Washington did little but listen and occasionally gavel querulous delegates to order. And there were enough differences among these men to produce rancorous moments. Big-state interests clashed with small-state concerns, slaveowners collided with those who owned no chattel, and there were differences over such issues as taxation and representation. But the amount of bickering has been overstated. As historian Edmund S. Morgan has observed, there “was never any serious doubt about the main features” of the Virginia Plan. Various interest groups battled over the details of Madison’s scheme, but in the end expediency and the delegates’ shared concerns led them into one compromise after another.35
The daily immobility brought on by these long, tedious sessions must ultimately have made the Convention an ordeal to a man of action such as Washington. Still he was careful to get his daily exercise, and his social calender was booked as solidly as it would have been at Mount Vernon. He began each day with his customary horseback ride, but by mid-morning he was at his desk in the State House, there to face a meeting that never lasted fewer than five hours and often exceeded six or even seven hours. Throughout the summer he dined out several evenings each week, sometimes in the company of other delegates at a local tavern, and once with the members attending the Society of Cincinnati gathering. Usually, however, he was a dinner guest in the home of some Philadelphia notable, occasions when he must have been offered a sumptuous repast in comparison to the customarily Spartan evening meals served at Mount Vernon. On at least five occasions he ventured into Philadelphia’s balmy nights to attend plays or concerts, and he often filled his free time with sightseeing forays. On two occasions he visited the botanical gardens of William Bartram, the famed naturalist, and once he slipped out of town to call on a farmer renowned in those parts for his innovative use of fertilizers in the production of wheat. He dropped in on the “Anatomical Museum” of wax figures operated by the surgeon Abraham Chovet; he looked in Charles Willson Peale’s partly completed museum that opened during the Convention (where, perhaps, he saw the stuffed and mounted pheasants he had sent the artist); and he attended a demonstration of Franklin’s newest invention, the “mangle,” a clothes-press. A nostalgic Washington once rode out to examine the battlefield at Germantown, a visit that came on the heels of a junket to White Marsh, where his army had camped in that dismal late autumn of 1777. During the ten-day adjournment that began late in July, Washington departed with Robert Morris on a fishing excursion that led them to the vicinities of Trenton and Valley Forge. Morris seems to have been the more interested of the two in the angling endeavors, for Washington excused himself to make side trips to the two historical sites. Whatever he expected to find, his laconic diary entry while at Valley Forge betrayed a feeling of melancholy, for he discovered that his former cantonment was “in Ruins” and overgrown with weeds.36
As always on a trip to the big city Washington was an extraordinary consumer. In addition to razors and hair ribbons, soap, powder, and powder puffs, he purchased a leather chair and even a dog while in Philadelphia. As is the lot of the traveler in every age, he had to pay for services that the homebody takes for granted. Among other things he paid for his baths, which he took but once a week.37
For weeks before leaving home Washington had been tormented by a painful rheumatic condition, and until the very eve of his trip he had worn a sling to alleviate the distress. But if he worried about suffering from that or some other affliction while he was away from the care of his family and his customary physician, he need not have concerned himself. By the time he got to Philadelphia his rheumatism was “much abated” and did not interfere with his physical activities. Certainly it was inclination, not health, that dictated his Sunday schedules. He attended church services on only two of his eighteen Sundays in Philadelphia, and not at all between June 17 and his departure on September 18. Mostly he relaxed at Morris’s residence on Sundays, though that was the day he usually devoted to keeping abreast of his correspondence. Some of his free time was given to Charles Willson Peale, who asked to be permitted to make a mezzotint of this famous man. Peale had hopes that a Washington picture would sell like hotcakes, lifting him out of debt; instead, it sold so poorly that he had to cut the purchase price by one-third to find a market for still another depiction of the general. It may have been just as well, as his 1787 representation of Washington was in all probability not a very good likeness. Peale always seemed to have difficulty with this man. George Washington Parke Custis, who lived with the general during the last half dozen years of the decade, generally did not fancy Peale’s renditions of his renowned stepgrandfather, and even the artist’s son, Rembrandt Peale, criticized some of his father’s work on Washington. The Washington of this instance seems marred by a misrepresentation of his eyes; the general’s eyes are made to exude a soft, merry, pleasing quality, a characterization that does not tally with what other portraitists or eyewitnesses saw in this man.38
“The Constitution that is submitted is not free from imperfections,” Washington acknowledged at the end of the Convention’s work. He was just as certain that its defects could not be attributed to hasty or reckless craftsmanship. For about fifteen weeks Washington watched and listened as his fellow delegates hammered out the document. Early on they agreed to write a new constitution, not merely to amend the Articles, the “sole and express purpose” for which they had been sent to Philadelphia. Thereafter, working in secrecy, these men argued and bargained and compromised until they had a completed document. As historian Merrill Jensen has written, three broad groups slugged it out during these weeks. One group, with which Washington undoubtedly sympathized, favored a powerful national government freed of all state controls, a polity that would include a strong executive official; at the opposite extreme were those who wished to strengthen the national government, but to do so without undercutting the states or totally destroying the Articles of Confederation. Between the poles was the largest group, a faction that possessed the votes to determine the outcome. These men favored a strong central government, but one whose powers—and limits—would be defined, a polity divided into separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Above all, they believed the new government must have powers that the government under the Articles had never dreamed of possessing. It must be capable of regulating foreign and domestic commerce, raising revenues, suppressing rebellions, and when so requested by state legislatures of intervening to subdue local insurrections. They also longed for an extraordinarily powerful president, a chief executive who would boast a degree of authority and power held by no other comparable constitutional figure in America since royal officialdom had been turned out in 1775–76, an office of such potential magnitude that some delegates even worried that it was but the “foetus of a monarchy.”39
If philosophical divisions over sovereignty and state power, over executive and legislative puissance, divided these delegates, so did economic considerations between the various sections. Until those matters of jarring contention were resolved the document could not be completed. To some degree the Convention proceeded in two phases. During the initial two months the delegates sought to determine the powers of the national government and its several branches; after the late July recess the Convention wrestled with the issues of sectionalism. Not surprisingly the result was a series of compromises. The South secured protection against outside interference with slavery, a ban on Congress’s power to levy export duties, and the easy admission of new western states on an equal footing with the original states. The commercial states obtained the right to levy navigation acts by a simple majority vote.40
Washington had to have been happy with the work of the Convention, but he took his vow of secrecy so seriously that he refused to record his thoughts even in his diary. During the long meeting he wrote only one letter in which he commented on the progress of constitution making, a missive to Hamilton six weeks into the conclave in which he despaired for the chances of erecting a “strong and energetic [central] go
vernment.” Yet when the work was at an end he gazed upon a document that called for the very sort of central government he long had hoped to see. Some provisions would “never . . . obtain my cordial approbation,” he told an acquaintance, yet “in the aggregate, it is the best Constitution that can be obtained.”41
Of all the components of this document Washington must have watched most closely as the office of chief executive was pieced together. Whatever else happened, Benjamin Franklin remarked during the first week of the Convention, “the first man put at the helm [as president] will be a good one.” No one required a translator to understand that he meant that the initial president was certain to be George Washington. Indeed, one delegate later even claimed that the office was designed with Washington in mind. Many “members cast their eyes toward General Washington as President,” Pierce Butler of South Carolina reflected, “and shaped their ideas of the powers to be given to a President, by their opinions of his virtue.”42
George Washington at the time of the Constitutional Convention, by Charles Willson Peale (1787). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Joseph and Sarah Harrison Collection.
The presidency came together in stages. The Virginia Plan proposed an executive elected by the national legislature to serve one fixed term and possessed of “general authority” to administer the laws. By mid-June the Convention had agreed to an executive elected by Congress to serve one seven-year term, and to be ineligible for reelection. The New Jersey Plan introduced on June 15 recommended a plural executive. It got nowhere. Nor did Hamilton and the Morrises, among others, who—with Washington in mind—sought tenure for life, as well as an absolute veto, for the president. By early August the Convention had decided that the executive should be elected independently of Congress and that the president should be eligible for reelection to a six-year term. Moreover, it had decided that the chief executive would have broad powers with which to enforce the law, considerable appointive capacities, the lead role in the making of foreign policy, and command of the nation’s armed forces. All that was left was a little tinkering. The president’s term eventually was reduced to four years, and the contrivance known as the Electoral College was created for the election of the chief executive.43
Three and one-half months after it began the Convention appointed a committee of style to spruce things up in a clean, final draft, and when it reported on September 12 only four days were required for the delegates to comb through the committee’s report. The last day business ran on until 6:00 P.M., later than any other session all summer, but it was a Saturday and everyone was anxious to get home. When work was completed that day all that remained was for the document to be engrossed and for the delegates to cast their final vote for acceptance or rejection. On Sunday Washington tended to his correspondence, and in one remarkably candid letter he offered a clue to the private motives that had combined with his nationalistic concerns to bring him to Philadelphia. He instructed his land agent in western Pennsylvania not to sell his property for a meager two dollars per acre, advising that if the new constitution was ratified he had “no doubt of obtaining the price I have fixed on the land, and that in a short time.” (He was correct. He eventually sold the land for more than seven dollars an acre.) Monday morning the Convention met for the final time. It was a brief session, one highlighted by Washington’s sole utterance during the entire meeting, as well as by the unanimous vote of the states in favor of the document. But if all the states approved the constitution, unanimity was lacking among the delegates. Both Governor Randolph and George Mason refused to sign the document, acts of protest in which Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts also participated. Nevertheless, each state delegation had given its approval. The charter was ready to be sent to the states for their consideration. While the men were gathering their papers for the last time, Franklin, typically, got in the final word. Throughout those often tiresome weeks, he said, he had puzzled over the painting of the sun which adorned the back of the chair occupied daily by Washington; at last, the old sage went on, he happily knew “that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” With that, the meeting ended.44
That evening a somber Washington kept to himself in his chambers, “meditat[ing] on the momentous wk. which had been executed.” On Tuesday, after a noon meal with the Morris family, he set out along the familiar path that led home. Those delegates who had planned the presidency for Washington almost saw their efforts made vain during the course of his journey. Crossing an ancient and rotten bridge near Head of Elk, one member of his team of horses fell, nearly pulling his carriage off the span, a spill that would have provoked a fifteen-foot plunge into the dangerous waters below. But no other horse was pulled over, and Washington’s servants, assisted by several bystanders, swiftly disengaged the team from the vehicle. Shaken but uninjured, Washington continued, stopping in Baltimore on the 21st, and finally reaching Mount Vernon about 6:00 P.M. on Saturday, “after an absence of four Months and 14 days,” as he wearily noted.45
It still looked like summer on the Potomac, but moderating temperatures indicated that autumn had commenced, just as the calendar reported. That dictated an accelerated work schedule, and Washington immediately plunged back into his farm activities, overseeing the harvest, looking into some second season planting, and supervising the labor of his “Negro ditche[r]s” and other chattel. Like a man who soon expected to leave again, he fell to taking a census of his various holdings—it showed that he owned more than 100 horses, 19 oxen, 311 cows, and 389 head of sheep. No matter seemed too small to command his attention.46
Through the early fall relatively few visitors rapped on Mount Vernon’s door, a pleasing turn of affairs after his prolonged absence. In his free time Washington closely watched the process of ratification of the proposed constitution. Congress had received a report on the Convention’s work even before Washington got back to Virginia, and by the end of September it sent the projected charter to the states. It was clear that the document’s proponents faced a fight. Already its foes in Congress had endeavored without success to amend the plan, or even to hold a second convention. Washington was not surprised at the opposition. Ratification, he told his former aide David Humphreys, would be an uphill battle, inasmuch as many interests “will be affected by the change.” Success, he thought, hinged upon the “literary abilities” of the Federalists, as the champions of the document were being called, and he hoped they would inundate the newspapers with their essays. But that was not the sort of role he wished to play.47
In fact, he did not play much of a public role in this struggle. He made clear his convictions to Patrick Henry, certain to be a pivotal figure in Virginia’s decision, and he indicated that he had no objection to having his name bandied about as a supporter of the document. On the other hand, he neither authored any essays in support of the constitution nor did he seek election to his state’s ratification convention. Save for brief trips to Alexandria, Georgetown, and Fred ericksburg, Washington did not leave Mount Vernon during the course of the ratification struggle. During those months his only resolute step came when Maryland’s Anti-Federalists endeavored to postpone a vote in their convention until Virginia had acted. Washington intervened—“meddled,” he said—to the point of rallying his Federalist acquaintances to call the vote. They did, and the state endorsed the constitution by a lopsided margin.48
Throughout the nine-month ratification campaign the Federalists did indeed use Washington’s name—and Franklin’s too—as a selling point. Some who were more zealous than veracious depicted Washington as having played a major role at the Convention, and one artful Federalist penman even composed a stirring speech that the general allegedly made when he voted for the document, a harangue in which he supposedly predicted that blood would flow if the constitution was not approved. It sounded credible. His farewell remarks as commander also had contained a warning of likely disorder. Besides, late in 1787 some conniving Federalist had latched onto and printed one of Washington’s recent
letters, a missive in which he had written: “My decided opinion . . . is that there is no alternative between the adoption of [the proposed constitution] and anarchy.” His style of campaigning—or lack of it—was in keeping with his temper, but his low-key approach also arose from a fear that some might attribute his support for ratification to a desire to be the first president under the new charter. He knew, of course, that his election was a “probability,” although he claimed that the office held no charms for him that could equal his “growing love of retirement.”49
By the time his private letter was surreptitiously published, the Federalists seemed assured of success. Five states had ratified the proposed constitution by early in January 1788, and by then all but one state had called conventions to consider the matter. For weeks, thereafter, however, the juggernaut slowed to a creep. Only one state affirmed the document in February, and two additional months elapsed before the seventh state consented; another month dragged by before the eighth state acted. Thus, on June 2, when Virginia’s convention at last assembled, the Federalists were only one state short of victory.
“A few short weeks will determine the political fate of America for . . . a long succession of ages to come,” Washington predicted as Richmond began to swell with the arriving delegates. He was ecstatic. Ratification seemed a certainty, if not by Virginia’s vote, then perhaps by that of New York, where Hamilton would play a leading role, or in New Hampshire, where John Sullivan would be a dominant force. Of course, Washington realized that a victory without the compliance of powerful entities such as Virginia and New York would be a hollow triumph, yet success seemed to loom in the Old Dominion. More Federalists than Anti-Federalists had been elected to the convention, though about 7 percent of the delegates were uncommitted. They would decide the issue.50
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