Washington- The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

  Washington urged audacity. According to a fellow delegate, he stated, “It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”

  While they were waiting for a quorum, the Virginia delegates, including Washington, drew up a plan for a powerful central government entrusted with all broad national affairs. It would be based on a separation of powers and designed to create a system of checks and balances. Since the state legislatures would presumably not thus weaken themselves, it was suggested that special conventions be elected in each state to decide whether to ratify. After only five days of discussion the whole convention took the giant step of scrapping the Articles of Confederation. It voted to establish “a national government … consisting of a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary.”

  The problem then was to determine what weight to assign on the checks and balances to the various political bodies, interests, and forces.

  George Washington, painted at the time of the Constitutional Convention by Charles Willson Peale (Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

  As Washington well realized, in this convention a mere majority vote was as useless as it had been in the wartime Continental Congress. What would be gained by having seven states sign the document eventually drafted while six went off in a rage? Even one state permanently lost would violate national unity. And, although Washington recognized that the work of the convention might be repudiated by the people, he wished to make this as unlikely as possible. Clearly, any upsurge of opposition in the convention that was not satisfied presaged a similar upsurge in some part of the nation.

  Unity could only be hoped for if there were mutual understanding between delegates from the different regions. At the start of the convention, this understanding was conspicuously absent. Washington, who was more traveled in the United States than almost any other delegate, had not penetrated into New England north of the Boston area and had never been south of Virginia. Madison admitted that he knew no more of Georgia than Kamchatka. Furthermore, ignorance was fortified by mutual suspicions and hostilities that often dated back to the earliest years of settlement.

  Washington had seen colonial distrusts and rivalries fade away as men from various regions were thrown together in the army camps during eight years of war. Now the process had to be repeated, but much more quickly—during a few months of stifling summer weather. The delegates were rubbed against each other in two ways: in formal debate and over tavern tables. It may well be that the tavern meetings were more important towards creating the Constitution than the formal debates.

  At the convivial gatherings Washington was endlessly present, dining at one place, having supper at another, chatting between the acts of plays. He sought always to bring diverse points of view into the open and then together. History will never be able to assess the extent of the contribution Washington made through such personal contacts, but it was surely great. His years of military service and his hospitality at Mount Vernon had made many of the delegates already his friends or acquaintances; his personal prestige was awesome even with those who had not previously met him; and he had, to a superlative degree, the gift of finding beneath controversy common ground.

  The convention having unanimously elected Washington President, he was prevented by his office from taking part in the discussions. However, all remarks were titularly addressed to him, and the room was small. (There were rarely as many as thirty delegates present.) His face was clearly visible to everyone. Often he listened torpidly. His wartime aide John Laurens wrote, “When the muscles are in a state of repose, his eye certainly wants animation.” But “his countenance, when affected either by joy or anger, is full of expression.” Many delegates were to remember how the proceedings of the convention were influenced by his “anxious solicitude” at angry disagreement, his pleasure at fruitful compromise.

  Since the convention was trying to establish a government altogether new under the sun, there were no precedents to violate—but also none to steer by. All the issues involved in government stalked the hall at one time or another. Among the troublesome problems were drawing lines between state and federal power, decisions concerning slavery (the more defensively protected in the South because disapproved of in the North), southern suspicions that federal trade regulations would make them serfs to New England shippers, taxation, fear of tyranny at one extreme or anarchy at the other. The level of agreement reached was phenomenal, and, when agreement proved too difficult, many a decision was left vague, to be worked out in actual practice.

  As Washington had five years before suggested, the new Constitution, leaving local jurisdiction to the states, gave the federal government control over matters affecting the entire Union. Bypassing the state legislatures, which had previously chosen all elected national officials, the Constitution gave federal ballots to individual voters everywhere. But the state pretensions, which had made Washington so much trouble during the Revolution and had torn the subsequent government apart, survived to create the one issue that threatened to wreck the Constitutional Convention.

  The states differed vastly in size (Virginia, for instance, being about fifteen times as populous as Delaware). If, as Washington believed, in a true people’s government every vote should carry the same weight, the inhabitants of the larger states would automatically outvote those of the smaller. But the smaller states, which had historically considered themselves equivalent to the mammoths, were determined not to lose their consequence. They wished each state to have, as was the case in the Continental Congress, an equal vote.

  When, led by Madison, the larger revealed determination to have representation be not by states but by population, spokesmen for the smaller went so far as to threaten that they would make alliances with foreign powers to protect themselves. Washington wrote, “I almost despair … and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business.” But no one really wanted to give up. Finally, all delegations accepted a compromise by which, after special powers in relation to treasury bills were given to the popularly elected House of Representatives, the representation in the Senate was established not by population but by states.

  Washington was personally most involved in decisions concerning the executive. If it were to be a committee of three men each representing a major section of the country, he could return undisturbed to Mount Vernon. But once the President was set up as a single individual, no one could doubt who that individual would be. In a world frightened by a long history of kings, the convention decided on one President and allowed him an amazing amount of power. He was to be elected independently of the other branches and to be indefinitely reelectable. He could carry out the many important functions assigned to him uncontrolled by any statutory advisers. He was to be commander in chief of the armed forces and, while the Congress could not interfere in his province, he could interfere with the Congress through a veto. He could only be removed from office because of treason or criminal behavior. A delegate explained, “Many of the members … shaped their ideas of the powers to be given to a President by their opinions of his [Washington’s] virtues.” The impress of Washington’s prestige remains in the strength allowed the President of the United States.

  Rhode Island had boycotted the convention. On September 17, the delegations of the other twelve states unanimously (although three individual delegates voted no) accepted the completed draft. Wearily, Washington wrote Lafayette that the Constitution “is now a child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others. What will be the general opinion on, or the reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say anything for or against it. If it be good, I suppose it will work its way good. If bad, it will recoil on the framers.”

  The task that lay ahead—to secure adoption of the Con
stitution by the nine states necessary to make it operative, by the thirteen necessary for peace and harmony on the continent—was in many ways a more difficult, if less creative, task than drawing up the document. It was agreed that no delegate would aid the opposition by specifying which points he had, in the spirit of compromise, agreed to reluctantly. Since Washington abided by this rule, it is not clear why he was not at first enthusiastic about the Constitution, but it is clear that he was not. He wrote three Virginia leaders identical letters stating, “Your own judgment will at once discover the good and the exceptionable parts of it, and your experience of the difficulties which have ever arisen when attempts have been made to reconcile such variety of interests and local prejudices as pervade the several states will render explanation unnecessary. I wish the Constitution which is offered had been made more perfect, but I sincerely believe it is the best that could be obtained at this time; and, as a constitutional door is open to amendment hereafter, the adoption of it under the present circumstances of the Union is in my opinion, desirable.” He believed that if nothing had been agreed upon, “anarchy would soon have ensued, the seeds being richly sown in every soil.”

  The debate over ratification elicited a flood of pamphlets on both sides. Washington read them all. He became convinced that the arguments of the opponents, based mostly on regionalism and an identification of strong government with tyranny, were hysterical when they were not self-serving. The pamphlets supporting the Constitution, particularly The Federalist written by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, persuaded Washington that “this Constitution is really in its formation a government of the people; that is to say, a government in which all power is derived from, and, at stated periods, reverts to them; and that, in its operation, it is purely a government of laws, made and executed by the fair substitutes of the people alone.… It is clear to my conception that no government before introduced among mankind ever contained so many checks and such efficacious restraints to prevent it from degenerating into any species of oppression.”

  Washington became passionately eager to have the Constitution ratified. The various state conventions followed a recurring pattern that was harrowing to the nerves. The majority of the delegates arrived opposed to the Constitution. But, as the debates went on, one delegate after another became convinced, and finally the majority voted “yea.” As Washington watched, he again and again strained as on a leash to interfere. However, he had resolved to take no active part in the debate.

  At one particularly dangerous turn on the road to ratification Washington wondered if he had not “meddled … in this political dispute less perhaps than a man so thoroughly persuaded as I am of the evils and confusions which will result from the rejection of the proposed Constitution ought to have done.” Yet, whether because of political acumen or because of some deep identification between what came naturally to him and what most appealed to the collective mind of the American people, his continued refusal to take part was surely the most effective role he could have played.

  In a world familiar with the tyranny of kings, popular fears clustered around executive power. That everyone expected Washington to be the first President was reassuring, but would it have comforted so much had he actively labored to persuade the people to give him the opportunity to exert such power?

  Furthermore, if Washington had entered the debate, the thrust of his influence might have been dissipated in arguments over specifics. As it was, all voters knew that he had presided over the creation of the Constitution and had been the first to sign. In his physical absence, his prestige hovered over every state convention. How carefully the opposition had to tack around this invisible presence was revealed by Luther Martin of Maryland, who intoned, “The name of Washington is far above my praise! I would to Heaven that on this occasion one more wreath had been added to the number of those which are twined around his amiable brow—that those with which it is already surrounded may flourish with immortal verdure, not wither or fade till time shall be no more, is my fervent prayer!” But—

  In writing Jefferson, Monroe thus assessed Washington’s role: “Be assured, his influence carried this government.”

  Late in June, 1788, more than ten months after Washington had put his signature on the proposed Constitution, almost simultaneous word came to Mount Vernon of two more ratifications. The total of assenting states was thus raised to one more than the nine needed to make the Constitution operative. As Washington, to the booming of celebrative cannon, stood on his piazza looking down over a Potomac aglow with the lights of boats coming to offer him congratulations, he hailed in his own mind what he later described as “a new phenomenon in the political and moral world, and an astonishing victory gained by enlightened reason over brute force.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Hysteria and Responsibility

  (1788)

  Washington had truly dreaded going to the Constitutional Convention, but once he had taken that step, his feet were irrevocably on the public road. He had feared that the road would carry him into the darkest ravines, but it had mounted to what he believed were shining heights. Using one of the theatrical metaphors of which he was so fond, he wrote the Irish patriot Sir Edward Newenham, “You will permit me to say that a greater drama is now acting on this theater than has heretofore been brought on the American stage, or any other in the world. We exhibit at present the novel and astonishing spectacle of a whole people deliberating calmly on what form of government will be most conducive to their happiness.” America was approaching “nearer to perfection than any government hitherto instituted among men.”

  Hazards remained. Three states had not ratified. Although the absence of Rhode Island and North Carolina could be temporarily accepted, if the huge, central state of New York stayed outside, that would be grave. As Washington watched from Mount Vernon, there was another struggle against odds, but in the end New York did ratify.

  Next came the congressional elections. If Congress were not to be filled with men opposed to the Constitution, who might sabotage the new government, the educative process which had persuaded the Constitutional Convention and then the eleven state conventions would have to be extended to the people at large. Washington protested angrily a new post office regulation that would impede the distribution of newspapers. “The friends of the Constitution,” he wrote, wanted “the public to be possessed of everything that might be printed on both sides of the question.” He was convinced that, if informed, the people would be won over. And enough were won over to enable him to exult concerning the first Congress that “the self-created respectability [worthiness of respect] and various talents of the members will not be inferior to any assembly in the world.”

  During the Constitutional Convention, a listing of the rights reserved to the people had been proposed but considered unnecessary since “natural law” dictated that the people retained all rights that they did not specifically delegate to their government. However, when the debates at the state ratifying conventions made clear that a “bill of rights” would give, as Washington put it, “extreme satisfaction,” he urged that the indicated amendments—freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, and so on—be immediately enacted.

  As the months passed, during which the Continental Congress laboriously presided over setting the new government in motion, Washington made no comment concerning the universal expectation that the Electoral College would unanimously select him as the first President. He made not the slightest gesture that could be considered campaigning. He stayed closer to his front lawn than he had ever done for an equivalent period of time, but his mind was no longer on his acres. Privately, he spoke of great “sacrifice,” but the truth seems to have been that he was looking forward to the office with eagerness.

  On a purely practical level, the Presidency would rescue Washington from the dilemma caused by his continually living beyond his income: although he intended to refuse a salary, his living and entertaining expenses for most of each year would be paid. F
urthermore, he would find a delicious excitement in leading so glorious an experiment—and he did not envision the task as extremely difficult. The most important labor would be to solidify the government by cementing to it the allegiance of the people. This would be done by visible virtue, a spirit within the government not of contention but compromise, by soothing regional prejudices, by improving the prosperity of the nation.

  Already, before he had reestablished connections with his former military aide and future financial adviser, Alexander Hamilton, Washington considered it as a primary necessity “to extricate my country” from the great shortage of financial credit. But he foresaw no elaborate schemes. Since the country was rich in resources, he felt it only necessary to remove impediments that blocked free enterprise. Prosperity would be “the natural harvest of good government.”

  Although Washington agreed with Jefferson that the United States should and would remain an agricultural country, he demonstrated, as the Presidency loomed, a sudden interest in manufacturing. Why should America allow her staples to be processed abroad? In his eagerness to encourage a native textile industry, he was to wear at his inauguration a great rarity: a suit made from cloth woven in the United States.

  Himself hating tax collectors, Washington resolved that a sure way to the hearts of the people was to make the government as cheap as possible. The former Commander in Chief wanted only a minimal standing army, and saw no need for a navy as long as American merchants kept on the seas vessels that could in an emergency be armed. Behind her ocean moat, the nation was not likely to be attacked, and she should not herself reach out to meddle abroad. In international affairs, the people should “guard against ambition as their greatest enemy.”