The fifty-year-old State House had changed too. The rotting steeple that towered over the symmetrical, Georgian-style structure when Washington, Franklin, and others had met there for the Second Continental Congress came down in 1781, replaced by a squat temporary cupola that would remain in place for five decades. New landscaping, paving, fencing, and copper spouts improved the exterior. The landscaping, which included a public garden with a grove of elms, serpentine walks, and constructed landforms, so delighted Washington that he asked its architect to create similar features at Mount Vernon. A city hall, courthouse, and home for Franklin’s American Philosophical Society were under construction on the State House grounds. With the confederation Congress then meeting in New York, the Convention could convene in the historic chamber where the Continental Congress had declared independence, without risking interference from the current government. No city in America had more rooming houses and taverns to lodge and feed delegates. Theaters and private clubs offered evening entertainment.
Philadelphians prepared for the coming fifty-five-member conclave. In February, long before the first out-of-state delegate arrived, they formed an elite Society for Political Inquiries that met biweekly in the library of Franklin’s home to discuss matters of political economy and public responsibility in a republic. Every member of the Convention from Pennsylvania joined, as did many of the civic leaders who would host delegates at salons and dinners. Although the society avoided topics of governmental structure that might divide members and intrude on the Convention’s business, it took on ones that framed and gave meaning to republican government. In May, the society made Washington an honorary member.5
As state president, Franklin also arranged for the Convention to meet in the spacious, ground-floor Assembly Room of the State House rather than nearby Carpenters’ Hall, which had housed the First Continental Congress, and he otherwise helped to prepare Philadelphia for the coming conclave. Reading about his activities in the newspapers of far-off Boston, Franklin’s sister wrote to him with evident pride that it “makes you Apear to me Like a young man of Twenty-five.” Her prayer for the Convention was simple: “I had Rather hear of the Sword being beat into Plow-Shares,” she told her brother, “if by that means we may be brought to live Peaceably with won a nother.”6
OF ALL THE DELEGATES descending on Philadelphia, none was more anticipated than Washington. His inspirational leadership during the Revolution—serving without pay or leave for more than eight years—followed by his acclaimed retirement from public life at the war’s end made him the personification of republican virtue at a time when Americans hungered for a leader they could trust with power. On April 3, Franklin wrote to Washington expressing his “Hopes of seeing you here at the Convention, being persuaded that your Presence will be of the greatest Importance to the Success of the Measure.”7 This was the only personalized greeting extended by Pennsylvania’s sitting chief executive. Robert Morris soon added the invitation “that you will on your arrival come to our House & make it your Home during your Stay in this City. We will give you as little Trouble as possible.”8 The Morrises offered this courtesy only to Washington. Other delegates lodged in crowded rooming houses and dined at common tables in them or at taverns and clubs. In May, Pennsylvania’s vice president wrote to Franklin, “I believe it will be Proper for [the Executive] Council to Address Genl Washington. Your Excellency knows best what should be done.”9 No other delegate received a formal state welcome.
As Franklin’s letter suggests, Washington’s attendance at the Convention remained in doubt until the last minute. The prior December, Virginia had tapped him to lead its delegation to Philadelphia, but he did not initially accept and instead urged that someone “on whom greater reliance can be had, may be substituted in my place.”10 Virginia governor Edmund Randolph entreated Washington “not to decide on a refusal immediately.”11 James Madison wrote separately to express his “wish that at least a door could be kept open for your acceptance hereafter, in case the gathering clouds should become so dark and menacing as to supercede every consideration, but that of our national existence.”12 Those considerations included Washington’s concerns that Congress had not yet consented to calling the Convention; the fact that states might so restrict their delegations that they could not (as Washington put it) “probe the defects of the Constitution to the bottom, and provide radical cures”; and disabling rheumatoid arthritis in his shoulder, which might keep him from traveling.13 In short, beyond matters of health, Washington did not know whether the convention route could work and did not want to expend his limited political capital on a doomed enterprise.
One by one, Washington’s concerns evaporated or at least became manageable. In February, Congress consented to calling the Convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”14 This measure might not go as far as Washington wished toward authorizing the Convention to craft radical cures for what he saw as a fatally flawed confederation but in April he heard from Secretary of War Henry Knox. Every state except Rhode Island would send delegations to the Convention, Knox wrote, and none would carry unduly limiting instructions on what its delegates could discuss or propose.15
Acting separately, Knox, Madison, and Foreign Secretary John Jay also sent Washington outlines for a new constitution. All called for turning the current governing structure on its head by replacing a toothless unicameral congress composed of delegates from sovereign states with a sovereign national government comprised of a bicameral legislature, independent executive, and separate judiciary. The authority of Congress should expand to cover “All national objects” as Congress itself defined them, Knox noted.16 Jay wrote of “the States retaining only so much power as may be necessary for domestic Purposes.”17 Madison called for a federal system “which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities whenever they can be subordinately useful.”18
Impressed by the similarities in these three proposals, Washington prepared an abstract comparing their main features that he could use as a strategic plan for the Convention. Much as on the eve of battles during the American Revolution, when he would listen to his top officers before framing a plan of operations, Washington finally felt ready to proceed. He now had a plan, or at least an outline of a plan, for a truly national government.
So long as his health allowed, Washington told Randolph at the end of March, he would go to Philadelphia.19 There he would deliberate with the assembled state delegations, he explained to Jay, to find out “what can be effected.” The Philadelphia Convention, Washington here added in an expression of urgency surpassing any of his prior warnings, “may be the last peaceable mode” of saving the union.20 Already first in war by military service, Washington would attempt by political service to become first in peace. Encouraging Washington to assume this role, Knox assured him that, should the Convention produce a wholly new constitution rather than “patch work to the present defective confederation,” he would be “doubly entitle[d] . . . to the glorious republican epithet—The Father of Your Country.”21 It was at this point that Washington received the letter from Franklin expressing the Pennsylvanian’s view that Washington’s presence at the Convention would be vital to its success.22
For Washington, as the reasons against attending the Convention faded, motives for going appeared in sharper relief. Among the dark clouds impelling him forward, thousands of rural Massachusetts debtors had taken up arms in a desperate effort to stop state courts from foreclosing on their farms during the economic depression engulfing their state in 1786. Unlike Franklin’s Pennsylvania, Massachusetts had done little to counter the destabilizing postwar constriction in the money supply, which the confederation left each state to address. Loosely led by a former Continental Army captain and wounded veteran of the Battle of Saratoga named Daniel Shays, this local insurrection appeared more frightening the further removed observers lived—and Washington resided four states away. He learne
d about it mostly through Knox.
“The fine theoretical government of Massachusetts has given way,” Knox wrote to Washington after rioters stopped courts from sitting in six rural counties during the September 1786 term. Despairing of the states, Knox concluded, the general federal “government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property.”23 After the closures extended into the December term, Washington wrote back, “I feel, my dear Genl Knox, infinitely more than I can express to you, for the disorders which have arisen in these states. Good God! who besides a tory [loyalist] could have foreseen, or a Briton predicted them!”24
In 1787 as in 1776, Washington equated liberty with the defense of property rights, which helped to make slavery such a hard issue for him and led him so ready to denounce Shays and his fellow “Regulators,” despite their sympathetic status as unpaid war veterans. “Notwithstanding the boasted virtue of America, we are far gone in every thing ignoble & bad,” he complained to Knox.25 Accordingly, Washington hailed the response of Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin, whose harsh debt and tax policies had fueled the uprising, to hire a twenty-five-hundred-man private army to pursue these Regulators and punish their leaders. “If government shrinks,” Washington wrote as Bowdoin’s army set out, “fresh manoeuvres will be displayed by the insurgents—anarchy & confusion must prevail—and every thing will be turned topsy turvey.”26 Bowdoin did not trust the regular Massachusetts militia to disperse the Regulators, especially since some of its soldiers had joined forces with the insurgents.
In the defense of property rights, Washington found an ally in Franklin. After Bowdoin’s army routed the ill-equipped Regulators in February 1787 and sent their leaders fleeing out of state, Franklin, as president of Pennsylvania, threw the full weight of his state’s government behind efforts to apprehend the runaways. “I congratulate your Excellency most cordially on the happy Success attending the wise and vigorous Measures taken for the Suppression of that dangerous Insurrection,” he wrote to Bowdoin after signing legislation adding to the reward offered for Shays’s capture.27 The voters of Massachusetts were less impressed. They booted Bowdoin out at the next election and reinstated as governor the more moderate John Hancock, who pardoned Shays and promoted debt and tax reform. The crisis had passed in Massachusetts but it left a lingering impact on the movement for constitutional reform. “These disorders are evident marks of a defective government,” Washington wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette in March about the episode; “indeed the thinking part of the people of this Country are now so well satisfied of this fact that most of the Legislatures have appointed, & the rest it is said will appoint, delegates to meet at Philadelphia the second monday in may next in general Convention of the States to revise, and correct the defects of the federal System.”28
FINALLY, IN EARLY MAY, the last impediment to Washington’s attendance at the Convention fell away as his health stabilized enough to travel. To others, Washington had always appeared a tower of physical and emotional strength, especially when on horseback: tall, solidly built, reserved, immaculately dressed, and a superb equestrian. The clothes and the emotional reserve remained but, at fifty-five, he no longer displayed quite the same physical force. Acquaintances commented that he looked older and somewhat stooped. Rheumatism in his shoulder could make riding painful and caused him at times to carry his arm in a sling. After delaying his departure due to the rain that dogged his entire trip, Washington left for Philadelphia by carriage on May 9 still complaining of a “violent” headache and “sick stomach.”29 His only traveling companions were three slaves—his valet Billy Lee, coachman Paris, and groom Giles—perched on front or back of his carriage. Having become “too attentive to two little Grand Children to leave home,” Washington explained, his wife remained behind at Mount Vernon.30 These grandchildren were hers, not his. She had taken responsibility for rearing them after their father died. They were heirs to the vast Custis estate, much of which Martha held in trust.
A reminder of early America’s expansiveness, Washington’s 150-mile carriage journey from Mount Vernon to Philadelphia took five days. It also crossed two culturally, economically, and religiously distinct regions by going from the hierarchical, slaveholding south with its plantation-based economy and entrenched Anglicanism to the more egalitarian middle states of small family farms, growing commercial centers, and deep religious diversity. Fully representative of the former region, Washington, the beneficiary of inherited wealth and status by birth and marriage, saw himself as part of the gentry while from the latter, Franklin, who earned his wealth and status, always portrayed himself a “middling” or middle-class man.31 By the time of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin had freed his few house slaves and Pennsylvania had decreed the gradual abolition of slavery within its borders, while Washington retained roughly three hundred enslaved workers at Mount Vernon and the number of slaves throughout Virginia continued to grow. The differences dividing Franklin’s Pennsylvania and Washington’s Virginia, which only increased as one traveled to states farther north or south, illustrated the task faced by delegates seeking to forge a true federal union out of thirteen far-flung states from three distinct regions: northeast (or east), middle, and south.
Not having announced his departure date or travel route in advance, Washington’s arrival in each community along the way came as something of a surprise until he neared Philadelphia. This suppressed what would have otherwise been a triumphant procession. Word had reached Philadelphia in advance, however, and an all-star delegation waited to greet him at the state line in Chester on May 13. Nearer Philadelphia, mounted dragoons of the city light horse brigade took their place around Washington’s carriage as it passed in paradelike fashion between rows of uniformed troops and crowds of local citizens. “On my arrival, the Bells were chimed,” Washington noted in his diary.32 The Convention was scheduled to begin the next day—May 14, 1787.
Washington first went to the boardinghouse operated by Mary House, where Madison had taken up residence, and then a few doors west to his own lodgings at Morris’s mansion. Minutes later, he emerged to travel some three hundred yards to Franklin’s home where, as Washington wrote, he “Waited upon the President.”33 This was Washington’s first order of business—his first formal act—upon reaching Philadelphia. The leading delegate calling on the host state’s chief executive: the nation’s two most celebrated heroes conferring and, by doing so, giving dignity to the proceedings that brought them together. Although Washington likely walked, historian of the Convention Richard Beeman envisions him traveling by carriage because the “meeting with Franklin had the character of a formal state visit.” Various accounts have Franklin showing Washington his house and the two men getting reacquainted over tea or wine under the shade of a mulberry tree in the courtyard. “That garden meeting may well have provided America’s two most illustrious statesmen with the opportunity to form a bond that would prove immensely valuable in the months to come,” Beeman posits.34 One of the sixteen historical murals in the U.S. Capitol’s Great Experiment Hall depicts Franklin conferring at this site with leading delegates during the Convention.
THE CONVENTION GOT OFF TO A SLOW START. On Monday, May 14, Washington and presumably Franklin appeared at the State House at the appointed hour for the Convention to start but found only Madison and other delegates from Pennsylvania present. They returned the following two days, but no more states were represented, even though four more members from Virginia arrived. The Convention could not meet without a quorum of at least seven states represented by half or more of their delegates.
Late on the afternoon of the sixteenth, Washington returned to Franklin’s house for what amounted to a state dinner for those delegates already in attendance. “We have here at present what the French call une assemblée des notables, a convention composed of some of the principal people from the several states of our confederation,” Franklin wrote to the London brewer who had supplied the beer used on this occasion. “They did me the
honor of dining with me last Wednesday, when the cask was broached, and its contents met with the most cordial reception and universal approbation. In short the company agreed unanimously that it was the best porter they had ever tasted.” Franklin hosted a similar dinner during the next week. Despite his advanced age and well-known infirmities, he was clearly up for the Convention and a prime mover at the proceedings. “When I consider how many terrible diseases the human body is liable to, I comfort myself that only three incurable ones have fallen to my share, viz, the gout, the stone, and old age; and that these have not yet deprived me of my natural cheerfulness, my delight in books and enjoyment of social conversation,” Franklin added in his letter to the brewer.35
Given the primitive state of medicine at the time and the average forty-four-year life span for a white American in 1790, Franklin was in tolerably good health for a man his age. Although once a fine horseman and expert swimmer, riding and swimming were now out of the question and even standing or walking caused pain from his kidney stone. “Sitting, or lying in Bed I am generally quite easy,” Franklin wrote to a friend in France less than a month before the scheduled start of the Convention, “and as I live temperately, drink no Wine, and use daily the Exercise of Dumb Bell, I flatter myself that the Stone is kept from augmenting.” To minimize the pain, when Franklin acted in his official capacity as Pennsylvania’s president (which likely was stretched to include attending the Convention), inmates from the nearby Walnut Street Prison sometimes bore him the three blocks from his home to the State House on a sedan chair. “People who live long, who will drink of the Cup of Life to the very Bottom, must expect to meet with some of the usual Dregs,” he wrote to this French friend.36 Franklin was fifteen years older than the Convention’s second most senior member, Roger Sherman, and twice the average age of the others yet, as one delegate noted, possessed “an activity of mind equal to a youth of 25.”37
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