The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  If so, that sensation could have only increased as Washington entered Philadelphia. From Gray’s Ferry on the Schuylkill River, mounted dragoons under the command of another friendly face, Samuel Miles, escorted the General’s coach to town. As deputy quartermaster during the Revolutionary War, Miles had arranged transport for Washington’s army to the decisive Battle of Yorktown. To mark the General’s arrival into the city proper, cannons fired thirteen rounds in the so-called federal salute and the great bells of towering Christ Church, the country’s chief Episcopal edifice, peeled loudly. No other delegate received an official welcome.

  “Notwithstanding the badness of the weather great numbers of respectable citizens assembled in the streets to hail him as he passed,” the Pennsylvania Herald reported on Washington’s entry into the city.15 “This great patriot will never think his duty performed, while any thing remains to be done.”16 Another local newspaper marked the occasion with a poem on the nation’s plight and Washington’s prospective role in remedying it, concluding with the stanza:

  Dry up your tears, ye maidens fair!

  With finest flowers adorn your hair!

  Your war-try’d hero comes;

  He comes, and grace sits on his brow!

  Bow down, ye tyrants, lowly bow,

  Sound trumpets, fifes and drums!17

  In what resembled a parade, Washington’s carriage, accompanying dignitaries, and mounted troops wound their way through town to a popular boardinghouse on Market Street operated by Mary House. Madison had already settled there and Edmund Randolph was expected soon. A block from the State House, where the Convention would meet, these stylish lodgings served as the nerve center for Virginia’s delegation. Robert Morris waited among the well-wishers to spirit Washington away, however. The General would stay a few doors west on Market, Morris insisted, in his mansion—one of the finest in Philadelphia and equal to some of the best in London. With ample room for the General’s valet, horses, and carriage, Morris’s estate became Washington’s home for the Convention.

  Even before settling in, Washington called on Franklin. A world-renowned inventor, natural philosopher, and diplomat who had coauthored the Declaration of Independence, secured the alliance with France, and brokered the peace with Britain, the “Sage of Philadelphia” was Washington’s sole peer in popular esteem. Only by pulling together could they hope to win public approval for fundamentally reforming the confederation.

  Despite their mutual admiration, because Franklin had spent most of the war in France and Washington had spent it in the field, the two men hardly knew each other except by reputation. Based on his frustrations representing the United States in Europe, Franklin supported a strong general government, but, perhaps due to his humble origins and common touch, he trusted democracy more than Washington, Hamilton, and many other prominent nationalists. Washington and Franklin needed to understand each other and could not work at cross-purposes or else the Convention would surely fail.

  Much as when Franklin embraced Voltaire at the Academy of Sciences in Paris two decades earlier, this was a meeting for the ages. Unfortunately for later historians, it was a private encounter, and no one recorded what happened. Richard Beeman speculates that the two men sipped wine in Franklin’s garden and toured the house and library.18 Surely they discussed the Convention and, despite their differences, established a rapport.

  A generation older than Washington and crippled by gout and kidney stones, Franklin nevertheless retained more boyish enthusiasm than the Virginian. Social magnets, both men charmed the ladies—though Franklin purportedly took them to bed while Washington danced them into delirium. Both also enjoyed the company of men, with Franklin drawing them into witty conversation and Washington keeping them rapt at a distance. Ever puckish, Gouverneur Morris once allegedly bet Hamilton that he could greet Washington with a gentle backslap. Morris won the bet but received such a glare from the General that he regretted the incident.19 In contrast, Franklin readily accepted hugs and kisses, as he had from Voltaire. “How charming,” John Adams grumbled at the sight.20 A born organizer, in advance of the Convention Franklin formed a biweekly discussion group on republican government. Seven of his state’s eight Convention delegates joined.21 Except perhaps for Madison and the Virginians, thanks in part to Franklin, Pennsylvania’s delegation was the best prepared for the Convention.

  “THIS BEING THE DAY appointed for the Convention to meet,” Washington wrote in his diary for Monday, May 14, “such members as were in town assembled at the State House.”22 That meant only Washington, Madison, and the Pennsylvanians. No others had arrived. Those present agreed to meet again at eleven o’clock on the following day. By then, a few delegates from Delaware, New Jersey, and North Carolina had trickled in, but not enough to proceed.

  To vote, every state except Maryland required the presence of at least half of its delegates; to conduct business, the Convention needed at least seven voting states. For the first two days, only Pennsylvania qualified. Governor Randolph arrived late on the fifteenth to augment the Virginia delegation, followed by the rest of its members by May 17. Still, that made only two states represented out of a baker’s dozen.

  Prospects looked bleak, but the slowly growing band kept reassembling at the State House each day except Sunday, only to disburse for lack of a quorum. The delay “is highly vexatious to those who are idly, & expensively spending their time here,” Washington complained on May 17.23 On one such idle day, he dined with the assembled members of the Cincinnati and reluctantly accepted their reelection as the society’s president, which was just what he had hoped to avoid.

  Franklin hosted a dinner for the assembling delegates at his home on May 16. Despite having become a connoisseur of fine wine during his time in France, Franklin served porter—a strong, dark beer then associated with working-class Englishmen. Despite lightheartedly referring to the delegates as “un assemblée des notables,” Franklin may have wanted to bring them down to earth by dispensing a commoner’s beverage. In any event, the results pleased him. “When the cask was broached,” Franklin reported to the brewer in London, “the company agreed unanimously, that it was the best porter they had ever tasted.” Even his gout and kidney stones seemed under control since he commented in the letter that they “have not yet deprived me of my natural cheerfulness, my delight in books, and enjoyment of social conversation.”24

  Holding the dinner on May 16 limited it mainly to delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania—but that proved fortuitous. Those two delegations bonded and, while waiting for others to arrive, met together regularly to frame a draft plan for a true national government. The combined group contained the three delegates with the most advanced ideas on the topic: Madison; Gouverneur Morris, who had moved from New York to Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War and represented Pennsylvania at the Convention; and the Scottish-born Philadelphia lawyer James Wilson.

  Prior to the Convention, Washington personally knew Madison and Gouverneur Morris quite well; he mainly knew Wilson by his reputation as a legal scholar. Indeed, three years earlier, when Washington’s nephew Bushrod opted to study law, Washington recommended and paid for him to study under Wilson. All three were notably brilliant: Madison and Wilson in a bookish sort of way that displayed itself best in writing and committee work; Morris, in contrast, had a wit that could bedazzle people in any setting. Less scholarly and not as quick, Washington relied on these three delegates during the Convention even though he was somewhat put off by Morris’s showmanship and would later tire of Madison’s intrigues.

  Wilson had a different Achilles’ heel: money, or rather the lack of it. Born into a pious Scottish family and educated for the ministry at St. Andrews, Wilson sought his fortune in America but, never satisfied with a lawyer’s income, always seemed a day late or a dollar short in the get-rich schemes that would eventually land him debtor’s prison. Creditors were already hounding him in 1787, but this did not stop him from playing a leading role with Madison and Morris at
the Convention.

  By the time a quorum assembled, the Virginia and Pennsylvania delegations had cobbled together the rough outline for a new plan of government. It became known as the “Virginia Plan” because Virginia governor Edmund Randolph introduced it at the Convention. Although few records survive of the informal meetings that generated it, Washington participated throughout and endorsed the end product. Before leaving Mount Vernon, he worked through the preliminary plans for union offered to him by Madison, Henry Knox, and John Jay, which roughly anticipate the Virginia Plan, and consolidated them into a single handwritten abstract.25 In a May 20 letter to his eldest son, senior Virginia delegate George Mason stated that all members of his state’s delegation, which would therefore include Washington, met for two or three hours every day to draft the final proposed plan. He noted that it already had support from other principal states, which at that point must have meant Pennsylvania.26 Beeman gives equal credit to the Pennsylvanians, particularly Morris and Wilson, for preparing the plan.27 Two other states, South Carolina and New York, were represented at the Convention by the twentieth, but their delegates apparently played little part in drafting it.

  AS MASON DEPICTED the still-forming plan in his letter, nothing less than a revolution in government was brewing. “The most prevalent Idea,” he wrote, “seems to be a total Alternation of the present federal System and substituting a great National Council, or Parliament, consisting of two Branches of the Legislature, founded upon the Principles of equal proportionate Representation, with full legislative Powers upon all the Objects of the Union.” In two phrases, this one sentence effectively summarized the Virginia Plan.

  First, people would replace states as the building blocks of a national republic. Under the existing confederation, each state had one vote in Congress even though small ones like Delaware and Rhode Island had less than one-tenth as many people as Virginia and one-seventh as many as Pennsylvania. Under the new plan, representation would be proportional to population or wealth. The United States would become a government of the people rather than of the states. The Pennsylvania delegates also wanted proportionate representation at the Convention itself, but the Virginians feared that pushing for it might cause a fatal divide between small and large states at the outset. Better to wait.

  Second, Congress would no longer go hat-in-hand to the states for everything. On matters of national interests, it would either dictate to the states or bypass them altogether in dealing with the people. To buttress the new government’s total control over national issues, Mason noted, the plan would empower Congress to veto state laws deemed “contrary to the Interest of the federal Union.” When held by the king over the colonies, this was one of the powers cited in the Declaration of Independence to justify revolution. The Virginia Plan would give it to Congress. Yet about this power and the plan in general, Mason predicted in his letter that “with a proper Degree of Coolness, Liberality & Candour (very rare Commodities by the Bye) I doubt not but it may be effected.”28

  Both in this letter to his son and in one sent earlier to Richard Henry Lee, Mason ascribed the delegates’ willingness to adopt such radical measures to recent abuses by the states, particularly their assault on property rights through the emission of paper money. “Knaves assure, and fools believe, that calling paper money, and making it tender, is the way to be rich and happy,” Mason wrote to Lee, “thus the national mind is kept in constant ferment; and the public councils in continual disturbance by the intrigues of wicked men, for fraudulent purposes.” Giving Congress the power to veto state laws and rendering “ipso facto void” any state law that contravened national policy should resolve the matter, Mason suggested. And since the problems had been centered in the eastern states, he predicted that those traditional “republican” states would be the first to agree. “However extraordinary this may at first seem,” Mason wrote to his son in Virginia, “it may, I think, be accounted for, from a very common & natural Impulse of the human Mind. Men disappointed . . . are very apt to run into the opposite Extreme; and the People of the Eastern States, setting out with more republican Principles, have consequently been more disappointed than we have been.”29

  Mason here sounded like Madison. A month earlier, in a letter to Washington, Madison had baldly asserted that Congress would never emit devaluated paper money. Such faith in the national legislature fit Madison’s theory that, in a republic, majority factions posed the gravest threat to individual and minority rights. To reduce the danger of majority factions forming or taking control, he proposed enlarging the republic and making it less homogeneous. This became his libertarian rationale for national supremacy under the Virginia Plan. It had the advantage of not relying on the supposed “republican virtue” either of citizens, as Jefferson did with his vision of republican yeoman farmers supporting the common good, or of leaders, as Washington and Adams did with their notions of enlightened solons disinterestedly dispensing justice.

  Madison viewed his approach as a realistic way to secure good laws from self-interested voters and legislators. Simply check and balance their interests. Of course, except for the romanticized examples of remote Swiss cantons and ancient Greek city-states, the founders had no examples of effective republican rule to draw on in framing their governments. They dreamed of creating something better in the New World than the monarchies that still ruled the Old World, but none of them knew how to do it.

  When Mason joined the patriot cause before the American Revolution, colonial governors, the king, and Parliament posed the greatest threat to freedom while colonial legislatures served as bulwarks of liberty. Running to the opposite extreme, Revolutionary Era Americans entrusted state legislatures with near-total power and circumscribed their governors and the confederation government. Pennsylvania went so far as to place legislative power in one hyperrepresentative chamber over the strenuous and continuing opposition of Robert Morris and his conservative, business-minded partisans.

  Similarly, at the federal level, the Articles of Confederation united legislative, executive, and judicial functions in a one-house Congress. Once the vices of the republican extreme became apparent in the states, the Virginia Plan sought to shift substantial power to the national level and check Congress’s representative lower house with an elite senate whose members served terms of “sufficient [length] to ensure their independency.”30 Both moves, Madison posited, would lessen the risk of majority faction. Unlike Mason, Madison had matured politically during the postrevolutionary period of state legislative supremacy rather than the pre–Revolutionary Era of abuses by the king and Parliament.

  Madison’s scheme did not initially focus on the executive’s role in checking the legislature. Indeed, in his April 16 letter to Washington, Madison maintained that he had not formed an opinion on the structure or authority of the executive branch. This may be where Morris and Wilson contributed to the emerging plan—it certainly was where they would play the most significant role during the Convention. They had lived under the emasculated presidency of Pennsylvania’s radically republican constitution of 1776, and witnessed its failings. Further, Gouverneur Morris had worked closely with Robert Morris during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War in trying to forge an effective executive office of finance for Congress, only to see it crumble once the exigency of war gave way to the lethargy of peace.

  Already in his May 20 letter to his son and one the next day to Virginian Arthur Lee, Mason noted that the Virginia Plan would establish a “national Executive” separate from Congress, which represented a radical departure from the Articles of Confederation.31 As proposed, the Virginia Plan ultimately provided for a single executive possessing all of the executive rights formerly vested in Congress plus a general authority to execute the nation’s law. To ensure independence of action, the executive, although chosen by Congress, would serve a fixed single term. This sketch served as the starting point for what became prolonged deliberations over the American presidency.

  No one should
have been discouraged by the progress made by the Virginia delegates during the days waiting in Philadelphia for a quorum to arrive. By having a plan ready for introduction at the outset, they gained the initiative. Washington, however, despised delay. On May 20—the same day that Mason wrote so optimistically to his son about the emerging Virginia Plan—Washington groused about the Convention’s late start. “Not more than four states were represented yesterday. If more are come in since it is unknown to me,” Washington grumbled in a letter to Arthur Lee. “These delays greatly impede public measures, and serve to sour the temper of the punctual members who do not like to idle away their time.”32 In so saying, he certainly spoke to his own sour mood.

  During this period, Washington wrote his longest and most heartfelt letters to the nephew who managed Mount Vernon in his absence. He sent one almost every week. “I hope the fine rains which have watered this part of the country,” Washington wrote in one, “were not unproductive as they hovered over you. All nature seems alive from the effect of them.”33 These letters leave little doubt that, as much as he obviously enjoyed the social scene in Philadelphia, Washington also missed his pastoral life in Virginia.

  WITH FOUR STATES REPRESENTED by May 20, the Convention stood more than halfway to securing a quorum but far shy of the number of states realistically required to get anything done. The twentieth also marked the first Sunday after the Convention’s scheduled starting date. Instead of gathering again at the State House, as they had done every day since May 14, all of the Virginia delegates except Washington went to church together. They made a telling choice of service to attend. Although none of them were Roman Catholics, they went to Mass.