George Washington
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2. To Knox, 20 February 1787, GWP.
3. To George William Fairfax, 10 November 1785, GWP; to Charles Washington, 28 March 1784, GWP; to George Augustine Washington, 1784, GWP.
4. From Benjamin Harrison, Sr., 25 February 1781, GWP; to Benjamin Harrison, Sr., 25 February 1781, GWP.
5. Chernow, 423; to John Augustine Washington, 16 January 1783, GWP; from the Citizens of Fredericksburg, 14 February 1784, GWP; Virginia Gazette, February 21, 1784.
6. To Fielding Lewis Jr., 27 February 1784, GWP; Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington: A Life, New York: Henry Holt & Co. (1997), 402–4; Bruce S. Thornton and Victor Davis Hanson, “‘The Western Cincinnatus’: Washington as Farmer and Soldier,” in Gregg and Spalding, Patriot Sage, 55.
7. Marvin Kitman, George Washington’s Expense Account, New York: Grove Press (1970), 31; to Robert Morris, 4 January 1784, GWP; to James Milligan, 18 February 1784, GWP.
8. To Samuel Vaughan, 14 January 1784, GWP; to William Hamilton, 15 January 1784, GWP; Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., Quebec to Carolina in 1785–1786, Being the Travel Diary and Observations of Robert Hunter, Jr., a Young Merchant of London, San Marino: Huntington Library (1943), 195. Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear, provided a very similar description of Washington’s usual day in retirement, adding only that the general sometimes played whist in the evening. Tobias Lear to William Prescott Jr., 4 March 1788, in “Lear Letter,” Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association Annual Report (1958), 21–22.
9. Wright and Tinling, Travel Diary of Robert Hunter, 191, 193 (17 November 1785).
10. Jared Sparks, The Life of George Washington, Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (1853), 521–22 (letter from Nelly Custis, 26 February 1833); William Harden, “William McWhir: An Irish Friend of Washington,” Georgia Hist. Q. 1:200 (1917); Wright and Tinling, Travel Diary of Robert Hunter, 194. Of the many newspapers he received, Washington attended most to the Pennsylvania Packet from Philadelphia and the Virginia Gazette. Freeman 6:126.
11. To Arthur Young, 6 August 1786, GWP; to Alexander Spotswood, 13 February 1788; to Levi Hollingsworth, 20 September 1785, GWP; from Arthur Donaldson, 1 October 1785, GWP; Diary, 3 November 1785, 15 July 1786, GWP; Freeman 6:55.
12. To John Francis Mercer, 27 March 1785, 20 December 1785, 12 August 1786, GWP.
13. From Thomas Cushing, 7 October 1786, GWP; to William Fitzhugh Jr., 15 May 1786, GWP; to Lafayette, 10 May 1786, GWP; to William Fitzhugh Sr., 2 July 1786, GWP.
14. From R. Morris, 1 January 1785, GWP; Diary, 30 June 1785, GWP; to Francis Hopkinson, 16 May 1785, GWP; Diary, 30 June 1785, GWP; from Thomas Jefferson, 10 July 1786, GWP; Diary, 2 and 10 October 1786, GWP. Nelly Custis recalled finding, as a young girl, her step-grandfather lying on a table, with quills in his nostrils to ensure his breathing while Houdon applied plaster to his face for a life mask. Carol Borchert Cadou, The George Washington Collection: Fine and Decorative Arts at Mount Vernon, Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press (2006), 120 (quoting Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis to George Washington Parke Custis, 5 December 1849, in The Rosenbach, Philadelphia). Other Mount Vernon visitors in this period included the future lexicographer Noah Webster (seeking Washington’s support for a new copyright law, and also considering signing on as tutor to Martha’s grandchildren), British historian Catherine Macaulay Graham, and the steamboat inventor James Rumsey. From Catherine Macaulay Graham, 13 July 1785, GWP; Diary, 14 and 18 July 1785, GWP.
15. Larson, The Return of George Washington, 37; Diary, 29 November 1785, 1, 5, 12, and 19 December 1785, 28 January 1786, 9 February 1786, GWP; to Henry Knox, 5 January 1785, GWP; to Boinod and Gaillard, 18 Feb. 1785, GWP.
16. From George William Fairfax, 23 August 1784, 19 March 1785, 23 June 1785, 23 January 1786, GWP; to George William Fairfax, 27 February 1785, GWP.
17. This paragraph draws on the exploration of Washington’s dental woes in Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington. Chernow, George Washington, 437–39.
18. New York Packet, March 25, 1784; Myers, Liberty Without Anarchy, 19, 21; Edgar Erskine Hume, “Early Opposition to the Cincinnati,” Americana 30:597 (1936); Samuel Osgood to John Adams, 14 January 1784, in Burnett, Letters of Members 7:416; Samuel Osgood to Stephen Higginson, Annapolis, 2 February 1784, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Procs. 5:471, 472–73; Aedanus Burke, Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati, Philadelphia: Robert Bell (1783), 4; Myers, Liberty Without Anarchy, 17, 25–26, 49; William Eustis, “Statement Concerning the Origin of the Cincinnati,” in James M. Bugbee, ed., Memorials of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, Boston: Massachusetts Society (1890), 531–32; Chernow, 497. Even the French minister, a monarchist, thought the society “incompatible with republican government.” Abigail Adams reported to her husband in Europe that the society “makes a bustle,” but predicted it would “be crushed in its birth.” Abigail Adams to John Adams, 11 February 1784, AP. John Adams called it “the deepest piece of cunning yet attempted.” John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, 25 April 1785, AP. Henry Knox feared the society would suffer from the people’s wrath. Henry Knox to Greene, 10 April 1784, in Showman, Greene Papers 12:291. Ben Franklin thought the group was absurd, observing that after nine generations, its members could boast of a 1/512 descent from a Continental Army officer, and doubtless would number “rogues, and fools, and scoundrels, and prostitutes.” Franklin to Sarah Bache, 26 January 1784, PBF.
19. Jefferson and former general Arthur St. Clair advised Washington to expunge all hereditary elements from the society or resign from it. From Jefferson, 16 April 1784, GWP; from Arthur St. Clair, 20 April 1784, GWP; “Observations on the Institution of the Society,” 4 May 1784, GWP; Jefferson to Martin Van Buren, 29 June 1824, PTJ; Elbridge Gerry to Sam Adams, 13 May 1784, Library of the Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, DC. One friend observed that he had never met a person who was not “sensibly awed in [Washington’s] presence, and by the impression of his greatness.” Harden, “William McWhir,” 200.
20. Winthrop Sargent, A Journal of the General Meeting of the Cincinnati in 1784, Philadelphia (1859), 22–28, 40–41, 60. At one point in the convention, Washington thought the society might disband itself, but the delegates’ sentiments revived with the unexpected arrival of golden eagles—the society’s insignia—made for them in France at the direction of King Louis XVI. The delegates were thrilled that a great king had so honored their service, when their own country so neglected it. The prospect of dissolving the society quickly evaporated. To Alexander Hamilton, 11 December 1785, GWP; Jefferson to Martin Van Buren, 29 June 1824, PTJ; Sargent, A Journal of the General Meeting, 68. When Nathanael Greene died in 1786, the South Carolina society immediately approved his teenage son as a new member when he reached age eighteen. That action signaled that society membership would remain hereditary. Pennsylvania Packet, September 11, 1786.
21. To Samuel Vaughan, 30 November 1785, GWP; to Arthur St. Clair, 31 August 1785, GWP. In 1785, the Massachusetts delegates to Congress warned that a national convention to rewrite the Articles of Confederation might be taken over by the Cincinnati in an aristocratic coup. Massachusetts Delegates to the Governor of Massachusetts, 3 September 1785, in Burnett, Letters of Members 8:208; Mercy Warren to John Adams, December 1786, AP.
22. From Thomas Walker, 24 January 1784, GWP; to Thomas Walker, 10 April 1784, GWP; to Samuel Lewis, 1 February 1784, GWP; from Thomas Lewis, 24 February 1784, GWP; to Edmund Randolph, 18 March 1784, GWP; to John Witherspoon, 10 March 1784, GWP.
23. From Jefferson, 15 March 1784, GWP.
24. To John Augustine Washington, 30 June 1784, GWP; to Dr. James Craik, 10 July 1784, GWP; Larson, The Return of George Washington, 39–47; George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2017), 43–44; to Thomas Richardson, 5 July 1784, GWP; advertisement, Virginia Journal, July 15, 1784; to Battaile Muse, 5 January 1785, GWP; from Battaile Muse, 12 Janua
ry 1786, GWP; to George McCarmick, 12 July 1784, GWP.
25. Diary, 5, 9, 22, and 25 September 1784, GWP; Wright and Tinling, Travel Diary of Robert Hunter, 191–92. Washington came upon a striking example of the growth of global trade in the 1780s when he passed people on the road who were hauling ginseng roots east for shipment to China. Diary, 12 September 1784, GWP.
26. Diary, 12, 13, 14, 20, 22, and 23 September 1784, GWP. For an extended treatment of this journey by Washington, see Joel Achenbach, The Grand Idea, George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West, New York: Simon & Schuster (2004).
27. Diary, 3, 4, 22, and 24 September, 1 and 4 October 1784, GWP.
28. Robert J. Kapsch, The Potomac Canal: George Washington and the Waterway West, Morgantown: West Virginia University Press (2007), 10, 23–24, 47; from Stephen Sayre, 20 August 1784, GWP.
29. To Governor Benjamin Harrison, 10 October 1784, GWP; from George Plater, 20 October 1784, GWP; to George Plater, 28 October 1784, GWP; from Stephen Sayre, 15 October 1784, GWP; from Normand Bruce, 13 November 1784, GWP; from Benjamin Harrison, 13 November 1784, GWP; from Henry Lee Jr., 18 November 1784, GWP; Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, November 25, 1784.
30. Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, December 2, 1784; to the Virginia House of Delegates, 15 November 1784, GWP; to James Madison, 28 November 1784, GWP. See also from Henry Lee Jr., 18 November 1784, GWP.
31. To James Madison 3 December 1784, GWP; from Beverley Randolph, 15 December 1784, GWP; to William Paca, 19 December 1784, GWP; to Thomas Blackburne, 19 December 1784, GWP; from Horatio Gates, 24 December 1784, GWP; to James Madison, 28 December 1784, GWP; from Madison, 1 January 1785, GWP; Hening, Statutes at Large 11:510–11.
32. Kapsch, The Potomac Canal, 50–51; Larson, The Return of George Washington, 61. Larson writes of Washington’s effort, “If he could not move mountains, the project proved that he could move men.” Madison to Jefferson, 9 January 1785, PJM.
33. To John Filson, 16 January 1785, GWP; from Samuel Love, 17 February 1785, GWP; to John Fitzgerald and William Hartshorne, 18 January 1785, GWP; from John Fitzgerald and Samuel Hartshorne, 21 January 1785, GWP; to Robert Morris, 1 February 1785, GWP; to Jefferson, 25 February 1785, GWP; to Lafayette, 15 February 1785, GWP; from Christopher Richmond, 8 April 1785, note 1, GWP; Diary, 17 May 1785; Virginia Journal, May 19, 1785.
34. Kapsch, The Potomac Canal, 11–12, 30–31.
35. From Benjamin Harrison, 6 January and 8 February 1785, GWP; to Henry Knox, 5 January and 28 February 1785, GWP; to William Grayson, 22 January 1785, GWP; to Benjamin Harrison, 22 January 1785, GWP; to Lafayette, 15 February 1785, GWP; to Jefferson, 25 February 1785, GWP; from William Grayson, 10 March 1785, GWP; from Patrick Henry, 19 March 1785, GWP; to Edmund Randolph, 30 July 1785, GWP; to Patrick Henry, 31 August 1785, GWP. The gift from the legislature included one hundred shares in the James River Company, a parallel project that explored clearing that river’s navigation. Washington never thought the James was a promising route to the west. The dedication of the shares to education matched Washington’s pattern of paying for the education of friends’ sons. Diary, 31 August 1785, GWP; to Jeremiah Wadsworth, 22 October 1786. He also made a major donation to a school in Alexandria for the education of orphans and other poor children. To the Trustees of the Alexandria Academy, 17 December 1785, GWP. The Potomac Company shares could not be found after Washington’s death, so never produced any income.
36. Diary, 2–10 August, 18 October 1785, 2 February, 14 June 1786, GWP; from George Gilpin, 10 July 1785, GWP; to Clement Biddle, 27 July 1786, GWP; to Thomas Johnson, 10 September 1785, GWP; to Thomas Johnson and Thomas Sim Lee, 10 September 1786 and note 1, GWP; from Thomas Johnson, 21 September 1785, GWP; Diary, 26 September 1786, GWP.
37. To William Grayson, 22 August 1785, GWP; to Edmund Randolph, 16 September 1785, GWP; to George William Fairfax, 10 November 1785, GWP; to Henry Lee Jr., 5 April 1786, GWP; Kapsch, The Potomac Canal, 243, 251, 254–55. The locks and canal around Great Falls have been called the greatest engineering project in eighteenth-century America. Alexander Crosby Brown, “America’s Greatest Eighteenth Century Engineering Achievement,” Virginia Cavalcade 12 (Spring 1963), 40–47.
38. To David Humphreys, 25 July 1785, GWP; to Lafayette, 25 July 1785, GWP.
39. From Thomas Stone, 28 January 1785, GWP; David O. Stewart, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Created the Constitution, New York: Simon & Schuster (2007), 4–7, 9.
40. Diary, 20, 22, 24, and 25 March 1785, GWP; Mason to Madison, 9 August 1785, PJM; Larson, The Return of George Washington, 61–62; Mount Vernon Compact, 28 March 1785, in Rutland, George Mason Papers 2:812–21. Although Article 6 of the Articles of Confederation may have required congressional approval of the compact, neither state submitted it for congressional review.
41. From Madison, 9 December 1785, GWP; Madison to Jefferson, 22 January 1786, PJM. In retirement, Madison recalled that the resolution for the Annapolis Conference was presented in the Virginia General Assembly by John Tyler, “who having never served in Congress,” was a more acceptable sponsor than someone (like Madison) “whose service [in Congress] exposed them to an imputable bias” in favor of strengthening the national government. Madison, “Preface to Debates in the Convention of 1787,” in Farrand 3:544.
39. BACK INTO HARNESS
1. To Richard Henry Lee, 8 February 1785, GWP.
2. Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the Revolution,” National Bureau of Economic Research (July 2011), 15; Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2016), 84–86; John R. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British North America, 1607–1789, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (1991), 373–74; Robert A. McGuire, To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution, New York: Oxford University Press (2003); Allan Kulikoff, “‘Such Things Ought Not to Be’: The American Revolution and the First National Great Depression,” in Andrew Shankman, ed., The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, New York: Routledge (2014), 134–35; Wood, The Idea of America, 136–37.
3. Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, New York: Crown (2017), 17, 86, 97–98, 283–86, 379–80; Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government, 19–22; Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” WMQ 62:243 (2005).
4. Hoock, Scars of Independence, 354–65, 17; Breen, The Will of the People, 201; John Kaminski, Paper Politics: The Northern State Loan-Offices During the Confederation, 1783–1790, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. (1989), 4–5; Hamilton to Robert R. Livingston, 13 August 1783, PAH.
5. Lindert and Williamson, “American Incomes,” 22; Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains, 90; Kulikoff, “Such Things Ought Not To Be,” 136–37; Curtis Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy: 1775–1815, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1962), 52; McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America, 361; James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, “Economic Change After the American Revolution: Prewar and Postwar Comparisons of Maritime Shipping and Trade,” Explorations in Economic History 13:397 (November 1976).
6. Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government, 37–38; Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 46–47; Kaminski, Paper Politics, 12; Edmund Randolph to Madison, 6 August 1782, GWP.
7. Stephen Conway, A Short History of the American Revolutionary War, London: Tauris (2013), 125; Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government, 22–23; Markus Hünemörder, The Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy and Distrust in Early America, New York: Berghahn Books (2006), 7; Eric Newman, The Early Paper Money of America, Iola, WI: Krause Publications (2008), 481; Ferguson, The Power of the Purse, 26–28, 44, 51, 63–64, 77.
8. Joseph Reed letter, October 1784
, quoted in Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government, 39; Richard Henry Lee to Madison, 20 November 1784, in PJM; Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 60; Terry Bouton, “Moneyless in Pennsylvania: Privatization and the Depression of the 1780s,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press (2006), 233.
9. Douglas A. Irwin, “Revenue or Reciprocity? Founding Feuds over Early U.S. Trade Policy,” in Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla, Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2011), 92. One maneuver the states mastered was to accept national securities (bonds) from citizens as tax payments and then use those much-depreciated securities to pay requisitions from Congress; the maneuver delivered no actual purchasing power to the national government (though it did reduce its debt). Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government, 73. By one calculation, from October 1786 to March 1787 the states paid to Congress so many of those national bonds that they paid actual currency of only $663. Ray Raphael, Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right, New York: The New Press (2013), 21; JCC 30:72 (15 February 1786); from Richard Henry Lee, 2 March 1786, GWP.
10. Roger H. Brown, Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1993), 17–18, 141; from Richard Henry Lee, 20 November 1784, GWP.
11. From Nathanael Greene, 29 August 1784, GWP.
12. To Jonathan Trumbull Jr., 5 January 1784, GWP; to Benjamin Harrison, 18 January 1784, GWP; to Lafayette, 25 July 1785, GWP.
13. To Jacob Read, 11 August 1784, GWP; to George William Fairfax, 30 June 1785, GWP; to Knox, 8 March 1787, GWP; to Madison, 30 November 1785, GWP; to James McHenry, 22 August 1785, GWP; to James Warren, 7 October 1785, GWP; to David Stuart, 30 November 1785, GWP.
14. Walter Stahr, John Jay: Founding Father, New York: Hambledon Continuum (2005), 211–17; James Monroe to Madison, 3 September 1786, PJM; from Henry Lee Jr., 3 July 1786, GWP; from David Stuart, 13 November 1786, GWP; from Madison, 7 December 1786, GWP.