“a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs”
WASHINGTON DECLINED TO ATTEND a meeting of the Society of Cincinnati, due to take place in May 1787 in Philadelphia, on the ground that he was now committed to a life of retirement. In March of that year, however, he wrote, with good reason, of “a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs.”
Washington’s former protégé Alexander Hamilton, of New York, and James Madison, of Virginia, had earlier been foremost in calling for a grand convention of all the states to address the weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation. It was to be held that May in Philadelphia. The articles provided Congress with no power to raise taxes: it could only request monies from individual states, and its requests were often ignored. The control that the states wielded over trade and commerce was often as punitive as that emanating from London, against which patriot Americans had rebelled. Madison and Hamilton were intent on establishing a federal government with a bicameral house, executive, and judiciary. Both of them pleaded with Washington to attend the convention as a Virginia delegate who favored their cause. In January 1784 he had written to Benjamin Harrison of the “disinclination of the individual States to yield competent powers to Congress for a federal Government.” He deplored the states’ “unreasonable jealousy of that body & of one another.”
At a preliminary convention in Richmond, Washington was named a delegate to the Grand Convention with Governor Edmund Randolph, Madison, Mason, Henry, and two others. However, it looked for some time as though he would refuse to serve in May. He had always guarded his reputation like a dog its bone. It would cause grave offense to his former comrades, members of the Society of Cincinnati, he argued, if, having declined to attend their meeting, he attended instead the Grand Convention. At the end of March he yielded to Madison and Hamilton. However, he still had misgivings, as the letter he wrote on the twenty-eighth to Governor Randolph shows: “there will be, I apprehend, too much cause to charge my conduct with inconsistency, in again appearing on a public theatre after a public declaration to the contrary.”
Confident that Martha would be at her husband’s side, the Robert Morrises begged the Washingtons to make their Market Street house their home while they were in the city. “We will give You as little trouble as possible,” Morris wrote on April 23, “and endeavour to make it agreeable, it will be a charming season for Travelling, and Mrs Washington as well as yourself will find benefit from the Journey, Change of Air, etc.”
Early in May the reluctant delegate replied: “Mrs. Washington is become too Domestick and too attentive to two little Grand Children to leave home.” When Jacky had been young, Martha had been too nervous about his health to leave him much, and she fancied him at death’s door when she went visiting. She expressed similar agitation about Wash, later writing to Fanny Bassett Washington: “I cannot say but it makes me miserable if ever he complains, let the cause be ever so trifling. I hope the Almighty will spare him to me.” There were others genuinely in need of her attention. That April Fanny Bassett Washington gave birth at Mount Vernon to her first child, a boy, whom they named George Fayette. Within two weeks, however, the child sickened. The Reverend Lee Massey, sent for to administer the rite of baptism, very soon officiated at the child’s burial. Martha mourned with Fanny and consoled her.
In early May Washington prepared George Augustine for new responsibilities: “Rid [rode] to the Fishing landing—and thence to the Ferry, French’s, Dogue run, and Muddy Hole Plantations with my Nephew G.W. to explain to him the Nature, and the order of the business at each, as I would have it carried on, during my absence at the Convention in Philadelphia.” But he still harped on his reluctance to serve at the Grand Convention, writing on the fifth to Robert Morris: “I can assure you, Sir, that it was not until after a long struggle I could obtain my own consent to appear again in a public theatre.” As often before, he wrote of his wish to “glide gently down the stream of life in tranquil retirement” toward what he now described as “the world of Spirits.”
He and Martha were both aware that his return to public life would not likely end with the closure of that assembly.
When elected commander-in-chief, Washington had told Congress: “I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.” He was again humble when he was—unanimously—elected, on May 25, to preside over the Grand Convention. From the chair, he reminded delegates of “the novelty of the scene of business in which he was to act, lamented his want of [better qualifications], and claimed the indulgence of the House towards the involuntary errors which his inexperience might occasion.” Such declarations only caused the convention president’s stock to rise. Washington had, of course, extensive experience as a burgess and as a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses. He had, besides, dealt constantly with Congress and state assemblies during the war.
The battles in the chamber over which Washington presided were fierce. There was a powerful anti-Federalist lobby that included the Washingtons’ neighbor George Mason as well as Governor George Clinton of New York. They held that only amendments to the Articles of Confederation currently in force were required. The Federalists as staunchly favored Madison’s and Hamilton’s plans for a central government. By the end of July the latter had won the day, and the framework of a constitution for the United States was agreed. But there was still an array of detail to debate.
During the months Washington spent in Philadelphia, when not required in the State House, he was unusually sociable. In town he dined frequently in company with the Morrises. Morris’s business partner Thomas Willing, Willing’s sister Elizabeth and her husband, Samuel Powel, and Gouverneur Morris were other hosts. Washington attended numerous parties of pleasure at these friends’ country villas. Martha, occupied with her grandchildren, was far away, but he enjoyed the company of his friends’ wives. With Elizabeth Willing Powel, in particular, a spirited woman ten years his junior, Washington, at fifty-five, was on excellent terms. He took her in his carriage, on two occasions, to drink tea after dinner at Lansdowne, John Penn’s home. He wrote to her on July 30, regretting that he could not form one of a party for a production of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal that evening. About to depart on a fishing expedition with Gouverneur Morris, the grave Washington was for once playful: “The Genl can but regret that matters have turned out so unluckily, after waiting so long to receive a lesson in the School for Scandal.”
Mrs. Powel, in turn, sent him, in early September, an economical new device, a “reflecting Lamp” for his hall. “I well know your Delicacy on the Subject of accepting the smallest Present even from your best Friend,” she wrote. She hoped, nevertheless, on the score of patriotism, that he would accept it. “Your Example will, I flatter myself, be always sufficient to recommend & establish the Use of any Articles in America.…The One sent is not of the ornamental Kind, but simple & neat; but, with your Temperance & Aversion to Ostentation, that will be no objection.” She signed herself, “with great Sincerity, dear Sir, Your affectionate Friend and very humble Servt, Eliza. Powel.” Washington replied the same day, “Neat simplicity, is among the most desirable properties of the one you have sent me, but that which stamps the highest value thereon, is the hand from which it comes.”
Such flirtatious friendships between the sexes within the bounds of marriage to others were not uncommon in Philadelphia. Mrs. Powel was on civil terms with Martha. But this correspondence with Washington suggests a different order of intimacy.
On September 17, the Constitution was adopted by the Convention. On the point of setting out for home the following day, Washington enclosed a copy of the document in a letter to Lafayette, naming it “the production of four months’ deliberation. It is now a Child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others.” Article VII provided for further ratifying conventions to meet in each state. If nine or more of those conventions voted aye, they would be bound by “this constitution.” Washington continued: “what will be the General opinion on, or the reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say any thing for or against it—if it be good, I suppose it will work its way good—if bad, it will recoil on the Framers.”
Washington, on his return home, was soon once again the farmer: “Friday 28th. Rid to the Plantns. at the Ferry—French’s, Dogue run & Muddy hole—engaged in the same work at each.” But for how long would he be permitted to remain at his plow? His name was widely canvassed as that of the only candidate of sufficient experience and standing to assume the executive office, once the Constitution was ratified and elections were held. Gouverneur Morris wrote to him on October 30: “I have observed that your Name to the new Constitution has been of infinite Service. Indeed I am convinced that if you had not attended the Convention, and the same Paper had been handed out to the World, it would have met with a colder Reception.…As it is, should the Idea prevail that you would not accept of the Presidency it would prove fatal in many Parts.” He argued: “your great and decided Superiority leads Men willingly to put you in a Place which will not add to your personal Dignity, nor raise you higher than you already stand.”
The Samuel Powels visited Mount Vernon in the autumn, and Mrs. Powel took some trouble thereafter to secure some “collars” that her hostess wanted for the Parke Custis girls, to improve their posture. In her letter of thanks, Martha, on January 18, 1788, begged the Powels to return: “though we are not as gay as you are at Philadelphia, yet in this peaceful retreat you will find friendship and cordiality which, to one who does not go fully into all the gaieties of the city, will, I flatter myself, be quite as agreeable.” Martha set her face resolutely against both urban pleasures and current affairs. In February she wrote to Fanny, who was lying in for her second child at Eltham, “we have not a single article of news but politics which I do not concern myself about.” David Humphreys, a former aide of her husband’s, she wrote, was at Mount Vernon, intent on writing a life of the general. Bad weather had foiled a journey the two were to make on Potomac Company business. The colonel, she wrote, “thought himself quite as well by the fire side at Mount Vernon as he should be at the Shenandoah.”
For all Martha’s concentration on the pleasure of home and hearth, elsewhere five ratifying conventions in five states had met and voted aye to the Constitution. Soon news would come that Massachusetts had made a sixth in favor. Following ratification by Maryland and South Carolina in the spring, Washington read anxiously every dispatch from David Stuart, a delegate to the ratifying convention that met in Richmond in June. News came of victory in the Virginia capital, capped by news of ratification in New Hampshire four days earlier, on June 21. The new Constitution now bound all these states, and New York, which shortly afterward voted aye.
Friends and admirers of Washington’s continued to beg him to serve as president or “Chief Magistrate” of the United States, should he be elected. The latter term was used by many, in allusion to the range of powers the head of the executive branch of government would enjoy. “I take it for granted, Sir,” wrote Hamilton in August, “you have concluded to comply with what will no doubt be the general call of your country in relation to the new government. You will permit me to say that it is indispensable you should lend yourself to its first operations—It is to little purpose to have introduced a system, if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment.”
Washington responded, “I can say nothing.” He explained that “the event”—his election as president—might never occur. If it did, he continued, “it would be a point of prudence to defer forming one’s ultimate and irrevocable decision, so long as new data might be afforded for one to act with the greater wisdom & propriety.” He wrote, as ever, of his “great and sole desire to live and die, in peace and retirement, on my own farm.”
A Congress of Confederation, in the autumn, made final arrangements for the new government. A bicameral legislature, with an upper house, to be known as the Senate, and a lower house, formally the House of Representatives—informally, “the House”—was created. Washington had admitted to Hamilton in August that it might become at some point “indispensable” to accept high office. At the same time he shared his fear that, in that case, “the world and Posterity might probably accuse me of inconsistency and ambition.”
The new year of 1789 brought elections for senators and repre-
sentatives—and a date for the election of president and vice president. There was at last an end to Washington’s havering. He asked Madison in early January, “Is there any safe, and tolerably expeditious mode by which letters from the Post Office in Fredericksburg are conveyed to you? I want to write a private & confidential letter to you, shortly, but am not inclined to trust to an uncertain conveyance, so as to hazard the loss or inspection of it.”
The document that the general conveyed to this trusted political ally in February was a draft of the inaugural address he meant to give as president. He had at last, and well in advance of the actual election, made his peace with the doubts that had so long beset him. On January 7 he noted in his diary: “Went up to the Election of an Elector (for this district).” Dr. Stuart was the successful candidate, one of twelve Virginia electors who would cast a vote on the fourth for presidential and vice presidential candidates the following month. The new Senate would count the votes of all the states’ electors. “Dined with a large company on venison at Page’s Tavern and came home in the evening.”
Washington could have been forgiven for considering the venison in some measure funerary meat. He wrote to Knox on April 1: “my movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quit a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties, without that competency of political skill—abilities & inclination which is necessary to manage the helm.”
On the fourteenth of that month, however, he was prepared and ready to depart when Charles Thomson, secretary of Congress, arrived to inform him of his election as president of the United States. John Adams had been elected vice president. The new president, elected, like his vice president, for a four-year term, was to be inaugurated in New York on the thirtieth. There was no time to be lost, and Washington, with Thomson, left Mount Vernon on the sixteenth.
Martha was not shy with her opinion of these proceedings. Four days after her husband’s departure, she wrote to her nephew John Dandridge, “I am truly sorry to tell that the General is gone to New York.” That city was the—temporary—home of government. Three Cherry Street, a town house, had been selected by Congress as a suitable presidential residence and was leased for an initial year at $845.1
Martha continued: “When, or whether he will ever come home again God only knows. I think it was much too late for him to go into public life again, but it was not to be avoided.” She added tersely, “Our family will be deranged, as I must soon follow him.”
1 Congress, in August 1785, had authorized the issuance of a new official and decimal currency, the United States dollar. As no mint was yet established, the currencies of different states and specie continued to circulate, and sums were quoted sometimes in dollars and sometimes in their equivalent in current money, denominated in pounds, shillings, and pence.