Prior to the Revolutionary War, Catholics were persecuted in every colony. They could not vote or hold public office anywhere—not even in Maryland, which was founded as a haven for Catholics, or in famously tolerant Rhode Island, where even atheists had rights. Massachusetts made it a capital offense for priests to proselytize or say Mass. The colonists’ special concern with Catholics was as much political as spiritual. It stemmed in part from Protestant England’s long warfare with Catholic France and the widespread Protestant perception that all Catholics obeyed the pope and his worldwide network of prelates and priests on matters both spiritual and temporal.
Overt anti-Catholicism abated during the war, especially after the United States allied with France, but it did not end. At New York’s constitutional convention in 1777, for example, John Jay sought to maintain his state’s ban on Catholics holding office, and, although he failed to secure such a provision in the new state constitution, he obtained a state law to that effect in 1788. At the time of the Convention, Massachusetts had yet to witness its first public Mass.
With only about thirty-five thousand adherents in all of the states, Catholicism was a foreign religion to most Americans. Even in Maryland, New York City, and eastern Pennsylvania, where most American Catholics lived, they remained a distinct and somewhat insular minority. Their numbers were growing, however, as a rising tide of Irish Catholics sought refuge from British rule in the newly independent United States. That the delegates chose to attend Catholic Mass during their first Sunday in Philadelphia, even though the city boasted America’s leading Episcopal church and was hosting a national Presbyterian convention, gave Catholics a reason to hope that a strong national union might support their rights more than the individual states had done so.
The invitation to Mass likely came from Pennsylvania’s lone Catholic delegate, Thomas Fitzsimons, a wealthy Irish-American merchant and ardent nationalist who had served as an officer in his state’s home guard during the Revolutionary War. Maryland also sent a Catholic to the Convention, Daniel Carroll, but he had not yet arrived. Explaining the decision to attend Mass, Mason wrote to his son that it was “more out of Compliment than Religion, & more out of Curiosity than compliment.” Unless they traveled, Virginians would have known few Catholics. Commenting on the service, Mason described the “preacher” as a foreigner, his “delivery” as faulty, and his “sermon” as trivial. “While I was pleased with the Air of Solemnity so generally deffused thro’ the Church,” Mason added, “I was somewhat disgusted with the frequent Tinckling of a little Bell; which put me in Mind of the drawing up of the Curtain for a Puppet-Shew.”34 Still, the delegates’ attendance was widely noted.
More notably, Washington attended Catholic Mass on the following Sunday. He had skipped the previous service but, after hearing about it, led a delegation of leading Philadelphia Protestants on May 27 to St. Mary’s Chapel, which stood two blocks from Fitzsimons’s home and within easy walking distance of Washington’s residence for the Convention. “The anthems and other solemn pieces of music performed on this occasion were admirably adopted to diffuse a spirit of devotion throughout a very crowded congregation,” the Pennsylvania Herald reported in an article reprinted in newspapers across the country.35
The event merited all of the attention it received. Despite his respect for religion’s role in civil society and belief in divine providence, Washington rarely went to church during this period of his life. Indeed, he attended Sunday worship services on only one other occasion during the Convention, and this was when an old friend preached at Christ’s Church. Therefore, his attendance at a Catholic Mass sent a clear message.36 During the Revolutionary War, he had welcomed both French and Polish Catholics into the American officer corps, from Lafayette to Casimir Pulaski, and developed lasting friendships with some of them. Now he could reciprocate by standing with American Catholics. “Being no bigot myself to any mode of worship,” Washington wrote to Lafayette later in 1787, “I am disposed to endulge the professors of Christianity in the church, that road to heaven which to them shall seem the most direct.”37
WASHINGTON’S VISIT TO PHILADELPHIA’S leading Catholic parish came at a propitious moment. During the previous week, enough delegates had arrived from Delaware, North Carolina, and New Jersey to allow the assembly to convene on Friday, May 25, with a bare majority of seven states represented and one deputy each from two others. The emergence of the Virginia Plan may have hurried them along. When Delaware’s George Read saw either that plan or a somewhat similar one by South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney, he urged his colleague John Dickinson to come fast. “By this plan our State may have a representation in the House of Delegates of one member in eighty,” ever-vigilant Read warned on May 21. “I suspect it to be of importance to the small States that their deputies should keep a strict watch upon the movements and propositions from the larger States, who will probably combine to swallow up the smaller ones.” He implored Dickinson, “If you have any wish to assist in guarding against such attempts, you will be speedy in your attendance.”
Similar pleas may have gone out to New Jersey delegates. Many delegates from these two small states lived within a few hours’ ride of Philadelphia; some were waiting at home for the Convention to begin. Once the extent of the proposed reforms became evident, they came quickly. Three other small states had not even named delegates yet. One of them, Maryland, now did so with dispatch and sent them scurrying to Philadelphia.
With just seven states represented and only twenty-nine delegates present on the twenty-fifth, the Convention could do little more than formally convene and prepare for future deliberations. Mainly, that meant electing a presiding officer. As president of the host state, Franklin wanted to perform the happy act of formally nominating Washington as the Convention’s president. Kidney stones and a persistent rain kept Franklin home, however. The task fell to Pennsylvania’s next most senior delegate, Robert Morris, who stated that he did so on behalf of his entire delegation. South Carolina’s senior delegate and former governor John Rutledge seconded the nomination and urged the Convention to accept it unanimously. It did. Morris and Rutledge then escorted Washington to the Speaker’s chair: a finely carved seat with a half sun painted on its crown. It stood behind a draped desk on the dais at the front of the State Assembly Room.
After sitting, Washington accepted the “honor,” as he called it, “conferred on him” by the Convention, noted the “novelty” of the president’s role for him, and asked “the indulgence of the House toward the involuntary errors which his inexperience might occasion.” He had not asked to preside over the Convention but surely expected to do so. If “he felt himself embarrassed” with the honor, as he reportedly said at the time, it surely was a fleeting feeling.38 Washington was comfortable with command. Being persuaded that only a strong general government could save the union, he was ready to play whatever part was required of him to secure that end.
Henceforth, as Washington realized perhaps more than anyone, he no longer represented merely himself, the army, or Virginia. He represented the nation, and on him its future rested. That made it all the more noteworthy that he chose, as his first public outing on the following Sunday, to attend Catholic Mass. Washington had an instinctive sense of theater. He spoke more through actions than words. And now he was acting on behalf of the nation.
Three more brief business items came before the rump convention on that initial Friday. First it chose Washington’s former aide, William Jackson, as the Convention’s secretary. Balloting by state, the delegates picked Jackson over Franklin’s grandson, Temple, by a margin of five to two. Then one member from each state presented the credentials for his delegation. Finally, before adjourning for the week, the Convention appointed a committee chaired by Virginia legal scholar George Wythe to draft standing rules for the assembly. At a time when Americans typically worked six days each week, not meeting on the first Saturday suggested that the delegates still felt that their numbers remained too low to tack
le substantive matters. Thereafter, they met on Saturdays.
In presenting the credentials from his state, George Read made a point of stating that Delaware had barred its delegation from supporting any change in the policy of equal representation for every state in Congress. This caught the attention of every delegate. It appeared in all their surviving notes.39 Mason promptly wrote home, “Delaware has tied up the hands of her deputies by an express direction to retain the principle . . . of each State having the same vote.”40 A member of the Continental Congress from Delaware, Read had voted against independence in 1776 but supported that decision once made. Fundamentally conservative, he favored a strong national government but wanted his small state to have as much say in it as any large one. His opening salvo suggested that the chief controversy at this Convention would not involve whether Congress received more power but rather who would wield it.
MONDAY BROUGHT NINE MORE DELEGATES and two added states, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Although the comings and goings of delegates meant that not every state remained represented at all times, the total never again dropped below eight or rose higher than twelve. The Convention could proceed.
Unable to walk steadily that day, Franklin arrived in a sedan chair carried by two trustworthy convicts assigned to transport the state’s chief executive on official business. The mode of travel further added to his aura. “Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest phylosopher of the present age,” Georgia delegate William Pierce wrote from the Convention. “The very heavens obey him, and the Clouds yield up their Lightning to be imprisoned in his rod.”41
Others arrived on foot, but more than a few of them had a reputation that commanded widespread respect. Of those by now assembled—beyond Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Mifflin, and the two Morrises—the delegates included four past or present state governors, a half dozen past or present members of Congress, and such well-known Revolutionary Era leaders as Mason, Wilson, Wythe, and General Pinckney. Among American political figures with a nationalist bent, this indeed constituted “un assemblée des notables,” as Franklin had said.42
The delegates began the new week by debating draft rules proposed by Wythe’s committee. In line with conventional parliamentary practice, these rules placed substantial authority in Washington, as president, to maintain order. One look or word from him could command respect, which the rebellious officers at Newburgh had learned to their dismay in 1783. As expected, the rules provided for the delegates to vote by state, one equal vote for each, with seven states required for a quorum. Every member wishing to speak would address Washington first and all would rise when he entered the hall each day. “When the House shall adjourn,” the rules added, “every Member shall stand in his place until the President pass him.”43
The most significant rules did not come from the committee, but were suggested from the floor on Monday and adopted on Tuesday. Rufus King of Massachusetts objected that recording the votes of individual members might hinder them from changing their opinions and North Carolina’s Richard Dobbs Spaight urged that any member be allowed to request that the Convention revisit matters previously decided. These variations from normal parliamentary procedure allowed delegates to play with new ideas and take tentative positions. Of even greater import, Pierce Butler of South Carolina moved that the Convention keep its proceedings secret. The final rules provided that “no copy be taken of any entry on the journal” and that “nothing spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated without leave.”44 These added rules allowed the Convention to build internal consensus without outside interference.
“No Constitution ever would have been adopted by the Convention if the debates had been public,” Madison later commented.45 He was probably right.
Washington scrupulously followed the secrecy rule in public discourse and private writings. “No Com[municatio]ns without doors,” he wrote in his personal diary for May 29, and never again disclosed details of the deliberations even in it.46
When one delegate accidentally breached the secrecy rule by mislaying a copy of the Virginia Plan, Washington’s stern supervision of the deliberations showed itself. “I am sorry to find that some one Member of this Body, has been so neglectful of the secrets of the Convention as to drop in the State House a copy of their proceedings,” Washington lectured the members after another delegate found it. “I must entreat Gentlemen to be more careful, lest our transactions get into the News Papers, and disturb the public repose by premature speculations.” He then threw down the offending document, directed its unnamed owner to claim it, bowed to the members, and marched from the room as they stood cowering at their seats.
“It is something remarkable that no Person ever owned the Paper,” observed Georgia’s Pierce, who later privately expressed great relief in confirming that it was not his copy.47 Other delegates also jotted down some firsthand observations about the Convention in private journals or letters that subsequently became public, but the only comprehensive account of the closed-door sessions appeared in the copious daily notes taken by Madison, which he vowed to keep confidential until the last delegate died.48 As it turned out, passing at age eighty-five in 1836, he was that final survivor.
Two key delegates well known by Washington checked in for the first time on Tuesday morning, just in time to vote on the proposed added rules. Delaware’s John Dickinson and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts had served together in 1776 at the Continental Congress, where the ever-cautious Dickinson dragged his feet on independence while the more progressive Gerry ran on ahead. “If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell,” John Adams had said at that time.49 Both now came to Philadelphia open to strengthening the confederation but with Dickinson protective of a role for small states in that union and Gerry worried about individual rights under any regime. Neither would likely rubber-stamp the Virginia Plan but no sooner had they arrived than it took center stage.
ON TUESDAY MORNING, after the Convention had committed itself to secrecy, the Virginia delegation dropped its bombshell. Having participated in preparing it, Washington clearly conspired in the timing of its delivery. To begin “the main business” of the Convention, as Madison termed it in his notes, Washington called on Randolph.50 The Virginia governor then presented his delegation’s plan for a new national government. Once he took the floor, Randolph held it for most of the day and left no doubt about his state’s radical intentions.
As presented by Randolph, the fifteen numbered resolutions that became known as “the Virginia Plan” contained the outline for a “national” government composed of a two-house legislature, some sort of chief executive, and a judiciary with supreme and inferior courts. This represented the Virginia delegation’s radical cure for America’s woefully inadequate central government. Citing the commercial discord among the states, the rebellion in Massachusetts, “the havoc of paper money,” and the failure to pay the nation’s debts, Randolph argued that the existing confederation did not work. It raised “the prospect of anarchy from the laxity of government every where.” Further, he added, “there were many advantages, which the U.S. might acquire, which were not attainable under the confederation—such as a productive impost—counteraction of the commercial regulations of other nations—pushing of commerce.” The hope, Randolph declared, lay in a national government with power to legislate on matters of general concern, compel obedience to its laws, and veto state laws that contravene its purposes.
William Paterson, a pro-state delegate from New Jersey, captured the speech’s essence in a scribble: “Sovereignty is the integral Thing—We ought to be one Nation.”51
Virginia had staked its ground, forcing others to respond. No delegate could doubt where Washington stood. He remained a voting member of Virginia’s delegation, called on Randolph to speak first, and never suffered any interruption of what Yates depicted as the governor’s “long and elaborate speech.”52 Clearly Washington sided with Virg
inia and the Virginia Plan. In doing so, he had helped to hijack the Convention. Congress had endorsed this gathering as a meeting to draft amendments to the confederation; Washington’s Virginia instead proposed using it to scrap the existing government and forge a nation.
This took time to digest. It also might require a more fluid format than even the Convention’s revised rule permitted. Thus, when Randolph finished, the delegates resolved to reconvene the next morning as a committee of the whole “appointed to consider the State of the American Union.” This removed Washington from the chair and put him on the floor with the Virginia delegation for so long as the delegates met as a committee. To chair that committee, the members chose Massachusetts delegate Nathaniel Gorham, who had presided over Congress when the issue of the Philadelphia Convention first arose in 1786 and never took a strong position for or against it. He was, however, a nationalist.
RANDOLPH’S SPEECH MAY HAVE RUN ON until nearly four o’clock, when the delegates typically adjourned for dinner. Certainly the Convention did little else after hearing Randolph on that first Tuesday. Keeping to a schedule of meeting from 10 A.M. to about 4 P.M., six days each week, left time each evening for members to meet informally, attend to personal business, and socialize—all of which were necessary for a successful Convention. On this momentous day, Washington dined at “home,” as he now called the Morris mansion in his diary, and then escorted Mary Morris to a benefit concert at City Tavern, one of Philadelphia’s finest venues.
Sometime that night he likely also worked on the long letter that he posted the next day to Jefferson. “The business of this Convention is as yet too much in embryo to form any opinion of the result,” Washington wrote. “That something is necessary, all will agree; for the situation of the General Government (if it can be called a government) is shaken to its foundations—and liable to be overset by every blast. In a word, it is at an end, and unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy & confusion will inevitably ensue.”53 These worried words echoed Randolph’s urgent speech. It also suggested that Washington still remained in doubt about how the delegates would respond.
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