First Founding Father

by Harlow Giles Unger

In May 1785 Don Diego de Gardoqui, the first Spanish ambassador to the United States, arrived with instructions not to cede navigation rights to the Mississippi River to the United States—and he did as instructed, despite a year of negotiations with New York’s John Jay. Exasperated by Jay’s failure, Richard Henry took command of the talks, only to realize that the Spanish were willing to risk war rather than cede access to the big river.

  George Washington met with Lee and suggested a possible solution: a network of canals, waterways, and portages to tie Potomac River headwaters on the east slope of the Appalachians to Monongahela River headwaters on the western slope, where it flows to the mouth of the Allegheny River to form the Ohio River. The connection would allow grain, furs, and pelts from the west to flow to East Coast ports and trade routes to Europe. The new waterway would shortcut the long trip down the Mississippi River and across the Gulf of Mexico, yielding its investors enormous profits and spurring an economic boom in the West, where Washington and Lee still owned upward of 100,000 acres in Ohio. In addition to the profits he envisioned for himself and his partners, Washington believed the waterway would create an economic boom that would unite the nation with unbreakable economic, geophysical, and political bonds and end interstate border disputes that threatened to erupt into civil war. Together with Richard Henry Lee and others with stakes in the Ohio Land Company, Washington formed the Potomac River Company. Subsequently they formed the James River Company to build a second network of canals tying the waterways from Williamsburg and Richmond to the West.

  “Extend the inland navigation of the Eastern waters with those that run to the westward,” Washington enthused, “open these to the Ohio and Lake Erie, we shall not only draw the produce of western settlers, but the fur and peltry trade to our ports, to the amazing increase of our exports, while we bind those people to us by a chain that can never be broken.”2

  Knowing that states bordering the waterways stood to prosper most, Washington invited Richard Henry Lee and other political leaders from Maryland and Virginia to confer in Alexandria, Virginia, in March 1785. The two states had long feuded over control of the Potomac River, with each claiming its border reached across the river to the opposite shoreline, thus giving it the exclusive right to collect fees and duties from ships traveling the waterway. A few weeks later, with Richard Henry Lee’s strong support, the two states agreed to join in funding the project and adopt uniform commercial regulations and a uniform currency—in effect, establishing a commercial union. In but a few months Washington and Lee had succeeded in organizing the greatest public works project in North American history and, more importantly, uniting two states that had been ready to war with each other over rights to the very waterway they would now develop together.

  But Washington’s vision was wider: “We are either a united people or we are not,” he asserted to James Madison, for three years a Virginia delegate in the Confederation Congress. “If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation which has national objects to promote and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.”3 Elated by the agreement with Maryland, Washington and Lee decided to host an interstate convention in Annapolis in September to tie other states to the commercial union Virginia and Maryland had formed.

  By then, however, the long, tiresome negotiations had taken its toll on Richard Henry Lee, and when Virginia’s House of Delegates elected him to another term in Congress, he refused, citing his health as too “precarious” to return.

  Without the press of public affairs to distract him, he doted over his wife and children for the first time in years and spent time managing his plantation. His two oldest boys, Thomas, twenty-eight, and Ludwell, twenty-six, had taken jobs elsewhere, but his seven other children were still at home—Nancy, twenty-two, and Hannah, twenty, from his first marriage, and Ann, sixteen; Henrietta, thirteen; Sarah, eleven; Cassius, seven; and Francis, three.

  With three-year-old Francis old enough to cede the downstairs nursery, Richard Henry moved the child into a bedroom upstairs and had carpenters transform the nursery into a library. There, for the first time in years, he could relax, rereading his favorite volumes of history, political philosophy, and poetry. Three-year-old Francis, however, often captured his full attention as he watched, transfixed, for long periods by the little boy’s antics. He also busied himself with entertaining household matters such as writing to a cousin for fresh grapes and berries, only to have them arrive “so damaged as to be fit for very little.”4

  With nine children, he had necessarily grown concerned with education and its costs. He joined the twelve-member board of a private school in nearby Fredericksburg, raising funds for the school and, occasionally, helping to hire teachers. The high costs of educating his children, however, made him a strong advocate of free public education.

  “A popular government cannot flourish without virtue in the people,* and… knowledge is a principle source of virtue,” he asserted in supporting a group that was organizing Virginia’s first public school. “These facts,” he told them, “render the establishment of schools for the instruction of youth a fundamental concern in all free communities.

  I wish that it had been made a primary duty of the legislature by our [Virginia] constitution. Such establishments will be the surest means of perpetuating our free forms of government, for when men… know… the great inherent rights of human nature, they will not suffer the hands of vice, of violence, or of ignorance to rob them of such inestimable blessings.5

  With that, Richard Henry Lee agreed to transfer two acres of land “for the sole use of a public school.”6

  Lee’s decision not to return to Congress proved a wise one. Before delegates could convene, chaos had erupted in Massachusetts and spread into neighboring New Hampshire, then, like a wild fire, it seemed to engulf the entire nation. The failure of Congress to levy a federal tax had left each state responsible for paying its own war debts—and having to impose property taxes to do so. Making tax payments difficult—indeed, impossible for less affluent Americans—was the near-absence of money. The national government and state governments, along with most merchants, had exhausted their supplies of specie, or “hard” money—silver and gold coins, ingots, and so forth—during the war. State governments had spent much of it buying arms and ammunition and the rest buying badly needed imports immediately after.

  With little specie in circulation, barter became the principal means of commerce, giving rise to a new intermediary in the American business world—the merchant-banker, who combined the functions of both occupations, buying and selling goods like a storekeeper and selling goods on credit like a banker—seeds or tools to a farmer, for example, against his future crop. Without money in the marketplace, farmers had no choice but to trade their perishable produce or livestock for whatever merchant-bankers were willing to pay on market day.

  A poor harvest could leave farmers with too small a crop to realize enough to pay their property taxes, let alone repay merchants. A bumper crop could produce market surpluses and prices too low to cover farmer expenses. As creditors went to court to collect their due, sheriffs swept across the country with court orders to seize farmer properties. Thousands of veterans, many still unpaid for wartime services, saw their lands and homes confiscated, their livestock, tools, and personal possessions auctioned at prices too low to clear their debts. Hysterical wives and terrified children watched helplessly as sheriffs’ deputies dragged farmers off to debtors’ prisons, where they languished indefinitely—unable to earn money to pay their debts and without the tools to do so even if they obtained their release.

  In western Massachusetts former captain Daniel Shays, a destitute farmer struggling to hold onto his property, organized some 500 armed men—mostly veterans of the Revolution—and marched them to Springfield to force the state supreme court to stop foreclosing on their farms. Shouting “close down the courts!” they sent supreme court justices fleeing, shut dow
n the court, and marched across town to surround the federal arsenal, where a state militia awaited, its cannon loaded to annihilate the rebels. By then, however, Shays’s cry had echoed across the state, sending farmers on the march to courthouses in Cambridge, Concord, Worcester, Northampton, Taunton, and Great Barrington—to shut them all down.

  Shays’s rebellion sent waves of fear into state legislatures across the nation, with Virginia’s panicked lawmakers pleading with Richard Henry Lee to return to the Confederation Congress to put the American house in order. “The friends to American honor and happiness here all join in lamenting the riots and mobbish proceedings,” Richard Henry Lee wrote to his cousin Henry Lee III, the heroic wartime general “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who had succeeded Richard Henry in Congress and was a popular favorite to become governor of Virginia.

  Although Richard Henry himself finally agreed to return to Congress, he had as little impact on the spreading anarchy as his cousin. Enraged farmers in Virginia and other states emulated Shays and his followers, taking up rifles and pitchforks to protect their properties, firing at sheriffs and others who ventured too near. Reassembling their wartime companies, they set fire to prisons, courthouses, and county clerks’ offices. New Hampshire farmers marched to the state capital at Exeter, surrounded the legislature, and demanded forgiveness of all debts, return of all seized properties to former owners, and equitable distribution of property. A mob of Maryland farmers burned down the Charles County Courthouse, while Virginia farmers burned down courthouses in King William and New Kent, northeast of Richmond.

  Alarmed by the spreading chaos, Richard Henry Lee urged his cousin, Henry Lee Jr., to appeal to George Washington, then in retirement at his home at Mount Vernon: “I apprehend your solicitude for… a nation formed under your auspices will illy relish intelligence ominous of its destruction,” Henry Lee then wrote to Washington, “but so circumstanced is the federal government that its death cannot be far distant unless immediate and adequate exertions are made by the several states.”

  The younger Lee told Washington that the Confederation Congress seemed to agree on but one point: “no money.”7

  Lee said Virginia had printed V£200,000* for its own uses, but like other states, “they are violent enemies to the impost [federal tax], and I fear even the impending dangers to the existence of the Union will not move them.”8

  Washington, of course, had been first to warn of the forthcoming anarchy when he resigned his commission in 1783. At the time he called it “indispensable that there should be lodged somewhere a supreme power to regulate and govern… the confederated republic, without which the Union cannot be of long duration.

  There must be a faithful and pointed compliance on the part of every state with the demands of Congress… that whatever measures have a tendency to dissolve the Union… ought to be considered as hostile to the liberty and independency of America and the authors treated accordingly.9

  With the chaos that followed Shays’s rebellion, Washington pressed state leaders to act to save the nation in peace as they had in war. “There are errors in our national government,” he complained to New York’s John Jay, who had been secretary for foreign affairs in the Confederation Congress. “Something must be done!”10

  The national chaos disrupted travel plans of so many delegates who had planned to attend the Annapolis convention on trade and commerce that delegates from only five states showed up on time. Without a quorum to proceed, they had little choice but to postpone their discussions until Congress could fix a new date for deliberations. In February 1787 the Confederation Congress reconvened and broadened the agenda of the next meeting, calling on states to convene for “the sole and express purpose of revising the articles of confederation… [and] render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the union.”11

  On May 17, 1787, the first delegates appeared in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of the Confederation—a tissue-thin document that had served as a constitution of sorts since the end of the Revolution. Although state legislatures had elected more than seventy delegates to the convention, not enough arrived in Philadelphia to make up a quorum until May 25, when twenty-nine delegates appeared and elected George Washington the convention president.

  By then several states were ready to take up arms against each other, spurred by speculation that had sent land values soaring. New York and New Hampshire were ready to war over conflicting claims to lands in Vermont; Virginia and Pennsylvania both claimed sovereignty over lands in western Pennsylvania and Kentucky; Massachusetts claimed all of western New York. Connecticut prepared to send its militia into Pennsylvania after Pennsylvania militiamen fired on Connecticut farmers who had staked out vacant lands in the Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania.

  In addition to territorial disputes, many of the states were involved in economic disputes over international trade. States with deep-water ports such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were bleeding the economies of neighboring states with heavy duties on imports that passed through their harbors on their way to inland destinations. “New Jersey, placed between Philadelphia and New York, is like a cask tapped at both ends,” complained Virginia’s James Madison, “and North Carolina, between Virginia and South Carolina seems a patient bleeding at both arms.”12

  Virginia governor Edmund Randolph had appointed George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee among others as delegates to the Philadelphia convention. By then, however, Virginia’s House of Delegates had reappointed Richard Henry Lee to the Confederation Congress in New York, and the prospect of plunging into two political battles—in Philadelphia and New York—was too much for the fifty-five-year-old Richard Henry Lee. He turned down the governor’s appointment, citing “the circumstances of my health” and adding that, with Washington, Henry, and “so many gentlemen of good hearts and sound heads… I feel a disposition to repose in confidence in their determination.”13

  Although Lee did not know it, Patrick Henry, Virginia’s first governor and patron saint of state sovereignty, had also refused to go to Philadelphia, but for other reasons. Although Henry agreed that “ruin is inevitable unless something is done to give Congress a compulsory process on delinquent states,” he believed the convention, as planned, was a fraud.14 Most delegates, Henry charged, were the very merchant-bankers who had provoked farmer rioting by profiting from the purchase and resale of foreclosed properties. Henry also believed the failure of Congress to secure navigation rights to the Mississippi River reflected the centralized government’s inability to serve the best interests of the states or the American people.

  Henry said he would stay home and fight to keep Virginia independent by opposing ratification of whatever changes the Philadelphia convention might make to the Articles of Confederation.

  More shocking than the refusals of Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry to attend the Philadelphia convention was the refusal of George Washington, whose response stirred an outcry from many of his own influential friends. Most warned that his absence would doom the convention to failure and provoke the very anarchy he sought to prevent.

  Secretary at War Henry Knox, a major general in the Revolutionary War and Washington’s chief of artillery from their early days in 1775, warned his old friend that “different states have… views that sooner or later must involve the Country in all the horrors of civil war.

  A neglect in every state of those principles which lead to union and national greatness—an adoption of local in preference to general measures—appears to actuate the greater part of the state politicians. We are entirely destitute of those traits which should stamp us one Nation, and the Constitution of Congress does not promise any alteration.15

  Knox’s letter alerted Washington to the possibility of a bloody civil war and that he was probably the only man in America who might prevent it. Washington finally yielded, admitting that “the disinclination of the individual states to yield competent powers to Congre
ss, their unreasonable jealousy of that body and of one another… will, if there is not a change in the system, be our downfall as a nation.”16

  In deciding to attend the Philadelphia convention, Washington expressed his hope that “the good sense of the people will ultimately get the better of their prejudices.”17

  Although Richard Henry Lee was unwilling to participate in the Constitutional Convention, he did not remain aloof from its proceedings and peppered George Mason, who had replaced Lee at the convention, with proposals for shaping the new government. The owner of a plantation near George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Mason—like Lee and, indeed, Patrick Henry—was a fervent devotee of state sovereignty and reluctant to give the central government powers that might mimic those of Britain’s governing ministry.

  “It has given me much pleasure… that General Washington and yourself have gone to the convention,” Richard Henry Lee wrote to Mason as the convention began. “We may hope… that alterations beneficial will take place in our federal constitution. The human mind,” he warned, “is too apt to rush from one extreme to another.

  When the confederation was submitted for consideration… the universal apprehension was of the too great… powers of Congress… now the cry is power. Give power to the Congress… every free nation that hath ever existed has lost its liberty by the same rash impatience and want of necessary caution.18

  Lee reminded Mason that the main complaint against the Confederation Congress had been its inability to raise money to pay its debts and support the federal government. He said the states had been so “unpardonably remiss” in providing the necessary funds “as to make impost [a federal tax] necessary for a term of time, with a provisional security that the money arising shall be unchangeably applied to the payment of their public debts.”19

  Lee also proposed giving Congress alone the exclusive right to print paper money.