The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

by Joseph J. Ellis

  As Washington saw it, he was not backing out because he had never backed in. His name was included on the list of the Virginia delegation without his permission, and he was on record, in a quite public fashion, as forever forbidden to step back onto the stage. The Cincinnatus role became his chief line of defense well into the spring of 1787. As he explained to Randolph, his presence at Philadelphia “would be considered as inconsistent with my public declaration delivered in a solemn manner at an interesting Aera of my life, never more to meddle in public matters. This declaration not only stands in the files of Congress, but is I believe registered in almost all the Gazettes and magazines that are published.” This sacred vow was perfectly aligned with his private preference, indeed deeply personal urge, “to see this Country happy whilst I am gliding down the stream of life in tranquil retirement,” an urge that was “so much the wish of my Soul, that nothing on this side of Elysium can be placed in competition with it.”21

  Despite what had become a multilayered series of defense mechanisms, Washington was vulnerable to entreaties from Jay and Madison because he was also on record, at least privately, advocating precisely the political agenda they were now proposing. In fact, as he himself acknowledged, “No Man in the United States is, or can be, more deeply impressed with the necessity of reform in our present Confederation than myself.” By disposition given to some combinations of prudence and reticence on most controversial issues, when it came to the postwar government, he was slashing in his criticism. “In a word,” he declared, “the Confederation appears to me to be little more than an empty sound and Congress a nugatory body.” During the war the Continental Congress had barely kept the Continental Army on life support, routinely rejecting requests for money and troops. As he saw it, the Confederation Congress had sustained that ignoble tradition after the war in its deliberate embrace of indifference and inadequacy. “We are either a United people or we are not,” he observed. “If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation…. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.” There is a certain irony to the political situation in the winter of 1786–87, since Washington was resisting attempts by Jay and Madison to recruit him to a cause that he cared about as much or more than they did.22

  Washington’s mind, then, was completely clear on the substantive question: the Articles needed to be replaced, not just revised, by a federal government empowered to act as a representative of the American people as a whole. He was, in truth, the most nationalistic of the nationalists, because he had invested more than anyone else in making the American Revolution succeed, and he had concluded during the course of the war that success entailed a consolidated national government capable of managing the states.

  The crucial question was whether now was the time to invest his enormous prestige in a cause that, at least as he saw it, might very well repeat the fiasco at Annapolis. He consulted Henry Knox, his old artillery commander, framing the issue along the lines of a military decision: Should we risk a battle, or avoid a fight until the strategic situation improved? Knox and Washington had made countless decisions of that sort during the war, and Knox argued that in this case the political terrain was too treacherous, the gamble too great. The state delegations to the Philadelphia convention, as Knox saw it, were likely to be divided into three factions: conservatives, who wished no change at all; moderates, who wished only modest revisions in the Articles; and radicals, who wished a major transformation into an energetic national government. Only if the latter group was likely to triumph should Washington join the battle, and that outcome was currently unpredictable. Best, therefore, to resist all overtures to attend the convention. Knox’s analysis struck Washington as the kind of cautious wisdom that echoed battlefield decisions in days of yore. “In confidence, I inform you,” he apprised Knox in March 1787, “that it is not, at this time, my purpose to attend.”23

  This conclusion, while avowedly tentative, received reinforcement in a lengthy memorandum from David Humphreys—like Knox, a fellow veteran who had served on Washington’s staff as an aide-de-camp. A Yale graduate, an aspiring poet, and the kind of bright young man Washington liked to fold into his official family, Humphreys had recently arrived at Mount Vernon to serve as Washington’s private secretary. He saw himself as guardian of Washington’s reputation and prepared a list of reasons why attendance at the convention would be a huge mistake.

  The old arguments were trotted out: the Society of the Cincinnati, meeting in Philadelphia at the same time, would feel betrayed; and Washington would be violating his solemn vow never to reenter public life, the Cincinnatus argument. He then confirmed Knox’s assessment that the political context was highly problematic, going further to predict failure to reach consensus on any new political framework, making Washington’s presence a massive embarrassment (“Your opinions & your eloquence regarded as ‘trifles-light as air’ ”), thereby burdening his legacy with a dramatic failure. Humphreys then added one new ingredient to the political equation: even if by some miracle the convention succeeded, Washington would almost surely be asked to head the new government, sweeping him back into the public arena and the inevitable vicissitudes of domestic politics, ending forever the bucolic splendor of his retirement years at Mount Vernon, most probably staining his heretofore spotless reputation as a heroic figure who levitated above such political infighting. In Humphreys’s calculation, Washington had nothing to gain and much to lose by going to Philadelphia.24

  There is no written record of Washington’s response to Humphreys’s memorandum—their proximity at Mount Vernon precluded correspondence. But indirect evidence suggests that Washington was wavering, though still leaning toward remaining retired, groping for personal reasons to justify his absence from Philadelphia. He wrote Knox to explain that his arm was in a sling due to rheumatism, making travel difficult. In addition, his brother had just died, “the most affectionate friend of my ripened age,” and his mother, Mary Ball Washington, was dying of breast cancer in Fredericksburg, and though he and she had been estranged for many years, now was not the time to leave her alone.25

  But these domestic considerations, it turns out, were final flings of resistance against the persuasive powers of Madison, who was providing updated reports on a state-by-state basis of the delegates chosen to attend the convention. Madison’s tallies revealed that, unlike at Annapolis, a quorum would be present in Philadelphia; only Rhode Island would fail to show up. Even more significant, most of the opponents of reform had decided to boycott the convention, thereby confining the debate to advocates of moderate and radical reform. If Washington’s major reservation was that he should not risk his reputation in a political contest that was doomed to fail, Madison’s analysis of the delegate count indicated that abject failure was highly unlikely. And with Washington on board, the prospect for thoroughgoing reform of the Articles became realistic, if not assured.

  Though he lacked Madison’s mastery of the state-by-state numbers, Knox altered his advice in mid-March on the basis of information indicating that attendance at the convention would be more robust than he had expected. Along with Humphreys, he had earlier urged caution on the grounds that Washington’s prestige was too precious to risk in such a questionable venture. Now, however, he reversed his view of the risk. “But were an energetic and judicious system to be proposed with Your Signature,” Knox predicted, “it would be a circumstance highly honorable to your fame, in the judgment of present and future ages; and doubly entitle you to the glorious republican epithet—the Father of Your Country.” In this formulation, Washington had much to lose if he refused to show up at Philadelphia and the convention succeeded in creating the kind of national government that he had always advocated. The legacy question, then, was double-edged.26

  Madison’s canvass of the state delegations altered Washington’s sense of the odds, and Knox’s new formulation of the legacy question pushed him over the edge. Though he retained his reservations about “again a
ppearing on a public theatre after a public declaration of the contrary,” by late March he had decided to join the Virginia delegation in Philadelphia. He wanted and received a final commitment from Madison that the convention would “adopt no temporizing expedient, but probe the defects of the Constitution to the bottom, and provide radical cures, whether they are agreed to or not.” The goal must be replacing the Articles, not just revising them.27

  Once they had captured the great prize, Jay and Madison, soon joined by Hamilton and Knox, formed an informal council of advisers to give Washington a tutorial in political theory. Washington had a firm grasp of the big picture—the new government needed to possess expanded powers sufficient to make laws for the nation as a whole—but its political architecture had never attracted his full attention. Since it was a foregone conclusion that he would be chosen president of the convention, he needed an education in the basic vocabulary of republican government. Jay and Madison were both sophisticated political thinkers eager to provide Washington with an intellectual road map to reach the destination that all of them already agreed upon. For his part, Washington was accustomed to leading by listening, having chaired countless councils of war in which junior officers presented options to the commander in chief. He spent much of April taking notes on the letters from Jay and Madison.

  Jay believed that the core debate at the convention would be between those who wished to reform the Articles and those who wished to replace them. Washington did not need to be coached on this issue, having long since declared himself a radical rather than a reformer. The preferred framework for the new government, as Jay saw it, was the tripartite model embodied in most of the state governments: executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The executive branch would generate the greatest opposition, because critics would claim that any energetic exercise of executive power was monarchical. This debate would be fierce, because “the spirit of ’76” stigmatized a potent executive as the second coming of George III, but it was a battle that had to be won.

  In order to ensure federal sovereignty over the states, Jay believed that the national government should have a veto over all state laws, much like the British king’s veto over colonial legislation, another crucial principle that would prove extremely controversial but could not be compromised. The knotty question of sovereignty—did it reside in the states or in the federal government?—was the central issue requiring a clear resolution. If the federal veto proved impossible, an alternative argument, an artful finesse, might be that sovereignty was located in “the people,” a somewhat ambiguous formulation that bent the shape of the new constitution in a national direction.28

  Madison predicted that the big fight would come on the question of representation in the legislature, which would be bicameral. Would it be by state or by population? A successful outcome depended on the rejection of the state-based system in the Articles, because only a Congress that accurately reflected the population as a whole could claim to be a national government. Like Jay, Madison wanted a federal veto over state laws, and he also thought that this would be a hard-fought battle in which defeat would mean failure of the entire enterprise.

  On the sovereignty question, Madison suggested a subtler and in the end more ingenious solution, which was to abandon the belief that it must be singular and indivisible: “I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities when they can be subordinately useful.” Instead of arguing about the ultimate location of sovereignty, Madison was suggesting that no such place existed. In purely rhetorical terms, Jay’s resort to “the people” worked well, but in practical terms it might prove preferable to embrace some version of shared sovereignty that blurred the line between federal and state authority. Madison was inventing what came to be called “federalism,” a government in which sovereignty was a matter of ongoing negotiations between the state and federal governments on a case-by-case basis. The genius of Madison’s formulation was that it imposed a national grid in lieu of the state-based Articles but left room for local, state, and regional loyalties to remain relevant.29

  This was actually Madison’s “fallback” position, a compromise on the all-important sovereignty question that he was prepared to share, in confidence with Washington in the spring of 1787, but then vigorously oppose during the deliberations in Philadelphia. He would embrace it again during the ratification debates of 1787–88, once the delegates at the Constitutional Convention had rejected his more radical insistence that the sovereignty question be clearly resolved. Since it turned out to be a defining principle of federalism and perhaps Madison’s central contribution to American political thought, it is interesting to note that the germ of the idea was there from the start.

  While Washington remained the central prize in the spring of 1787, Madison had become the central player. Although Jay had initiated the seduction of Washington, Madison had consummated his capture by demonstrating, on the basis of state-by-state assessments of the delegates, that the prospects for success in Philadelphia were plausible. He had also demonstrated the intellectual agility to move comfortably between the nitty-gritty world of practical politics and the more rarified world of political theory.

  Currently serving his second term as a member of the Virginia delegation in the Confederation Congress, Madison was also perfectly positioned to orchestrate the political strategy that would maximize the prospects for success at the looming convention in Philadelphia. And as it turned out, he was thoroughly prepared for that task both intellectually and emotionally. Though he still signed all his letters “James Madison, Jr.,” at thirty-six years of age he was a veteran political operative at both the state and national levels, already famous for his ability to count noses, keep a confidence, cultivate colleagues, and let others take credit for political victories that he had actually managed.

  Both experience and temperament, then, had prepared him to play a leadership role at a most propitious moment in American history. In retrospect, Madison was about to enter the most productive and consequential chapter of what turned out to be a fifty-year career in public service.

  Madison’s emerging political stature defied his physical appearance, since “little Jemmy Madison” was, at five foot four and 120 pounds, a diminutive young man, forever lingering on the edge of some fatal ailment. Born into a prominent Virginia family with a sizable plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he enjoyed a sheltered childhood before being sent off to the College at New Jersey (later Princeton) in 1769. Classmates described him as brilliant but paralyzingly shy, perhaps best suited for a career as a schoolmaster or librarian. Madison himself, somewhat morbidly, predicted that whatever career he pursued would be short-lived, given his frailty. As it turned out, he outlived all his classmates and most of his contemporaries, observing near the end that “I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.”30

  Like most members of Virginia’s planter class, Madison was an early advocate of American independence. Though he served briefly in the Virginia militia, the very idea of Madison as a soldier was ridiculous. His natural environment was the political rather than the military battlefield, and his version of leadership, so different from Hamilton’s, was very much a product of his experience in the Virginia legislature, which put a premium on building consensus rather than dashing out in front of the troops in a headlong charge.

  The collaborative context also fit nicely with Madison’s deep-rooted reticence. For example, while serving with George Mason on a committee to draft a Declaration of Rights for Virginia’s new constitution in the spring of 1776, Madison expanded Mason’s language on religious freedom, going beyond mere toleration to insist that “all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of religion.” But he did so silently, allowing Mason, his senior and Virginia’s leading student of political theory, to claim all the credit. Then, eight years later, it was Madison who ushered Jefferson’s d
raft of a bill for religious freedom through the Virginia legislature, while Jefferson received all the recognition for the landmark law, even putting it on his tombstone as one of his proudest achievements.

  Madison’s trademark talent was superior preparation. While serving on the Governor’s Council (1778–79), then again in the Virginia legislature (1779–80), he seldom missed a session and always seemed to have more facts at his fingertips than anyone else. Amid the flamboyant orators of the Virginia dynasty he was almost invisible and wholly unthreatening, but the acknowledged master of the inoffensive argument that so often proved decisive. He seemed so innocuous, even gentle, that it was impossible to unleash one’s full fury against him without seeming a belligerent fool. His style, in effect, was not to have one. As a result, a Madisonian argument lacked all the emotional affectations but struck with the force of pure thought, embedded in often overwhelming amounts of evidence. As one commentator put it later, “Never have I seen so much mind in so little matter.”31

  It is difficult to identify the time, much less the moment, when Madison became a full-blooded nationalist. Unlike Washington and Hamilton, he lacked the experience of serving in the Continental Army, which was the political and psychological foundation of their disgust with the confederation framework. And unlike Jay, he never served abroad, so he was denied Jay’s experience of representing a government purporting to be the United States that, in fact, did not exist.