First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  He attributed his temporizing to the fact that he had fibbed himself into an embarrassing corner. In declining to attend the meeting of the Cincinnati set for May in Philadelphia, he had pleaded that the demands of his business would not permit a prolonged absence. To attend the constitutional conclave would expose him. But other factors also weighed on his mind. If this meeting was poorly attended and resulted in a fiasco as had its predecessor at Annapolis, Washington would appear a fool. If the movement for constitutional reform failed, his reputation would suffer for having embraced an unpopular cause. “I should not like to be a sharer in this business,” he said. Of even greater importance, however, was his concern about the legality of the Philadelphia meeting. John Jay, in fact, had confessed to Washington that the legitimacy of the convention was “questionable,” that is, illegal; moreover, the general knew that Patrick Henry had announced that he would not attend allegedly because he “smelt a rat.” While the Articles were vague about the lawful amending process, Washington had good reason for wondering about the origin of the proposed meeting, inasmuch as it had been called by the Annapolis Convention, itself an unofficial gathering of men from fewer than one-half the states. What is clear is that Washington worried that the Philadelphia convention might be illicit business. “A Convention so holden,” he said in an oddly quaint manner, “may not be legal.” Neither the importunings of Madison nor those of Governor Edmund Randolph, not to mention the pleas of various legislators, could budge him. Only in the final week of March, barely six weeks before the meeting was to start, did he consent to attend, his change of heart coming only forty-eight hours after he learned that Congress had approved the meeting.22

  When Washington left the army he believed his public service was at an end. He doubtless hoped it was, too, for crowned with glory he aspired to fill the role of Cincinnatus. Now he must have looked with mixed emotion on being swept “back into the tide of public affairs.” A man of Washington’s temperament had to be elated at his countrymen’s summons, and the prospect of an exciting respite from retirement must also have been alluring. Yet against those gains he had to weigh the potential risks to his reputation, not to mention the danger his absence might pose for his business concerns. Nor could he have been human had he not wondered if the Philadelphia meeting was not but the first step in a renewed round of public service. He was aware of the talk of creating a separate executive official; presuming the reformers succeeded, could he not have wondered who might be selected to hold that office?23

  Washington was late setting out for Philadelphia. On the eve of his planned departure late in April word arrived of his mother’s serious illness. He rushed to her bedside in Fredericksburg. Still later heavy rains forced him to postpone his journey, but just after sunrise on May 9 his carriage pulled away from Mount Vernon. His apprehension at leaving must have been considerable, and, indeed, before that day ended he had been seized by a violent headache, symtomatic perhaps of a severe case of raw nerves. As Martha had become “too domestic, and too attentive to two little Grand Children” to tear herself away, the general rode alone—that is, with only his customary retinue of body servants and coachmen—for most of the journey, a bumpy, lonely, five-day trek. Only on the fourth day was the monotony broken, for near Head of Elk he ran into an acquaintance, a Virginia planter-legislator en route to Philadelphia on private business, and the two men continued on together over the final forty or so miles. Along the way Washington spent two evenings at the residences of friends and two others in inns; on the 13th, punctual as usual, for the Convention was slated to begin the next morning, he rode on in from Wilmington. Philadelphia rolled out the red carpet for him. At the Schuylkill he was met by the city’s light horse and artillery companies and escorted across the river, crossing on a bridge constructed by the British during their occupation in 1777–78. Late in the afternoon he reached Philadelphia, where tolling bells announced his arrival and a cheering throng along the sidewalks ecstatically greeted him.24

  The general may have been prompt, but few other delegates were so inclined. In fact, aside from some of the host state’s representatives, only one other delegate was in town. James Madison had arrived more than a week earlier, left with nothing to do but stew and fret that this conclave surely would end as had its predecessor unless the representatives came quickly. Washington seemed more annoyed than worried by the lack of delegates, although as day after day passed without a quorum he, too, became concerned. Nevertheless, unlike Madison he managed to enjoy himself while he waited. He lodged with Robert Morris’s family, often dining with them in “a family way,” and once escorting the financier’s wife, Mary White, to a charity lecture on eloquence; when he did not dine with the Morrises during his first nights in Philadelphia, he usually was entertained by some other locally prominent person. Franklin was his host one evening; John Penn, the grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania, another; on subsequent nights Jared Ingersoll, the son of a Connecticut Tory, Dr. John Ross, a former Continental army doctor, now a Philadelphia physician, and Thomas Willing, the mercantile magnate, entertained the famous general. One evening he attended a wedding reception, and one Sunday he worshipped at a Roman Catholic mass; on the 23rd he accepted a gracious invitation to breakfast at the residence of Governor Thomas Mifflin, whose complicity in the “Conway Cabal” he had suspected in 1778. Almost daily during this interim delegates arrived in town, until, finally, on May 25 seven states—a majority—were represented. That morning twenty-nine delegates (only one of which was from New England) sloshed through cool spring showers to the Pennsylvania State House, where they brought themselves to order and proceeded to organize. Their initial act of substance was to elect a presiding officer, and in the very room where a dozen years earlier he had been chosen to command the Continental army, Washington, to no one’s great surprise, was elected without a dissenting vote.25

  Washington had come expecting a long meeting, but he probably never dreamed that this conclave would drag on for four tedious months. With the exception of a ten-day hiatus late in July, the delegates worked almost every day, Monday through Saturday, usually from early morning until 4:00 P.M., throughout that hot, sticky summer. Typically, much of the work was done in committee, and a considerable amount of buttonholing and politicking took place around dinner tables or from roughhewn tavern benches. Three days after the Convention began nine more delegates had arrived, and the remainder trickled in during the next two weeks. Eventually fifty-five men from every state but Rhode Island surfaced at the meeting. Twenty-nine were there from the first session to the last, while ten others were in town for all but a few days that summer; on the other hand, a dozen delegates missed 50 percent or more of the sessions, and four men attended so infrequently that they were hardly worthy of being considered working members. Three representatives who had been elected and agreed to attend never arrived. On any given day about thirty delegates bothered to get out of bed and stroll down to the State House, there to meet in the tall-ceilinged, richly paneled little chamber where so much history had been made since the time of that fateful morning at Lexington and Concord a bit more than a decade before. Washington was one of those who attended regularly, not missing a single session between May and September.26

  The delegates to this Convention would not have been looked upon by their contemporaries as typical or commonplace Americans. None was poor. Without question at least ten were very rich, and only a quibbler would have argued that another fifteen or so were anything but wealthy men. Virtually all the others, save for four or five men of quite modest standing, two of whom hovered at the edge of insolvency, would have been classed by the general population as men of means. Nineteen delegates were slaveowners, their holdings varying from those who possessed two or three domestic slaves to the two hundred or more slaves owned by each of two South Carolinians. Thirty-four men were lawyers, sixteen were planters, two were more modest farmers, fifteen were engaged in some form of mercantile activity, two were physicians, and t
hree have been classed as pensioners. Just over half the men owned public securities, but their investments ranged from Elbridge Gerry’s $50,000 down to David Brearly’s $15. (Washington still owned $500 in securities, though their actual value in 1787 was only about $75.) Twelve men were creditors in the sense that they had invested in banking capital; three had investments in manufacturing; twelve were land speculators.27

  At age fifty-five Washington was an elder among these men. The average age was forty-three, a fact that suggested that most of the delegates had come of age during the years of the colonial protest and rebellion. As a result many had served the national government far more than their state government, leading them almost inevitably toward a nationalistic inclination. Three had served in the Stamp Act Congress twenty-two years before, forty-two had sat in Congress—where eight had signed the Declaration of Independence—and thirty had borne arms in the War of independence, ten for enough years to be considered real warriors, not “summer soldiers.” In an age when only about 1 percent of the male population attended college, twenty-five of these men were college graduates (eight were from Princeton alone), and six had completed post-graduate degrees, mostly by studying abroad.28

  Whether their political views differed from those of the “common man” is a matter that has divided scholars. On one count their ideas certainly were different. Virtually every one of the delegates thought America was in crisis, and, in fact, as historian Forrest McDonald has observed, this was “a critical moment . . . for the United States as United States.”29 Not all their countrymen would have agreed that the United States was worth saving, but quite obviously the men who came to this Convention believed the salvation of the Union was in their interest.

  Washington always thought of political activists in terms of the interests they represented, and his correspondence is studded with references to the “financial interest,” the “mercantile interests,” the “local interest,” the “interested views of desperate characters,” the “minor part” and the “better kind of people,” “men of consequence” as well as those who were “actuated by ambitious motives,” and, finally, among the varied “classes of people” he discerned the “self-interested designing disaffected.” With such an outlook he would have had far less difficulty than have some historians in seeing this Convention as a assemblage of various interest groups intent on altering the national charter in such a way as to protect and further their own factional considerations. Indeed, he ultimately characterized the delegates as representing a “diversity of interests.” In one sense there was only one interest group here: private property owners from the most privileged economic stratum. But within that class there were subspecies, men whose concerns ranged from exporting to importing, from large-scale farming to manufacturing to mercantile endeavors, from slaveholding to nonslaveholding, and from land speculation to investments in securities and other negotiables. And since each man was part of a state delegation, consideration had to be given to the state’s size and its well-being.30

  Whatever their interest almost everyone at the Convention shared certain ideas. Views about government were derived from the colonial experience, from the successes and failures of writing state constitutions, and from both the pens of Europe’s great minds and the rich vein of political theory composed by American activists over the past twenty years. In the abstract all believed it essential to protect minorities from majorities; there was absolutely unanimous agreement on the necessity of securing private property. Almost everyone also would have agreed with Edmund Randolph, the governor of Virginia, who opened the Convention by proclaiming that the “chief danger arises from the democratic parts” of the state constitutions. That “chief danger,” it went unsaid, was the menace to the man of wealth; his private property, as well as his pursuit of additional riches through the channels of finance, commerce, and foreign and western policy, was jeopardized because the “democracy,” the mass of the citizenry, was not sufficiently restrained. The state constitutions had failed to “provide . . . sufficient checks,” Randolph had suggested, and, given the enfeebled nature of the Articles government, the states were virtually sovereign. A year earlier Washington had said more or less the same thing when he had remarked that “we have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.”31 Checks were needed because it was human nature to act according to selfish interests.

  Unanimity disappeared, however, when it came to discovering a solution to these woes, although a majority of the delegates generally agreed with the notion of still another Virginian, James Madison. The national government, he said, must be “clearly paramount” over the states, which, in turn, should be left in a “subordinately useful” position, whatever that meant. Certainly Washington agreed with that view, even though he might have been struck by the irony of events. Thirteen years before, while attending the First Continental Congress, he had heard Joseph Galloway tell the legislators the same thing, only then he had voted against such a concept. Of course Galloway was speaking of the necessity for having a sovereign government within the British Empire. Now Washington and his young friend in the Virginia delegation were expressing the same general philosophy as Tory Galloway, who now resided in impecunious straits in exile far away in London.32

  If unanimity was absent from this chamber, greed and idealism comingled, enough to keep the meeting going until these men had produced what one scholar called “a virtual revolution in American politics,” a revolution to save a revolution by preventing a revolution. These men realized that the American Revolution had unleashed profound—and unexpected—change. New men, often from previously unrepresented strata of society, were in power, or they were jostling for influence. Some had succeeded the vanquished Loyalists; others were thrust into prominence when elections became commonplace, or when the electorate was expanded, or when legislatures were enlarged. Change—and its constant companion, uncertainty—also flowed from the Revolution’s disruption of established trade patterns, as well as from the fiscal chaos and the profiteering that accompanied the war and its immediate aftermath. Like an undertow that drags an unsuspecting swimmer deeper into danger, the Revolution, it now was held in some circles, unwittingly had deposited power “into the Hands of those whose ability or situation in Life does not intitle them to it.” Social chaos was the result, a menace that threatened total anarchy—and with it the very extirpation of the Revolution. Thus, the men of the Convention saw their mission as nothing less than the preservation of the American Revolution. They would create a continental republic, one in which republicanism could be saved from itself.33

  Washington, too, feared that this Convention might be the last hope of the Revolution, and he likewise thought “radical cures” were necessary in order to save the liberties and opportunities won by independence. But his views differed from those of many delegates. A near victim of Hamilton’s and “the financier’s” machinations while at the Newburgh cantonment, he was almost as suspicious of their motives as he was fearful of the Shaysites and other “incendiaries.” He had heard and alluded to the suggestions of men in august circles who speculated that America required a monarchical government, an expedient that he found as displeasing as the leveling ideas of Massachusetts’s protesting yeomen; what other designs of “wickedness” were harbored by some reformers he could only guess at. Eight years as commander in chief had left him with a cynical view of America’s “boasted virtue.” His countrymen—regardless of their economic class—were no more virtuous than men from the Old World; all men, he believed, were actuated by selfish interests. Unlike some of his colleagues, however, he did not conclude from this that republicanism could not work. Instead, the conclusion he reached was that a system of curbs and counterchecks was necessary—a central government composed of several branches, a national government indisputably sovereign over the states.

  As was his custom in such a body, Washington was reluctant to speak out during the Convention’s wearying sessio
ns. In fact, he addressed only one issue. At the conclave’s final meeting he announced his belief that members of the lower house should represent thirty thousand inhabitants, not forty thousand as the delegates earlier had agreed. (The delegates immediately reversed themselves and accepted his suggestion.) What role, if any, Washington played “out of doors” is not clear, but as he believed that “his situation [as presiding officer] . . . restricted him from offering his sentiments” indoors, he probably engaged in little if any politicking in the evening. He obviously felt ill suited for such behavior, and besides there was no real need for him to assume such a role. On the third day of the Convention, Governor Edmund Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan, a scheme prepared by Madison that called for far more than mere amendments to the Articles. Madison’s idea was to draft a new constitution, one that would provide for a sovereign national government that included executive, judicial, and bicameral legislative branches. Manifestly, Washington agreed with the basic outline of the Virginia Plan. Moreover, as the next four months largely were spent in debating and amending that scheme, and as Madison was more than equal to marshalling a defense of his own design, there was little cause for Washington to enter the debates.34