The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  Franklin’s motion, which the Convention adopted, appeased some dissenters but not the three principal ones: Mason, Gerry, and Randolph. Complicating the last day, they reiterated in brief the objections that they had stated at length prior to the final vote on Saturday. On one or both occasions, each of them condemned what Randolph deplored as “the indefinite and dangerous power given by the Constitution to Congress,” with Gerry focusing his angst on the Necessary and Proper Clause. To Washington’s likely annoyance, the Virginians again railed against the unitary executive, which Randolph had denounced from the outset as the fetus of monarchy. They wanted an executive council with regional representation to advise and circumscribe the President. Mason also decried the lack of a bill of rights and predicted that the new government “would end either in monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy.”26

  By this point if not before, Washington must have glared down at Mason, his old friend, even as Mason, by the Convention’s rules, addressed his remarks to Washington as President. Neighbors in Virginia, their relationship never recovered from the strains of the Convention and subsequent ratification fight.27 Randolph, in contrast to Mason, wavered even as he spoke by conceding that his decision not to sign “might be the most awful of his life” and saying that he might still support ratification in Virginia.28

  In what represented a continuation of exchanges that began during the debate on Saturday and probably went on in private throughout the weekend, Washington and other federalists tried to win over the dissenters. Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris contended that they, too, had objections to the Constitution—with Hamilton going so far as to say that “no man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his”—but would sign it anyway because, in the words of both, the alternative was “anarchy.”29 Hamilton and Morris viewed the proposed government as too weak rather than too strong, however, so their willingness to sign could hardly help to appease the dissenters.

  Franklin tried to assure the dissenters that his earlier remarks on compromise were not aimed at them, but Gerry shot back that he could not think otherwise. At Washington’s urging, the Convention passed a late amendment designed to address one of Mason’s objections by allowing for a larger House of Representatives.30 It was a minor change, though, and not likely to win over the dissenters unless they were looking for an excuse to retreat. When they did not relent, the signing proceeded without them. The official journal, which did not record individual comments or votes, never mentioned their dissent and Christy totally omitted them from his romanticized portrayal of the event.31

  Although observed by no one except the Convention’s members and officers, the signing may have felt as historic to them as it looks in Christy’s painting. Washington signed first and above the rest in a bold, large hand somewhat reminiscent of John Hancock’s already well-known signature on the Declaration of Independence: “Go: Washington, Presidt and Deputy from Virginia.” Then the other thirty-eight signers filed forward by state beginning with New Hampshire’s John Langdon and proceeding southward to Abraham Baldwin of Georgia. One by one, they mounted the dais where Washington sat and added their signatures to the document. Even though New York had not voted on the Constitution, Hamilton signed as the state’s lone remaining delegate and won a central seat in Christy’s picture. Unable to attend the closing session, Dickinson also gained a place in the painting by having another delegate sign for him.

  While the last members were signing, Franklin looked at the half sun adorning the crown of Washington’s chair. “I have,” he said to those near him, “often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.”32 Madison chose this anecdote involving the Sage of Philadelphia and Washington’s chair to close his meticulously edited Notes of the Federal Convention. After relating it, Madison’s Notes simply conclude that, once the last members signed, “the Convention dissolved itself.”33

  Elaborating only slightly, Washington reported in his diary, “The Members adjourned to the City Tavern, dined together and took a cordial leave.” In the privacy of that diary, which typically contained a matter-of-fact account of events, Washington also added that, after dinner, he “retired to meditate on the momentous work which had been executed.”34 The product of that labor—the Constitution—if sent to the state legislatures by Congress, and if then referred by those legislatures to state ratifying conventions, and if finally ratified by at least nine of those conventions, would transform the rest of his life and his country forever. The first step finished, still more momentous works lay ahead.

  WASHINGTON WASTED LITTLE TIME in departing Philadelphia. On the morning after the signing, he mailed brief letters to Jefferson and Lafayette in France, enclosing a copy of the Constitution with each. “It is now a Child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffited by others,” he wrote, “if it be good I suppose it will work its way good—if bad it will recoil on the Framers.”35 Then, about 1 P.M., Washington dined with Robert and Gouverneur Morris, who afterward rode with him as far as Gray’s Ferry on the Schuylkill River just south of the city, where he left them and Philadelphia behind.

  In his grand, two-horse, enclosed carriage with liveried attendants, the trip to Mount Vernon took nearly five days. John Blair, the quietest of the Virginia delegates, joined Washington for the journey. Respected in Virginia for his well-connected family, vast fortune, and legal training at London’s Middle Temple, Blair was, as one fellow delegate noted, “no orator.”36 Although he rarely spoke at the Convention, Blair’s continued presence proved crucial after George Wythe left in June to join his dying wife and James McClurg went home in July. Without Blair’s steady support of their nationalist positions, Washington and Madison would have lost control of their own delegation and Virginia might not have backed the Constitution. History turns on such contingencies. As it was, Virginia normally voted with Washington on motions favoring a strong general government and powerful, independent executive.

  With Blair along, Washington seemed to enjoy the journey home. The only difficulty came when one of the horses pulling Washington’s coach broke through the rotten planks of an old wooden bridge over the Elk River in Maryland. Late summer rains had swollen the river, leading an impatient Washington to try the long-disused span rather than wait for the ford to become passable. If the other horse had gone, too, the carriage would have followed and been swept into the swift current. Such was Washington’s stature that newspaper accounts of the episode spoke of his “providential preservation . . . for the great and important purpose” of establishing the new government.37 Actually, Washington had disembarked from his coach before it crossed the derelict bridge and had safely witnessed the drama from the rain-soaked bank. The press, however, presented him on the precipice looking down, much as it had so often portrayed him during his earlier military engagements.

  After three more days and no further incidents, Washington reached Mount Vernon by sunset on the first day of fall, September 22, 1787. He had been away from his plantation for an entire season—one of the worst summers on record for farming in the Potomac region due to an unprecedented drought.38 Resuming the Cincinnatus role that suited him so well, Washington vowed to focus his full attention on domestic affairs—his farm and family—but broke his word almost immediately.

  Washington had so much time and reputation invested in the Constitution, and believed so strongly that his country could not survive without it, that its progress consumed him even as he resumed day-to-day management of Mount Vernon. Although he had written to Lafayette on the eighteenth about the Constitution that “the General opinion on, or reception of it is not for me to decide,” and he genuinely embraced the role of a disinterested republican patrician responding to the call of the people, Washington could not refrain from exerting his influence in this case. Like most other fe
deralists at the Convention, he was convinced that the choice lay between the Constitution and chaos: the preservation of liberty and property required ratification. Washington could not keep his self-imposed promise to Lafayette that he would not “say anything for or against” the Constitution.39 Two days after reaching Mount Vernon, he sent copies of the document to three former Virginia governors along with identical letters urging them to support it. “I sincerely believe it is the best that could be obtained at his time,” Washington wrote. “If nothing had been agreed to by [the Convention] anarchy would soon have ensued.”40 With Mason and Randolph opposed, Washington feared that the Constitution would face strong headwinds in Virginia.41

  ONCE THE CONVENTION ADJOURNED, news of the Constitution and calls for its ratification quickly spread across the country. Countless newspapers printed the Convention’s transmittal letter to Congress as if its pleas for ratification came directly from Washington. Some articles credited the Constitution itself to him or trumpeted his support as reason alone to ratify it. “Is it possible that the deliverer of our country would have recommended an unsafe form of government?” a widely reprinted article from the Pennsylvania Gazette asked in early October.42

  South Carolina’s Columbian Herald celebrated the news from Philadelphia with new lyrics to an old song. After extolling the proposed constitution as a boon to trade, prosperity, liberty, and order, the tune’s final verse concluded:

  That these are the blessings, Columbia knows—

  The blessings the Fed’ral CONVENTION bestows.

  O! then let the People confirm what is done

  By FRANKLIN the sage, and by brave WASHINGTON.43

  Reporting that the state’s popular governor, John Hancock, would back ratification, the Massachusetts Centinel asked a rhetorical question that suggested how much the processes might turn on the opinions of great men: “Let it but appear that a HANCOCK, a WASHINGTON, and a FRANKLIN approve the new government, and who will not embrace it?”44 Everywhere, early reports sounded much the same. Supporters would rely on trust in Washington, other framers, and local supporters to carry the Constitution.45

  Washington knew the role that his name and reputation were playing in the campaign for ratification. He received and read newspapers from around the country almost daily, and closely followed the unfolding drama in them and through private correspondence. These newspapers and letters carried endless references to Washington’s central role at the Convention. “Indeed I am convinced that if you had not attended the Convention,” Gouverneur Morris wrote to Washington in October, “and the same paper had been handed out to the World, it would have met with a colder Reception, fewer and weaker Advocates, and with more and more strenuous opponents.”46 Rather than question his intentions in signing the Constitution—clearly a hard sell in America—some opponents resorted to claiming that Washington had been duped into supporting it—which was scarcely more effective.47 “The universal popularity of General Washington,” Hamilton said at the time, was the strongest factor in the federalists’ favor going into the ratification contests.48

  Most people probably cared less that Washington had signed the Constitution than that he would likely lead the government under it. No sooner had the Convention issued its Constitution in September than the Pennsylvania Gazette proclaimed, “GEORGE WASHINGTON has already been destined, by a thousand voices, to fill the place of the first President.”49 If anything, the Gazette’s count was far too low. People everywhere, when they heard about the proposed new government for the United States, commonly assumed and generally expected Washington to lead it.50 “What will tend, perhaps, more than any thing to the adoption of the new system,” David Humphreys wrote to Washington upon first reading the Constitution in September, “will be an universal opinion of your being elected President.”51 No doubt Washington saw it coming and, without coveting or courting the position, never denied that he would accept it. “Should the Idea prevail that you would not accept the Presidency,” Morris warned in his October letter about the Constitution’s prospect, “it would prove fatal in many Parts.”52 By silence on this score, Washington again played his part. Even with him in their camp, however, federalists faced the daunting task of securing ratification for their radical centralization of power.

  THE CONFEDERATION CONGRESS PRESENTED the first hurdle. As understood from the outset, upon completing its work, the Convention transmitted the finished Constitution to Congress, which had been idling away the summer in New York. With ten of its members serving as delegates to the Convention, Congress lacked a quorum most days. Washington and other federalists considered it an irrelevancy anyway: the relic of a failed confederation. Then, on September 20, Convention secretary William Jackson rode into town with copies of the Constitution, resolutions from the Convention, and Washington’s transmittal letter.

  Congress sprang to life, if only to receive its death warrant. Four of its members had arrived from the Convention by then, bringing the number of states represented to nine. The number reached eleven by the twenty-sixth, when Congress formally took up the matter.53 By this time, Virginia congressman Richard Henry Lee had received letters from Mason and Randolph outlining their objections to the Constitution and was primed to take up their fight. Madison then resumed his seat as one of Virginia’s five members of Congress and, along with fellow Convention delegates King and Gorham from Massachusetts, Butler of South Carolina, and Johnson from Connecticut, readied the response. An epic clash was brewing that would inevitably engage Washington.

  Lee was no ordinary naysayer. Having led the chorus of noes to George III in 1776 by introducing the resolution in Congress for independence, Lee was more than willing to take on George Washington when he disagreed with him. Lee may have considered Washington an equal, but never a superior to whom he should defer.54 Born a month apart, Lee and Washington had entered the Virginia House of Burgesses together in 1758, and remained members until that body elected both of them to the First Continental Congress in 1774. Lee had served off and on in Congress ever since, including a stint as its president, and worked with Washington on many matters. They corresponded frequently. Like Mason’s, Lee’s voice carried weight in Virginia and beyond.

  The Constitution posed a problem for Congress, which had authorized the Convention only to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. Amending the Articles required the consent of Congress and approval by all thirteen state legislatures.55 Instead, the Convention had drafted a new plan of government that would take effect upon ratification by “the conventions of nine states.”56 At the Convention, Washington favored an even lower number of states: seven, a bare majority.57 Rather than ask Congress to approve the plan, the Convention simply requested that it submit the Constitution for ratification to conventions of delegates “chosen in each State by the People thereof, under the recommendations of its Legislature.”58

  Faced with the difference between what Congress authorized and what the Convention did, members debated how to proceed. Lee and other skeptics moved that Congress send the Constitution to the states for consideration with some sort of disclaimer stating that it did not comply with the procedures for amending the Articles of Confederation. Anything less, Lee’s resolution suggested, would not be “respectful” to a Convention of twelve states chaired by Washington; anything more would exceed Congress’s authority. Your motion “is not respectful to the Constitution,” Madison shot back at Lee. It “implies a disagreement.” He favored an alternative resolution offered by Washington’s friend Edward Carrington, a founding member of the Cincinnati, asking that Congress take up the Constitution, agree to it as written, and send it to the states with the request that they “speedily” hold ratifying conventions. This surpassed even what the Convention had requested, but Gorham, Johnson, King, and the other former delegates rallied behind it.59

  Madison’s response left Lee an opening. To take up and approve the document, Lee argued, “implies a right to consider [it] on the whole or part
,” and amend it. He then offered a list of amendments largely borrowed from Mason, beginning with an expansive bill of rights, through an executive council both to advise the President and to replace the Senate in confirming appointments, and concluding with an expanded lower house of Congress and a proportionally representative Senate.60 Lee had overplayed his hand. Even his fellow skeptics realized that Congress could not reopen the basic compromises made in Philadelphia without derailing the Constitution. After two days of wrangling, Congress took a middle course by resolving “unanimously” to transmit the Constitution to every state legislature for submission “to a convention of Delegates chosen in each state by the people.”61 Neither side clearly won but battle lines were clearly drawn.

  THE RESULT SATISFIED WASHINGTON. He received a one-sided report of the dustup in Congress from Madison, but the episode largely stayed out of the press for months. Congress met in private and, even though members could disclose what happened, none of them publicized it until December. Indeed, far from questioning its prospects, one of the few articles about the Constitution in any New York newspaper during the congressional debates simply predicted that Washington’s election as the first President “would doubtless be unanimous.”62 Congress’s official journal included none of the acrimonious discussion and, after the vote on Lee’s motion was stricken from the record, contained scarcely a whiff of dissent.63 “I am better pleased that the proceedings of the Convention is handled from Congress by a unanimous vote (feeble as it is) than if it had appeared under stronger marks of approbation without it,” Washington wrote back to Madison in October. “Not everyone has opportunities to peep behind the curtain; and as the multitude often judge from externals, the appearance of unanimity in that body, on the occas[io]n, will be of great importance.”64