She found another man, again a kind and generous lover—she had a knack for attracting men of gentle disposition—by the name of Thomas Giffard. He came from one of England’s most ancient families; he also had the advantage of being intimately connected at the royal palace, for one of his closest friends was the twenty-three-year-old Prince of Wales. She felt herself steadying, even as she let herself be caught up in the excitement and pageantry and possibilities. “While with Mr. Giffard, my humble roof was often visited by princes of the Blood Royal,” she wrote breathlessly, “and by Nobles of the highest distinction.”
But in one sense she and Thomas Giffard made a disastrous pair: while Coghlan pursued her own addiction to shopping and luxury, her new lover, who had an open and trusting nature, was unlucky enough to be drawn to the gaming tables. On his arm at tableside, she gasped at the way hucksters took advantage of him, watched as elegantly dressed con men pursued “schemes of plunder and robbery against him.” His gullibility was particularly worrisome given that he had promised to pay down her debts. Instead, he had to divert his funds to satisfy the “nefarious gamblers and intriguers of every description” who preyed on him.
Everything came crashing down at once. Giffard sold his carriage and one of his homes, raising 1,000 pounds, which he gave in payment of those debts of hers for which he had personally signed. But she owed nearly 3,000 in total, and her creditors were no longer willing to be put off. Paying such an amount—for reference, a housemaid could expect to earn eight pounds for an entire year’s wages—was simply impossible. Giffard left her.
She reeled. Under English law, those unable to pay their creditors faced being thrown into debtors’ prison. The phrase itself was a horror. So many dire associations came with it: misery, disease, disgrace. As the likelihood of it moved toward certainty, she fell into fits of panic. She dreaded the squalor, not only for herself but for her daughter. But worse than that would be the shame. It would be the end of her career, the end of her. What friends she had, or thought she had, had abandoned her.
People were known to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid Marshalsea, King’s Bench, Coldbath Fields and other debtors’ prisons. Margaret Coghlan, the actress playing the role of mistress, was no stranger to the dramatic exit. She had fled from protectors in New Jersey and from her husband in Wales. In the depths of her despair she dreamed up her grandest exit yet.
On June 4, 1787, a Mr. Thomas Vaughan of Suffolk Street must have been struck on turning the pages of the Daily Universal Register to find a terse, abbreviated obituary:
In Cavendish-street, Portland-squ. Mrs. Margaret Coghlan, lady of John C. esq; and dau. of Col. Moncrieff.
She had died, the newspaper said, “after two days illness.” Mr. Vaughan was considerably shaken to read this news, for Thomas Giffard had chosen him to deal with Margaret Coghlan’s creditors. How was he to tell them that the woman who had racked up such a stupendous mountain of debt had shaken free of their clutches in the most decisive and permanent manner?
Summer was coming on. Across the ocean, in Philadelphia, George Washington, the great general with whom a defiant Margaret had dined as a teenager, was presiding over a convention to determine a constitution that would govern the land of her early years. Truly, that heralded a new beginning and would provide a seedbed for the nurturing of individual liberty. But for Margaret Coghlan, née Margaret Moncrieffe, who had longed all her young life for just such freedom, who had believed the declarations of journalists and playwrights and society doyennes that freedom was in the air, ready for the taking by modern young women, and who had acted on that belief by striking out on her own in defiance of father and husband, it was not to be. History had failed her; society had defeated her.
That, anyway, was what she wanted her creditors to think. Sometime later, in Paris, a woman with her features—the same beguiling eyes and milky complexion, the same poutiness of expression undergirded by a ferocious and uncanny will to survive—checked into the Hôtel de l’Université. America wasn’t the only place where the forces of change were making themselves felt. There were rumblings on the European continent. Another revolution in the offing, and with it came, perhaps, another chance for an inordinately clever and resourceful woman to clutch at a life that would be truly her own.
It was apparently a season for false death notices. In late January 1788 Abraham Yates was in Poughkeepsie, where the state assembly was in session, when he learned of his own supposed demise. Melancton Smith, a fellow New York antifederalist, wrote him from Manhattan to say there was a rumor going around the Confederation Congress “that you was defunct, and that your funeral had been solemnized with great pomp & your pall supported by a number of illustrious Characters.” The rumor had apparently been started by federalists who were so sick of Yates’s unrelenting opposition that they tried to will him out of existence. “I am happy to hear, however, that you are in the land of the living,” Smith added, and he went on to speculate on the possibility that Yates had indeed died but had “been restored to this mortal life” by a righteous deity “in order to oppose the new system of government.”
For the battle against the Constitution was not over. The Philadelphia convention had passed it, but it required ratification by nine states before it could become the foundational document of the nation. After five states ratified in late 1787 and early 1788, the antifederalists pressed harder than ever, trying to stop others from following suit.
Massachusetts was to vote next. Yates’s sources told him that most officials there were opposed to ratification, but, Melancton Smith noted darkly, “the better sort have means of convincing those who differ from them.” In February came news that the federalist pressures, whatever they were, had worked: Massachusetts had voted in favor. All the more reason to stand firm. Yates knew his fellow New Yorkers viewed the document with distrust. But most newspapers were on the federalist side. He joined with like-minded men in the state to promote antifederalist printers. His son-in-law wrote him in March that he had signed the family up for six subscriptions to a new antifederalist paper, and at the same time he informed him that Susanna, who was expecting another child, was “still well tho restless and uneasy.” Yates knew his daughter was having a hard pregnancy; he suspected that Lansing was keeping details from him. He pushed politics aside as he nervously waited for the stage coaches from Albany that would bring the next letter. Finally, ten days later the coach driver handed him good news. “Dear Sir,” Abraham Lansing wrote, “I have the satisfaction to inform you that on Monday last between the hours of 10 & 11 Susan was safely delivered of a—fine Boy—and herself and the Child have been in very good health.”
Yates had little time to rejoice. As spring weather came on, the pressure mounted anew on the political front. Since he was both a member of the State Assembly and a New York delegate to the Confederation Congress, he was traveling up and down the Hudson between Poughkeepsie and Manhattan. He entered the “Congress Room” of Federal Hall in lower Manhattan on May 27 to find delegates in excited conversation. South Carolina had become the eighth state to ratify. Only one more was needed. Would New York capitulate? All eyes in the chamber turned to him. He was treated “With Civility” by his fellow delegates, he reported to his son-in-law, and he returned the favor, but he felt the pressure. When he went to his rooms at William Bedlow’s house that evening he found that Alexander Hamilton had stopped by; there was a note inviting him to a one-on-one dinner meeting. Yates had little patience for Hamilton. Besides his conviction that Hamilton was practically a monarchist, he knew that Hamilton had stolen his job as continental loan officer. But politics was politics: he would of course meet. Before doing so, Yates did some checking and came up with an estimate that the New York convention would probably vote to reject the Constitution by a good margin: 40 votes to 25. He knew Hamilton would try to play him, but he didn’t know in what way.
When they met the next day, Hamilton, speaking with seeming offhandedness, told Yates it was his guess
that “the Antis” would eventually come around and adopt the Constitution, provided it was fitted out with “amendments.” This was the first Yates had heard of any amendments, but he dismissed the notion as “An Absurdity.”
The two men were a study in contrasts—Hamilton thin, young and beakishly handsome, Yates old, gray-haired and fusty and creaky—but they were equally hardheaded. Hamilton stayed focused. Yates had power among the antifederalists; he had to try to win him over. He told Yates that if nine states did not adopt he feared the new nation would divide before it even started its life. Yates said he would be sorry of that but that he would risk it. Hamilton then said something lofty about the Constitution being the will of “Providence.” Yates practically erupted. He knew perfectly well that Hamilton was lowborn like him, but that instead of being true to the common people he had lusted for status his whole life. He had led the way in twining social privilege and political power. He had pressed for an all-powerful national government to be headed by a leader-for-life. And now he had the gall to talk about Providence. A government that suited the will of Providence, Yates roared at the young man, would certainly have “for its pillars righteousness and truth.” Regarding the Philadelphia convention, he declared, “I could hardly think that Providence had a hand in a government were it required to wade through such a scene of corruption, falsehood and misrepresentation.”
Yates believed in the antifederalist cause as surely as he had in the American cause during the Revolution and in his stance against the British army in the days of the French and Indian War. He believed in the steadfastness of his allies as well. George Clinton, New York’s governor and his friend, saw the constitutional debate in Poughkeepsie as a battle between “the friends of the rights of mankind” and “the advocates of despotism.” But Yates’s passion seemed to blind him to a softening in the antifederalist ranks. As more states adopted the Constitution, men like Clinton and Melancton Smith felt they had to move, as Hamilton had suggested, toward accepting the document provided it was fitted with amendments that addressed their concerns.
Summer wore on. In June, New Hampshire adopted the Constitution. Enough states now approved of it for it to take force. Four days later, Virginia did likewise.
Attention then turned to New York. Its ratification, strictly speaking, was not needed, but it would give the Constitution added force in its early stages. The federalists applied more pressure, and at the same time put forth a slate of amendments in an effort to bring antifederalists to their side.
It worked. The state voted in favor of the Constitution in late July. Yates was away at the time. Even his son-in-law, a staunch “anti,” was happy with the result: “our Friends are much better pleased with it than we had reason to expect,” he told Yates, and he gave the reason for the happiness, which he hoped his father-in-law would share. “The Bill of Rights which is interwoven with the Adoption is considered by the Majority of those whom I have shewn it as a security against the Encroachments of the Genl. Government.”
Yates had been blindsided by this Bill of Rights. Besides the fact that the Constitution laid out vast powers for the federal government, he had vigorously objected to the fact that it did not stipulate rights guaranteed to American citizens. He had been certain the federalists would never agree to such a thing. He was so stubborn in his distrust of their intentions, so convinced that they were in the process of crafting a two-tiered system, in which a wealthy landed elite would exist on a different plane and abide by different rules from everyone else, that he could not imagine his enemies putting forth, on their own, a list of guaranteed freedoms. But here they were, crafted mostly by the small, pale, rather sickly but unstoppable Virginia federalist James Madison. Free exercise of religion. Freedom of speech and assembly. Freedom of the press. The right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Perhaps best of all, in Yates’s eyes, was an amendment stipulating that the list of stated rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In other words, the federal government’s powers were to be limited to what the Constitution enumerated, while individual rights were not so limited.
Yates remained suspicious. Lansing went on to say that the City of Albany had set aside the following Friday as a public holiday to celebrate the passage of the Constitution. He and other Albany antifederalists had decided they should keep a low profile and “remain quiet at Home on the rejoicing day.” But Lansing could barely hide his glee as he described the parade that was planned: a boat fixed on a carriage would hold, as representatives of Albany’s history, an Indian and a trader, and it would be festooned with flags honoring the city’s different occupations. There would be a whole roasted ox, and “several scores of barrels of beer” for a proper celebration.
Yates must have read the buoyant description with mounting confusion. He had fought against the encroachment of government most particularly in order to uphold the empowerment of the citizens of his beloved city. Others had joined him in that fight. Now, however, those same citizens seemed practically to celebrate their loss of power. Yes, the new system of governmental authority contained assurances of rights, but he remained convinced that government, any government, was a thing to be mistrusted, that once it got a portion of power, it would never relinquish it but would rather push for more, and keep growing and expanding, always at the expense of individuals. During the years of the Revolution he had been in his element, fully connected to the currents of the day. Now he was suddenly out of touch with the world around him.
Truly adding insult to the injury of the Constitution’s adoption and the celebration of it in his home town, Yates learned that Philip Schuyler—his old antagonist who was, to boot, Hamilton’s father-in-law—would lead the parade holding aloft a copy of the Constitution, while Schuyler’s insufferable son, also called Philip, would drive the carriage. Unconsciously reinforcing Yates’s conviction that what was being celebrated was an elitist victory, Lansing cheerily referred to the younger Schuyler as “the Lord of the Manor.”
Five days later, in an altogether moody frame of mind, feeling squeezed like a melon, Yates sat down with Alexander Hamilton and the two other members of New York’s delegation to the Confederation Congress, Ezra L’Hommedieu and Egbert Benson, and asked them to attest an affidavit he had written. With the states having approved the Constitution, it now fell to the Congress to certify it. Yates had planned to vote against certification, on principle. But Benson and L’Hommedieu would likely be out of town for the vote. As it happened, the Iroquois, in their anger at Cornplanter for having given away their lands, were raiding upstate settlements, and the two politicians had to head north to negotiate with them. That left only Yates and Hamilton to represent the state in Congress. Should New York’s delegation not vote a clear yes on the pro forma certification, other states would not support it in what was already shaping up to be a brisk confrontation: the bid to become the seat of the new federal government.
Yates had sweated and strained to block the Constitution. From its very first words—“We the people . . .”—it indicated an arrogant presumption on the part of a federal government to represent all. But now it was inevitable. And he wasn’t even to be given the dignity of voting his conscience. At the very least, he wanted it attested why he was not able to do so. With the same twisty energy that he used to pen his Rough Hewer essays, he put in writing in the affidavit the negative conditions that compelled him to vote for something he believed was wrong. He began with gale force: “Being Confident that the Constitution for the general government in its present form Will be destructive to the liberties of the People And as Such by every means to be avoided as one of the Greatest of all Evils . . .” He went on to state his concern that without a positive vote from the New York delegation the Congress might move out of the state, and added, further, his fear that without the full support of the New York delegates the Bill of Rights might not be attached to the final document. He said he considered that the Bill of Rights was �
��indispensably necessary for the Security of the Liberty and freedom of the People.” Therefore, with deepest reservations, he wrote, “I Shall Join in the vote to Compleat the Ordinance.”
Hamilton, his enemy, sitting across from him, all but gloated. He had won his great victory, assuring a strong federal government. And he had won this small victory, over the quarrelsome, nettlesome, squinty old man from Albany. It was quite possibly the most painful moment of Yates’s life.
“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The Constitution was now in force, and it called for a chief executive.
George Washington stood in a Virginia field, staring darkly at stubby cabbage heads. He had planted his cabbages between his corn rows. The crop had failed, and he didn’t know why. Buckwheat was also a disappointment, huge, white-headed stands of hogweed having crowded it out. He blamed it on the wet spring.
It was September. Well before news of the official certification of the Constitution, he had started to see in newspapers calls for him to serve as the first executive. Some appeals were spiritual, declaring it divinely ordained. Others waxed psychological, noting that, as he had no children of his own, Washington would be the father of all Americans—and, as a bonus, the nation would have no fear of a hereditary rule being established.
Then the letters started arriving. He tried to stay quiet on the matter of what he would do. Deep within him was a longing for peace. Part of him hoped that the electors “by giving their votes in favor of some other person, would save me from the dreaded Dilemma of being forced to accept or refuse.” Then too, ever since he had been coached as a boy by William Fairfax to adopt a “Roman” facade, he had followed the strategy, when he was close to achieving something, of holding back, waiting for it to be thrust at him. Maybe he didn’t know himself, this time, whether he wanted this thing or not. Maybe he wanted events to decide the matter for him. But his actions said that he was tired, spent from a lifetime of hard service.
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