The festival involved a great deal of drinking and merrymaking. The Philadelphians were eager to sing their fake “Indian language” songs for Cornplanter, and they demonstrated their “war dances.” They begged the Senecas to show them theirs, and the Indians obliged. At some point, Cornplanter, who must have figured that the sheer size of the crowd made this an opportune moment to appeal yet again to Americans on behalf of his people, asked to speak. The seriousness of his message may not have been in keeping with the festival, but it was received respectfully enough that the Daily Advertiser took it down verbatim.
“Brothers,” he began, “hearken to what I tell you. This great gathering of our brothers is to commemorate the memory of our great grandfather.” He must have gestured toward a flag bearing the likeness of Chief Tamenend. The forebears of the Indians and the whites, he went on, had “loved each other, and strongly recommended to their children to live in union and friendship.” (Like any diplomat, he was not afraid to employ overstatement for political effect.) Therefore, he implored the crowd, “Let us keep fast the chain of friendship.” He enriched his appeal with spirituality: “I heard it said our great grandfathers are dead—they are not dead. They now look down upon us, and what we are doing. Much more God looks upon us, he sees what we are doing.” By now the Philadelphians assembled for merriment on the riverbank would have realized something of the depth of suffering that was being expressed by this Iroquois from a distant place. “I think God Almighty at this time is sorry for the poor Indians,” Cornplanter said. “He is grieved at the afflictions now come upon them.” Cornplanter had become a very good public speaker by this time. He knew how to build an argument, how to pause for effect, to scan the crowd. “I hope you have observed that I have always tears in my eyes,” he declared. Referencing the fact that his people had sided with the British, he added, “I am sorry that we have been led astray. I hope you will do everything to put me right. Then God will look upon you and us, and help us. He will have pity on us both if we do right.”
A stunned silence seemed to follow his words. The Saint Tammany festival was a lighthearted affair, but everyone knew that at its center was an Indian leader of the past who personified wisdom. It must have seemed as though he had been reincarnated—except that this latter-day wise Indian was dressed in European clothes while the white men were made up as Indians. Life was strange.
Then the crowd roared—gave, in fact, three cheers. Thirteen cannons, one for each state of the new union, blasted away in salute. The Tammany leaders made a circle for Cornplanter and his companions to sit in. A pipe was proffered. Everyone smoked. Cornplanter took a glass of wine that was offered to him and poured it onto the soil as a libation. There was goodwill all around. Maybe everything would work out—maybe everything would be just fine.
The goodwill extended: Cornplanter and his followers were put up in fine style—at the Indian Queen Hotel, no less—and the citizens of Philadelphia offered them a coach and driver for their trip to New York. On the way, the good fortune ended. The carriage tipped over and several of the passengers were hurt, Cornplanter worst of all, with a deep gash in his forehead above his eye, which permanently disfigured him.
The accident may have been disorienting, but so was the crossing of the river and the entry into New York. If Cornplanter had previously fashioned a sense of the power of the new American nation, of how vast and mighty was this force the Iroquois were dealing with, that sense was now magnified. New York was feverishly throwing off the vestiges of its long years of military occupation. Bricks were stacked everywhere as buildings were being repaired. The population had doubled from what it was just a few years before. Tailors, butchers, ropemakers, cobblers, chandlers and saddlers plied their wares, and people lined up to buy. Lawyers hustled along the streets, the sheafs of papers under their arms denoting land deals, marriages, inheritances. Enormous wooden vessels sat at anchor in the harbor. Wagons and carriages roared by—the danger of these was uppermost in the Senecas’ minds now—carrying everything from logs to hogs. Shop windows displayed frying pans hanging from hooks, boxes of tea and salt and tobacco; there were advertisements for “QUEENS-WARE quart MUGS,” paint brushes, toys, tureens, sets of claret glasses, “Jamaica spirits,” cognac, molasses, Russia duck, codfish in barrels and “pickled sturgeon, cured in the Holland mode.”
After having run this gauntlet, the Senecas found themselves, on Tuesday, May 2, 1786, at City Hall, which was serving as the latest home of the Congress of the Confederation (as the nation’s governing body was now known). Cornplanter was disappointed that George Washington was not on hand. Washington was the great victor in battle over England; he assumed he would now sit at the head of the government. But he was hundreds of miles away, in Virginia. Richard Butler, who had negotiated the treaty at Fort Stanwix and met with them in Carlisle, introduced Cornplanter to the delegates. Cornplanter spoke as he had in Carlisle and Philadelphia. He said that he represented Indians who felt that they had been cheated by the combined effect of the treaties of Paris and Fort Stanwix. The chairman of the Congress, David Ramsay of South Carolina, asked him to return in three days to receive the official American response. Cornplanter did so, and Ramsay began by outlining the details of the treaty between the United States and England concerning North American territory. He held the document and actually pointed to the place where King George had signed it, and told Cornplanter he wanted him to assure all the Indians that “the King of England” had “given up, to them the lands of the Indians.” The Americans had then negotiated with the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix, and signed a treaty, which ascribed certain lands to them. “The United States,” he said, “will take care that none of their Citizens shall intrude upon the Indians within the bounds which in the late Treaties were allotted for them to hunt and live upon.” The Congress, he said, “will do what is right and proper for the Indians.”
The Senecas were overwhelmed—presumably as much by New York itself as by the definitive declaration that the Americans had officially and permanently taken possession of much of the Iroquois’ traditional homeland. Once again, Cornplanter was made to understand what the Iroquois were up against. Then too, if the Congress did indeed live up to the promise David Ramsay made him, that would, perhaps, be something to hang on to. His back was against the wall; it was not within him to issue a call to war that would bring the American army down on his people. “Brothers, what you have said is good,” he replied. “My mind had been disposed to war, but you wisely recommend peace, and I thank you for your advice, and for the good things you have said, and pray that the Great Spirit above may take care of you.”
Cornplanter and his men stayed for six weeks in New York. In the midst of whatever touristic missions they undertook, Cornplanter made repeated visits to a studio, where he sat before an artist named Frederick Bartoli who was visiting from Europe. Someone—perhaps Butler, on behalf of the Congress—had commissioned a portrait of the Seneca leader. The Congress had also earmarked 400 dollars to be spent on presents for the Seneca delegation; among those that Cornplanter received were a silver medal, silver armbands, and a red blanket. He decided to be painted adorned with these, as well as a collection of other items, both native and European. The artist chose not to show the ugly wound above the eye that he had suffered in the carriage accident. But he seems to have done justice to the man’s expression, which, in the course of the sittings, showed many things: pride, pain, suffering, hope tempered by sad wisdom, endurance.
George Washington, in retirement, was the celebrated squire of Mount Vernon. If he was gratified to have thrown off a king, and happy not to have become a dictator, then he reveled in emulating a hero of his: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who, after serving as all-powerful ruler of Rome, threw off the mantel of power and took up the plow and tools of a simple farmer.
Washington farmed his estate with renewed vigor. He felt at ease and at peace, and outlined his situation in a letter to Lafayette: “At length my Dear Marquis I am becom
e a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, & under the shadow of my own Vine & my own Fig tree, free from the bustle of a camp & the busy scenes of public life.” He made clear that he wanted nothing but more of the same for himself in the future: “I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retireing within myself; & shall be able to view the solitary walk, & tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. . . . I will move gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my Fathers.”
But retirement was not so simple. The most celebrated man in America, the universally recognized hero of the new nation, could not hide from the public. People came to Mount Vernon by twos and tens, in official delegations and as unannounced drop-ins. He and Martha were forced to play hosts on a daily basis. He came to understand that this was inevitable. He personified something: the public needed to make human contact with the fact of their country’s new status. And so the Washingtons readied beds, offered dinners; he poured wine and dutifully recounted stories of battle. Some of the visitors were French aristocrats. Others were Virginia dignitaries who wanted his blessing or support for their schemes. Accolades rolled in steadily. The city of Fredericksburg—“Our Sincere Congratulations on your safe return from the Noisy Clashing of Arms”—wanted to host a ball in his honor. He acquiesced, and decided that, as his mother lived in the city, he would bring her along. True to her nature, when the city delegation showed up at her door to invite her to accompany “His Excellency,” Mary Washington shot back: “His Excellency? What nonsense!” She was perhaps the one person whose acknowledgment of his success he would have welcomed, but she denied him that satisfaction. She did, however, attend the ball.
Just as exhausting as the visits from strangers was the unending stream of letters: about plans for the expansion of the country, about Indian relations, about business. A visiting Italian nobleman wanted to pay a visit. Noah Webster wrote asking for his support for “my grammatical publications.” (He replied with best wishes “in the prosecution of your design of refining the language . . . so as to reduce it to perfect regularity.”) He plunged into correspondence about the possibilities of extending navigation on the Potomac River. He paid great attention to the compiling and amassing of his wartime correspondence, anxious as he was to preserve it so that his biography and the history of the Revolution could be written.
One topic that he no doubt wished would go away but which came up again and again was slavery. Lafayette was now positively indignant with Washington and other American leaders, insisting that abolition be among the first steps the new government took. “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery,” he said. He wrote to Washington in his retirement suggesting that the two of them “unite in purchasing a small estate where we may try the experiment to free the Negroes and use them only as tenants.”
Along with other slave owners, Washington ducked these attempts. In conversation with abolitionists he expressed his moral condemnation of the institution, but he took no public steps to end it. In fact, on more than one occasion he peculiarly reversed logic and suggested that it was slave owners like himself who were the victims, presumably out of a feeling that he was caught in a moral-economic vice. In a letter to Robert Morris he declared that “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” but also insisted that “when slaves who are happy & content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with & seduced to leave them; when masters are taken at unawares by these practices . . . it introduces more evils than it can cure.”
Many of the letters he received at Mount Vernon were from the gentlemen of the Congress. His fellow Virginian James Madison in particular took to schooling him on what was transpiring among the delegates: the growing number of ideas for reforming the government, for starting a paper currency, for fomenting a “federal spirit.” He told Madison he considered “the foederal governmnt” to be “the great, & most important of all objects.” From his pastoral distance, he urged the delegates to take a long view of things. “Let prejudices, unreasonable jealousies, and local interest yield to reason and liberality,” he wrote. “Let us look to our National character, and to things beyond the present period. No Morn ever dawned more favourable than ours.”
He offered such lofty sentiments in hopes that they would suffice, that the others would figure it out themselves. But Madison was cultivating Washington with a purpose in mind: to get him involved, when the time was right. Finally, he judged that it was. A new convention was to be held, in Philadelphia, to reform the government. Virginia would send its delegation. And Virginia wanted Washington to lead it.
Washington didn’t give a firm answer. But other events were calling out to him. In Massachusetts, farmers clashed violently with state tax assessors, and then with a private militia that the state was forced to raise in the absence of a national army. News of Shays’s Rebellion, as it was called, after its leader, swept through the states. In Virginia, Washington saw it as further evidence that something had to be done immediately. The looseness of the confederation of states, which was meant to ensure individual liberty, was threatening to devolve into chaos.
Madison wrote him again in the spring of 1787, saying that he had developed “some outlines of a new system” and “I take the liberty of submitting them without apology, to your eye.” Madison considered that it was now clear that the idea that each state would have complete independence was “utterly irreconcileable with their aggregate sovereignty,” and that therefore “a consolidation of the whole into one simple republic” was a necessity. He proposed, therefore, that the national government have clearly stipulated powers. He suggested that the “Legislative department might be divided into two branches,” and that a “national Executive must also be provided.”
Washington was as aware as anyone else of the fulminations of men like Abraham Yates, who feared the rise of a new, homegrown tyranny. He understood such concerns. But he also saw that the system was collapsing. In April he sat down with pen and paper and summarized for himself the suggestions that Madison, John Jay and Henry Knox had sent him for the proposed restructuring. Despite the call of the land, despite his former determination to “tread the paths of private life . . . until I sleep with my Fathers,” he was getting involved. He sent word that he would attend the convention. On May 9, he said goodbye to Martha and swung himself up into his saddle. He felt conflicted enough—over the state of the nation and his own anxiety at being pulled back into the vortex—that he was overcome by physical nausea as he set off. But he had made his decision. He was going to Philadelphia.
Abraham Yates stepped from the chilly deck of a sloop onto the shore of Manhattan Island. Nagged by his gout, he made his laborious way to the house of William Bedlow, a onetime ship’s captain whom he had known since the Revolution. Yates hauled his personal belongings to a room in the home of Bedlow and his wife Catharine: he would be boarding here. In January 1787, after a tempestuous campaign, he had been elected as one of the state of New York’s delegates to Congress.
Yates was sixty-two years old and feeling moody. His long battle with Robert Morris over his position as loan officer had come to an end with him finally losing the job. He had gotten nothing out of the fight but misery: his political opponents in Albany had taken advantage of it to accuse him of mismanaging funds. And he was now more than ever “suspitious” of what the gentlemen in the Congress were up to, which was why he had worked so hard to be elected to that body.
Shortly after he arrived in the governmental chamber in lower Manhattan, a resolution came before them. Five states had earlier sent representatives to a meeting at Annapolis to look at ways to “remedy defects of the federal government.” Their resolution, now before Congress, proposed a general convention to be held in May in Philadelphia. The resolution did not include the frank details that James Madison had spelled out for Washington: there was
no mention of a plan to scrap the Articles of Confederation and start over, to develop a new constitution for governing the nation. To do so would have incited the wrath of the many who, like Yates, wanted to keep power in the states.
Even with its mild language, the resolution infuriated Yates. He objected to the proposed convention, which he already suspected would lead to a vastly more powerful government sitting above the states. But others overruled the objections; each state chose representatives to go to Philadelphia. Yates maneuvered to ensure that New York’s delegation tilted toward states’ rights. He got his way. The three men chosen included his nephew, Robert Yates, and John Lansing, who was his son-in-law’s brother; both men followed Yates in their opposition to the massing of power at the national level. The third member chosen for the delegation was Alexander Hamilton, one of the most forceful advocates of centralized power.
Yates conferred with Robert Yates and John Lansing on strategy. They decided that the two antifederalist delegates would travel to Philadelphia with Hamilton, distribute copies of one of Abraham Yates’s essays opposing the federalist agenda, then lead a coalition in blocking any attempt to create a new government. If circumstances warranted, at a propitious moment they would leave the convention in protest. Yates knew there was substantial opposition to the Philadelphia convention. Patrick Henry had refused to be part of it. Richard Henry Lee considered the effort “an elective despotism.” In New York, the governor, George Clinton, was against it as well. And the entire leadership of the state of Rhode Island had declared it would boycott the convention. So Yates had reason for hoping that this gambit would send the whole thing crashing down.
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