Washington: A Life (106 page)

While the convention dragged on, Washington drank enormous quantities of tea at the City Tavern and the Indian Queen, two haunts frequented by delegates. In his social life, he exhibited expert political instincts and embraced a wide spectrum of citizens, as if he already saw the presidency looming dimly on the horizon. On one of his first Sundays, he attended a Roman Catholic mass and also dined with Mark Prager, Sr., a Jewish merchant. On several occasions he joined fraternal dinners hosted by the Irish American Sons of St. Patrick. In early June he yielded to the importunate General Mifflin and reviewed the infantry, cavalry, and artillery of Philadelphia, as if he were already more than merely president of the convention.

Washington’s Philadelphia itineraries reflected his far-ranging interests. Surgeon Abraham Chovet gave him a private tour of his Anatomical Museum, with its ingenious displays of human figures. Washington also gratified his abiding love of theater by catching plays at the Southwark Theater, which lay beyond Philadelphia’s borders because of a law banning theater performances in the city proper. He evinced continuing solicitude for artists, sitting for an engraving by Charles Willson Peale and a portrait by Robert Edge Pine, who needed to touch up work begun at Mount Vernon two years earlier. In his wanderings, he visited a gristmill on the Schuylkill River and exhausted the proprietor with questions. “This day, Gen. Washington, Gen. Mifflin and four others of the convention did us the honor of paying us a visit in order to see our vineyard and bee houses,” said Peter Legaux, a French immigrant. “In this they found great delight, asked a number of questions, and testified their highest approbation with my manner of managing bees.”
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At Franklin’s house, Washington revealed a sharp interest in mechanical inventions, marveling at a mangle used for pressing items after they were washed.

As always, Washington’s silences were as eloquent at his pronouncements. In late July he accompanied Robert Morris on a trout-fishing expedition to a creek near Valley Forge, prompting him to ride over to his old army cantonment. In his diary, Washington mentioned having “visited all the works, which were in ruins, and the encampments in woods, where the ground had not been cultivated.”
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When he last saw Valley Forge, it had been cold and gloomy, bare of all foliage. Now it was a balmy place, lush with summer greenery. The sight undoubtedly stirred deep-seated memories in Washington, but his diary entry for that day is curiously reticent; even by Washingtonian standards, it is a gem of emotional evasion. After a one-sentence allusion to Valley Forge, he continued, “On my return back to Mrs. Moore’s, observing some farmers at work and entering into conversation with them, I received the following information with respect to the mode of cultivating buckwheat and the application of the grain.”
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He then listed various ways to sow, plow, and harrow buckwheat, as if that were the day’s major occurrence. On some level, Washington felt the powerful lure of the past yet could never articulate it. He proved only a touch more expansive after visiting the site of the Germantown battle, stating that he had “contemplated on the dangers which threatened the American Army at that place.”
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That was his total commentary. Active and forward-looking, Washington did not amble very often down memory lane, though some dinner guests at Mount Vernon recalled him reminiscing about the war.

In the absence of Martha’s company, Washington continued to gravitate toward alluring female society. When he dined at a club composed of the city’s leading gentlemen, he noted that they invited female family members on alternate Saturdays. Not surprisingly, Washington chose that day to attend, specifying, “This was the ladies day.”
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Several times he called upon Elizabeth Powel and dusted off a musty streak of gallantry. As he wrote to her on July 23, “Gen[era]l Washington presents his respectful compliments to Mrs. Powel and will do himself the honor of calling upon her at or before 5 o’clock (in his carriage) in hopes of the pleasure of conducting her to Lansdown this evening.”
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From the chivalrous tone of these messages, one senses that Washington could sometimes enjoy flirtatious banter. A week later, noting his trout-fishing trip to the Valley Forge area, he declined an invitation to escort Mrs. Powel to a performance of Sheridan’s
School for Scandal:
“The Gen[era] l can but regret that matters have turned out so unluckily after waiting so long to receive a lesson in the School for Scandal.”
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Washington seldom allowed himself the liberty of jesting with a married lady in this manner. His lighthearted tone with Elizabeth Powel makes one wonder anew about the role of repressed sexuality in George Washington’s life. We have no evidence that he ever talked to Martha in this coy manner, nor is it easy to imagine. For all the happiness of their marriage, Martha had become his life’s standard prose while Elizabeth Powel, like Sally Fairfax, may have introduced some forbidden spice of poetry. It was as if, during his extended sojourn in Philadelphia, the footloose Washington permitted himself to explore sides of his personality that he kept firmly under wraps at home.

 

 

NOT LONG AFTER Washington wrote so gloomily to Hamilton, the Constitutional Convention experienced a spectacular breakthrough. In mid-July it was agreed that the small states would be represented equally in the Senate, while the House would have proportional representation based on population. For Washington and other Virginia delegates, it was a bitter pill to swallow, threatening to weaken the federal government critically. Nonetheless, an eminently pragmatic man, Washington accepted the need for painful compromises to form a union, assuring Henry Knox that the government being shaped by the delegates was “the best that can be obtained at the present moment, under such diversity of ideas as prevail.”
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Perhaps the most uncomfortable debate hinged on the slavery issue. The abolitionist movement had made considerable headway in New England but was losing ground in the South after a brief flurry of postwar interest. Slavery was the most vexing topic at the convention. As Pierce Butler of South Carolina commented, “The security the southern states want is that their negroes may not be taken from them, which some gentlemen within or without doors have a very good mind to do.”
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Employing thinly disguised blackmail, some southern delegates vowed to quit the convention if anyone interfered with their peculiar institution. “The true question at present is whether the southern states shall, or shall not, be parties to the union,” said John Rutledge of South Carolina.
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The delegates agreed that slavery wouldn’t be mentioned by name in the Constitution, giving way to transparent euphemisms, such as “persons held to service or labor.” Slaveholders won some substantial concessions. For the purposes of representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, they would be able to count three-fifths of their slave population. This was no mean feat: slaves made up 40 percent of the population in Virginia, for instance, and 60 percent in South Carolina. The slave trade would also be shielded from any tampering for at least twenty years. Through a fugitive slave clause, masters would be able to reclaim runaway slaves in free states—a provision George Washington would liberally employ in future years. Referring to these hard-fought victories for the southern states, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison would later castigate the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”
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Whatever his own nascent abolitionist views, George Washington wasn’t about to make an open stand at the convention and joined other delegates in daydreaming that slavery would fade away at some nebulous future date. Isolated critics branded Washington a hypocrite for clinging to his slaves after a revolution fought in the name of freedom. At the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution, one speaker deplored his status as a slaveholder. “Oh, Washington, what a name he has had! How he has immortalized himself!” he exclaimed, then remarked that Washington “holds those in slavery who have as good a right to be free as he has. He is still for self and, in my opinion, his character has sunk 50 percent.”
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A Massachusetts newspaper, echoing this charge, regretted that Washington had “wielded the sword in defense of American liberty yet at the same time, was, and is to this day, living upon the labors of several hundreds of miserable Africans as freeborn as himself.”
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The debate over the executive branch was likewise steeped in controversy. Delegates had difficulty conceiving a mighty presidency that did not look suspiciously like a monarchy, and they trod gingerly in this treacherous territory. The idea of a separate executive branch with a president independent of the legislature and able to veto its laws was regarded as heretical in some quarters. Benjamin Franklin so distrusted executive power that he pushed for a small executive council instead of a president. In advancing this idea, he had the courtesy to note, with a figurative nod toward Washington, that the first president would likely be benevolent, but he feared despotic tendencies in his successors.

That the delegates overcame their dread of executive power and produced an energetic presidency can be traced directly to Washington’s imperturbable presence. Pierce Butler doubted that the presidential powers would have been so great “had not many members cast their eyes toward General Washington as president and shaped their ideas of the powers to a president by their opinion of his virtue.”
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As convention president, Washington sat through extensive discussions of what was turning into his job description. There was a tacit assumption that, the office having been conceived with him in mind, Washington would serve as the first president. With his image before their eyes, the delegates were inevitably governed by their hopes instead of their fears. Still, with memories of the Revolution fresh, they reserved significant powers for Congress, endowing it, for instance, with the authority to declare war, thereby avoiding the British precedent of a monarch who retained this awesome power.

For all his inscrutable silence, Washington disclosed specific views several times during the convention. When Elbridge Gerry proposed a constitutional limit of three thousand men in any standing army, Washington supposedly remarked drily that “no foreign enemy should invade the United States, at any time, with more than three thousand troops.”
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At the end of the convention, he also took a decidedly democratic stand on the question of how many people each congressman should represent, opting for thirty thousand instead of forty thousand to ensure “security for the rights and interests of the people.”
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Blessed by Washington, the convention adopted this change unanimously, in a striking instance of his irresistible appeal. That Washington was an exponent of an energetic presidency was also evident when he voted for requiring a three-fourths majority in Congress to override a presidential veto. Despite Washington’s backing, it was reduced to a two-thirds majority to forestall abuses of executive power.

Whatever pleasure he derived from being away from Mount Vernon had disappeared by September 9, when he wrote to George Augustine that the convention would likely wind up its deliberations within a week: “God grant I may not be disappointed in this expectation, as I am quite homesick.”
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The long hours and sedentary job must have proved an ordeal for him. A day earlier the convention had convened a committee on style, with Gouverneur Morris as its head, to give the Constitution its finished form. The foppish, peg-legged Morris was a delightful bon vivant with considerable verbal resources who relished Washington’s “cool, steady temper.”
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Washington, in turn, enjoyed Morris’s lively flow of quips, his “first-rate abilities,” and his “lively and brilliant imagination.”
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It was Morris who drafted the great preamble to the Constitution that began with the memorable flourish “We the People.” On September 12 delegates received printed copies of the final document, and as he led them through it, Washington personally inserted the changes that had been approved while the committee on style was hard at work.

Whatever his misgivings about individual provisions, Washington was no lukewarm supporter of the final document. As he later expressed it, the Constitution was “the result of a spirit of amity and mutual concession” and more coherent than anyone had a right to expect from so many discordant delegates with passionate opinions.
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It struck him as “little short of a miracle,” he told Lafayette, that “delegates from so many different states … should unite in forming a system of national government so little liable to well-founded objections.”
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In another letter he said, “It approached nearer to perfection than any government hitherto instituted among men.”
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Especially sensitive to allegations that the president was vested with excessive power, he stressed the numerous safeguards put in place, telling Lafayette that the new constitution “is provided with more checks and barriers against the introduction of tyranny … than any government” previously devised by mortals.
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As president, Washington went so far as to say that the “invisible hand” of providence had been manifest in the enactment of the Constitution.
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In correspondence Washington admitted to imperfections in the new charter but trusted to the amendment process to refine it. The Constitutional Convention was no conclave of sages in Roman togas, handing down eternal truths engraved in marble, and he wondered how long the document would last. He parted company with Edmund Randolph, who refused to sign the Constitution unless it provided for a second convention to enact necessary amendments. For Washington, the beauty of the document was that it charted a path for its own evolution. Its very brevity and generality—it contained fewer than eight thousand words—meant it would be a constantly changing document, susceptible to shifting interpretations. It would be left to Washington and other founders to convert this succinct, deliberately vague statement into a working reality. He also knew that the American public needed to contribute its share; the Constitution “can only lay the foundation—the community at large must raise the edifice.”
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Benjamin Franklin shared this view. Legend claims that as he left the State House, Franklin bumped into Elizabeth Powel, who inquired about the form of government produced inside. “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” Franklin replied.
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Powel later claimed that she had no recollection of the famous retort, but she did say that “the most respectable, influential members of the convention” had gathered at her house and that “the all important subject was frequently discussed” there.
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