposed nothing less than constitutional alterations that were designed to save the Revolution from itself. Washington agreed with their prescription, and he viewed the changes they advanced as “radical cures,” as revolutionary—or, perhaps, counterrevolutionary—in their own right, something he could not countenance before the events of late 1786.20

  Washington’s friends had not troubled to invite him to the Annapolis Convention, but sensing that the Philadelphia meeting in all likelihood would be their last hope for success the extreme nationalists wanted Washington’s prestige added to the conclave. After all, as an Englishmen who toured the States that year noted about Washington, “the people have no confidence in any other man.” Besides, the nationalists knew that Washington shared their convictions. The only problem was that for four months following his election to the Virginia delegation, General Washington disclaimed any intention of attending the meeting. His hesitancy did not stem from any quarrel over amending the Articles, for now he was convinced that “the superstructure we have been seven years raising . . . must fall” unless “some alteration in our political creed” was fashioned.21 Why then was Washington so reluctant to be a part of the convention?