It was not the same Virginia, nor even the same home and neighborhood he
had gone from, that Washington came back to when the war was done. He
had left Mount Vernon in the care of Lund Washington, his nephew, while
the war lasted, and had not forgotten amidst all his letter writing to
send seasonable directions and maintain a constant oversight upon the
management of his estate. It was part of his genius to find time for
everything; and Mount Vernon had suffered something less than the
ordinary hazards and neglects of war. It had suffered less upon one
occasion, indeed, than its proud owner could have found it in his heart
to wish. In the spring of 1781 several British vessels had come
pillaging within the Potomac, and the anxious Lund had regaled their
officers with refreshments from Mount Vernon to buy them off from
mischief. “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me,” his
uncompromising uncle had written him, “to have heard that, in
consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my
house and laid the plantation in ruin. You ought to have considered
yourself as my representative.” Kept though it was from harm, however,
the place had suffered many things for lack of his personal care. There
was some part of the task to be done over again that had confronted him
when he came to take possession of the old plantation with his bride
after the neglects of the French war.
But Virginia was more changed than Mount Vernon. He had left it a
colony, at odds with a royal Governor; he returned to find it a State,
with Benjamin Harrison, that stout gentleman and good planter, for
Governor, by the free suffrages of his fellow Virginians. There had been
no radical break with the aristocratic traditions of the past. Mr.
Harrison’s handsome seat at Lower Brandon lay where the long reaches of
the James marked the oldest regions of Virginia’s life upon broad,
half-feudal estates; where there were good wine and plate upon the
table, and gentlemen kept old customs bright and honored in the
observance. But the face of affairs had greatly changed, nevertheless.
The old generation of statesmen had passed away, almost with the colony,
and a younger generation was in the saddle, notwithstanding a
gray-haired figure here and there. Richard Bland had died in the year of
the Declaration; Peyton Randolph had not lived to see it. Edmund
Pendleton, after presiding over Virginia’s making as a State, as
chairman of her revolutionary Committee of Safety, was now withdrawn
from active affairs to the bench, his fine figure marred by a fall from
his horse, his old power as an advocate transmuted into the cooler
talents of the judge. Patrick Henry, the ardent leader of the
Revolution, had been chosen the State’s first Governor, in the year of
the Declaration of Independence; three years later Thomas Jefferson had
succeeded him in the office, the philosophical radical of times of
change; the choice of Mr. Harrison had but completed the round of the
new variety in affairs. Men who, like Richard Henry Lee, had counselled
revolution and the breaking of old bonds, were now in all things at the
front of the State’s business; and younger men, of a force and power of
origination equal to their own, were pressing forward, as if to hurry a
new generation to the stage which had known nothing but independence and
a free field for statesmanship. Among the rest, James Madison, only a
little more than ten years out of college, but already done with serving
his novitiate in the Congress of the Confederation, a publicist and
leader in the Old Dominion at thirty-two. Edmund Randolph, of the new
generation of the commonwealth’s great family of lawyers, like his
forebears in gifts and spirit, was already received, at thirty, into a
place of influence among public men. John Marshall, just turned of
twenty-eight, but a veteran of the long war none the less, having been
at the thick of the fighting, a lieutenant and a captain among the
Virginian forces, from the time Dunmore was driven from Norfolk till the
eve of Yorktown, was, now that that duty was done, a lawyer in quiet
Fauquier, drawing to himself the eyes of every man who had the
perception to note qualities of force and leadership. James Monroe had
come out of the war at twenty-five to go at once into the public
councils of his State, an equal among his elders. Young men came forward
upon every side to take their part in the novel rush of affairs that
followed upon the heels of revolution.
Washington found himself no stranger in the new State, for all it had
grown of a sudden so unlike that old community in which his own life had
been formed. He found a very royal welcome awaiting him at his
home-coming. The old commonwealth loved a hero still as much as ever;
was as loyal to him now as it had been in the far-away days of the
French war, when Dinwiddie alone fretted against him; received him with
every tribute of affection; offered him gifts, and loved him all the
better for refusing them. But he must have felt that a deep change had
come upon his life, none the less, and even upon his relations with his
old familiars and neighbors. He had gone away honored indeed, and marked
for responsible services among his people--a Burgess as a matter of
course, a notable citizen, whose force no man who knew him could fail to
remark; but by no means accounted greatest, even among the men who
gathered for the colony’s business at Williamsburg; chosen only upon
occasion for special services of action; no debater or statesman, so far
as ordinary men could see; too reserved to be popular with the crowd,
though it should like his frankness and taking address, and go out of
its way to see him on horseback; a man for his neighbors, who could know
him, not for the world, which he refused to court. But the war had
suddenly lifted him to the view of all mankind; had set him among the
great captains of the world; had marked him a statesman in the midst of
affairs--more a statesman than a soldier even, men must have thought who
had read his letters or heard them read in Congress, on the floor or in
the committee rooms; had drawn to himself the admiration of the very men
he had been fighting, the very nation whose dominion he had helped to
cast off. He had come home perhaps the most famous man of his day, and
could not take up the old life where he had left it off, much as he
wished to; was obliged, in spite of himself, to play a new part in
affairs.
For a few weeks, indeed, after he had reached Mount Vernon, Nature
herself assisted him to a little privacy and real retirement. The winter
(1783-4) was an uncommonly severe one. Snow lay piled, all but
impassable, upon the roads; frosts hardened all the country against
travel; he could not get even to Fredericksburg to see his aged mother;
and not many visitors, though they were his near neighbors, could reach
him at Mount Vernon. “At length, my dear Marquis,” he could write to
Lafayette in his security, “I am become a private citizen on the banks
of the Potomac; and under the shadow of my own vine and my own fig-tree,
free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am
solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments of which the soldier, who
is ever in pursuit of fame, the statesman, whose watchful days and
sleepless nights are spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of
his own, perhaps the ruin of other countries, as if this globe was
insufficient for us all, and the courtier, who is always watching the
countenance of his prince, can have very little conception. I have not
only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within
myself.... Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all; and
this, my dear friend, being the order of my march, I will move gently
down the stream of time until I sleep with my fathers.” The simple
gentleman did not yet realize what the breaking up of the frosts would
bring.
With the spring the whole life of the world seemed to come pouring in
upon him. Men of note everywhere pressed their correspondence upon him;
no stranger visited America but thought first of Mount Vernon in
planning where he should go and what he should see; new friends and old
sat every day at his table; a year and a half had gone by since his
home-coming before he could note in his diary (June 30th, 1785): “Dined
with only Mrs. Washington, which, I believe, is the first instance of it
since my retirement from public life”--for some visitors had broken
their way even through the winter roads. Authors sent him what they
wrote; inventors submitted their ideas and models to him; everything
that was being said, everything that was being done, seemed to find its
way, if nowhere else, to Mount Vernon--till those who knew his
occupations could speak of Washington, very justly, as “the focus of
political intelligence for the New World.” He would not alter his way of
living even in the face of such overwhelming interruptions. His guests
saw him for a little after dinner, and once and again, it might be, in
the evening also; but he kept to his business throughout all the working
hours of the day; was at his desk even before breakfast, and after
breakfast was always early in the saddle and off to his farms.
Only at table did he play the host, lingering over the wine to give and
call for toasts and relax in genial conversation, losing, as the months
passed by, some of the deep gravity that had settled upon him in the
camp, and showing once more an enjoying relish for “a pleasant story, an
unaffected sally of wit, or a burlesque description,” as in the old days
after hunting. Strangers were often in awe of him. It did not encourage
talk in those who had little to say to sit in the presence of a man who
so looked his greatness in the very proportions of his strong figure
even, and whose grave and steady eyes so challenged the significance of
what was said. Young people would leave off dancing and romping when he
came into the room, and force him to withdraw, and peep at the fun from
without the door, unobserved. It was only among his intimates that he
was suffered and taken to be the simple, straightforward, sympathizing
man he was, exciting, not awe, but only a warm and affectionate
allegiance. “The General, with a few glasses of champagne, got quite
merry,” a young Englishman could report who had had the good luck to be
introduced by Richard Henry Lee, “and, being with his intimate friends,
laughed and talked a good deal.”
As much as he could, he resumed the old life, and the thoughts and
pastimes that had gone with it. Once more he became the familiar of his
hounds at the kennels, and followed them as often as might be in the
hunt at sunrise. He asked but one thing of a horse, as of old, “and that
was to go along. He ridiculed the idea that he could be unhorsed,
provided the animal kept on his legs.” The two little children, a tiny
boy and a romping, mischievous lassie, not much bigger, whom he had
adopted at Jack Custis’s death-bed, took strong hold upon his heart, and
grew slowly to an intimacy with him such as few ventured to claim any
longer amidst those busy days in the guest-crowded house. It seemed to
Lafayette a very engaging picture when he saw Washington and the little
toddling boy together--“a very little gentleman with a feather in his
hat, holding fast to one finger of the good General’s remarkable hand,
which (so large that hand!)” was all the tiny fellow could manage. These
children took Washington back more completely than anything else to the
old days when he had brought his bride home with her own little ones. He
felt those days come back, too, when he was on his horse in the open,
going the round of good twelve miles and more that carried him to all
the quarters of his plantation.
Once more he was the thorough farmer, ransacking books, when men and his
own observation failed him, to come at the best methods of cultivation.
Once more he took daily account of the character of his slaves and
servants, and of the progress of their work, talking with them when he
could, and gaining a personal mastery over them. Contracts for work he
drew up with his own hand, with a minuteness and particularity which
were sometimes whimsical and shot through with a gleam of grim humor. He
agreed with Philip Barter that if he would serve him faithfully as
gardener and keep sober at all other times, he would allow him “four
dollars at Christmas, with which to be drunk four days and four nights;
two dollars at Easter, to effect the same purpose; two dollars at
Whitsuntide, to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning, and a
drink of grog at dinner, at noon”; and the contract was drawn, signed,
and witnessed with all formality. Philip no doubt found short shrift of
consideration from his thorough-going master if there was any
drunkenness in the garden beyond the limit of the eight days nominated
in the bond, and found the contract no jest in the end, for Washington
had small patience and no soft words for a breach of agreement, whatever
its kind. He would help men in distress with a generosity and wise
choice of means which few took the pains to exercise, but he had only
sharp rebuke for carelessness or neglect or any slackness in the
performance of a duty. Men who had cheated or sought to impose upon him
deemed him harsh and called him a hard master, so
[Illustration: WASHINGTON BRINGING HIS MOTHER INTO THE BALL-ROOM,
FREDERICKSBURG]
sharply did they smart after he had reckoned with them. He exacted the
uttermost farthing. But he spent it, with the other hand, to relieve
genuine suffering and real want, though it were deserved and the fruit
of a crying fault. In his home dealings, as in everything else, his mind
kept that trait by which men had been awed in the camp--that trick, as
if of Fate, of letting every act come at its consequences and its full
punishment or reward, as if he but presided at a process which was just
Nature’s own. When he succored distress, he did it in pity, not in
justice--not excusing fault, but giving leave to mercy. If he urged the
government to pension and reward the soldiers of the war, who had only
done their duty, he himself set an example. There were black pensioners
not a few about his own homestead. Bishop, his old body-servant, lived
like a retired gentleman in his cottage there; even Nelson, the good
sorrel who had borne him so bravely in the field till Yorktown, now went
forever unsaddled, free in his own pasture.
But, much as he loved his home and courted retirement amidst the duties
of a planter, the old life would not come back, was gone forever. He was
too famous, and there was an end on ’t. He could not go abroad without
drawing crowds about him. If he attended service on a Sunday away from
home, though it were in never so quiet a parish, the very walls of the
church groaned threateningly under the unaccustomed weight of people
gathered in the galleries and packed upon the floor to see the hero of
the Revolution. Not even a ride into the far west, to view his lands and
pull together his neglected business on the Ohio, was long enough to
take him beyond the reach of public affairs. On the 1st of September,
1784, with Dr. Craik for company, he set out on horseback to go by
Braddock’s road again into the west. For nearly five weeks he was deep
in the wilderness, riding close upon seven hundred miles through the
forested mountains, and along the remote courses of the long rivers that
ran into the Mississippi; camping out as in the old days when he was a
surveyor and a soldier in his ’prenticeship in these very wilds;
renewing his zest for the rough life and the sudden adventures of the
frontiersman. But, though he had come upon his own business, it was the
seat of a future empire he saw rather than his own acres scattered here
and there.
When last he had ridden the long stages from settlement to settlement
and cabin to cabin in this far country of the Ohio, he had been a
Virginian and nothing more, a colonial colonel merely, come to pick out
lands for his comrades and himself, their reward for serving the crown
against the French. A transformation had been worked upon him since
then. He had led the armies of the whole country; had been the chief
instrument of a new nation in winning independence; had carried its
affairs by his own counsels as no other man had done; had seen through
all the watches of those long campaigns the destinies and the hopes that
were at stake. Now he saw the crowding immigrants come into the west
with a new solicitude he had not felt before. A new vision was in his
thought. This western country was now a “rising world,” to be kept or
lost, husbanded or squandered, by the raw nation he had helped put upon
its feet. His thought was stretched at last to a continental measure;
problems of statesmanship that were national, questions of policy that
had a scope great as schemes of empire, stood foremost in his view. He
returned home more engrossed than ever by interests not his own, but
central to public affairs, and of the very stuff of politics.
And so not the letters merely which poured in with every mail, not only
his host of visitors, great and small--the Governor of the State, the
President of Congress, foreign noblemen, soldiers, diplomatists,
travellers, neighbors, friends, acquaintances, intruders--but his own
unbidden thoughts as well, and the very suggestions of his own interest
as a citizen and land-owner, drew him from his dreams of retirement and
forced him upon the open stage again. Even hunting ceased before many
seasons were out. The savage boar-hounds which Lafayette had sent, in
his kindness, from the Old World, proved too fierce and great a breed
for even the sharp sport with the gray fox; the old hunting companions
were gone--the Fairfaxes over sea; Belvoir deserted and burned; George
Mason too much engaged--none but boys and strangers left to ride with.
’Twas poor sport, after all, without the right sportsmen. It must needs
give way before a statesman’s cares.
Upon his first home-coming, Washington had found it hard to break
himself of his habit of waking very early in the morning with a sense of
care concerning the affairs of the day, as if he were still in camp and
in the midst of public duties. Now a new sense of responsibility
possessed him, and more and more gained ascendency over him. He began to
feel a deep anxiety lest a weak government should make independence
little better than a reproach, and the country should fall into a
hopeless impotency. At first he had been very sanguine. “Notwithstanding
the jealous and contracted temper which seems to prevail in some of the
States,” he wrote to Jonathan Trumbull in January, 1784, “yet I cannot
but hope and believe that the good sense of the people will ultimately
get the better of their prejudices, and that order and sound policy,
though they do not come so soon as one could wish, will be produced from
the present unsettled and deranged state of public affairs....
Everything, my dear Trumbull, will come right at last, as we have often
prophesied. My only fear is that we shall lose a little reputation
first.” But the more he observed the temper of the time, the more uneasy
he grew. “Like a young heir,” he cried, “come a little prematurely to a
large inheritance, we shall wanton and run riot until we have brought
our reputation to the brink of ruin, and then, like him, shall have to
labor with the current of opinion, when compelled, perhaps, to do what
prudence and common policy pointed out, as plain as any problem in
Euclid, in the first instance.... I think we have opposed Great Britain,
and have arrived at the present state of peace and independency, to very
little purpose, if we cannot conquer our own prejudices.”
For the present he saw little that could be done beyond holding up the
hands of the Congress, and increasing, as it might prove possible to do
so, the meagre powers of the Confederation. “My political creed,” he
said, “is to be wise in the choice of delegates, support them like
gentlemen while they are our representatives, give them competent powers
for all federal purposes, support them in the due exercise thereof, and,
lastly, to compel them to close attendance in Congress during their
delegation.” But his thoughts took wider scope as the months passed: and
nothing quickened them more than his western trip. He saw how much of
the future travelled with those slow wagon trains of immigrants into the
west; realized how they were leaving behind them the rivers that ran to
the old ports at the sea, and going down into the valleys whose outlet
was the great highway of the Mississippi and the ports of the Gulf; how
the great ridge of the Alleghanies lay piled between them and the older
seats of settlement, with only here and there a gap to let a road
through, only here and there two rivers lying close enough at their
sources to link the east with the west; and the likelihood of a
separation between the two populations seemed to him as obvious as the
tilt of the mountains upon either slope. “There is nothing which binds
one country or one State to another but interest,” he said. “Without
this cement the western inhabitants, who more than probably will be
composed in a great degree of foreigners, can have no predilection for
us, and a commercial connection is the only tie we can have upon them.”
“The western settlers,” he declared, while still fresh from the Ohio,
“stand as it were upon a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them
any way”--down the Mississippi to join their interests with those of the
Spaniard, or back to the mountain roads and the head-waters of the
eastern streams, to make for themselves a new allegiance in the east. He
was glad to see the Spaniard so impolitic as to close the Mississippi
against the commerce offered him, and hoped that things might stand so
until there should have been “a little time allowed to open and make
easy the ways between the Atlantic States and the western territory.”
The opening of the upper reaches of the Potomac to navigation had long
been a favorite object with Washington; now it seemed nothing less than
a necessity. It had been part of the original scheme of the old Ohio
Company to use this means of winning a way for commerce through the
mountains. Steps had been taken more than twenty years ago to act in the
matter through private subscription; and active measures for securing
the necessary legislation from the Assemblies of Virginia and Maryland
were still in course when Washington was called to Cambridge and
revolution drew men’s minds imperatively off from the business. In 1770
Washington had written to Jefferson of the project as a means of opening
a channel for “the extensive trade of a rising empire”; now the empire
of which he had had a vision was no longer Britain’s, but America’s own,
and it was become a matter of exigent political necessity to keep that
western country against estrangement, winning it by commerce and close
sympathy to join itself with the old colonies in building up a free
company of United States upon the great continent.
Already the west was astir for the formation of new States. Virginia had
taken the broad and national view of her duty that Washington himself
held, and had ceded to the Confederation all her ancient claims to the
lands that lay northwest of the Ohio River, reserving for herself only
the fair region that stretched south of that great stream, from her own
mountains to the Mississippi. North Carolina would have ceded her
western lands beyond the mountains also, had they been empty and
unclaimed, like the vast territory that lay beyond the Ohio. But for
many a year settlers had been crossing the mountains into those fertile
valleys, and both this region and that which Virginia still kept showed
many a clearing now and many a rude hamlet where hardy frontiersmen
were making a new home for civilization. Rather than be handed over to
Congress, to be disposed of by an authority which no one else was bound
to obey, North Carolina’s western settlers declared they would form a
State of their own, and North Carolina had to recall her gift of their
lands to the Confederation before their plans of defiance could be
checked and defeated. Virginia found her own frontiersmen no less ready
to take the initiative in whatever affair touched their interest. Spain
offered the United States trade at her ports, but refused to grant them
the use of the lower courses of the Mississippi, lest territorial
aggression should be pushed too shrewdly in that quarter; and news
reached the settlers beyond the mountains, in the far counties of North
Carolina and Virginia, that Mr. Jay, the Confederation’s Secretary for
Foreign Affairs, had proposed to the Congress to yield the navigation of
the Mississippi for a generation in exchange for trade on the seas. They
flatly declared they would give themselves, and their lands too, into
the hands of England again rather than submit to be so robbed, cramped,
and deserted. The New England States, on their part, threatened to
withdraw from the Confederation if treaties were to be made to wait upon
the assent of frontiersmen on the far Mississippi.
The situation was full of menace of no ordinary sort. It could profit
the Confederation little that great States like Virginia and New York
had grown magnanimous, and were endowing the Confederation with vast
gifts of territory in the west, if such gifts were but to loosen still
further the already slackened bonds of the common government, leaving
settlers in the unclaimed lands no allegiance they could respect.
Without a national government spirited and strong enough to frame
policies and command obedience, “we shall never establish a national
character or be considered as on a respectable footing by the powers of
Europe,” Washington had said from the first. He had made a most solemn
appeal to the States in his last circular to them, ere he resigned his
commission, urging them to strengthen the powers of Congress, put
faction and jealousy away, and make sure of “an indissoluble union under
one federal head.” “An option is still left to the United States of
America,” he had told them, with all his plain and stately eloquence;
“it is in their choice, and depends upon their conduct, whether they
will be respectable and prosperous, or contemptible and miserable, as a
nation. This is the time of their political probation.” The hazards of
that probation had been a burden upon his heart through all the toil of
the Revolution, and now it seemed as if the States must needs make every
evil choice in meeting them. Congress could not so much as carry out the
provisions of the treaty of peace, for its commissioners had made
promises in the name of the States which the States would not redeem.
England consequently refused to keep her part of the agreement and
relinquish the western posts. She levied commercial war against the
country, besides, without fear of reprisal; for Congress had no power to
regulate trade, and the States were too jealous of each other to
co-operate in this or any other matter. English statesmen had consented
to give up the colonies, and recognize their independence as a nation,
rather than face any longer the world in arms; but they now looked to
see them presently drop back into their hands again, out of sheer
helplessness and hopeless division in counsel; and there were observant
men in America who deemed the thing possible, though it brought an
intolerable fire into their blood to think of it.
Other nations, too, were fast conceiving a like contempt for the
Confederation. It was making no provision for the payment of the vast
sums of money it had borrowed abroad, in France and Holland and Spain;
and it could not make any. It could only ask the States for money, and
must count itself fortunate to get enough to pay even the interest on
its debts. It was this that foreign courts were finding out, that the
Confederation was a mere “government of supplication,” as Randolph had
dubbed it; and its credit broke utterly down. Frenchman and Spaniard
alike would only have laughed in contemptuous derision to see the whole
fabric go to pieces, and were beginning to interest themselves with
surmises as to what plunder it would afford. The States which lay
neighbors to each other were embroiled in boundary disputes, and were
fallen to levying duties on each other’s commerce. They were
individually in debt, besides, and were many of them resorting to issues
of irredeemable paper money to relieve themselves of the inevitable
taxation that must sooner or later pay their reckonings. “We are either
a united people, or we are not so,” cried Washington. “If the former,
let us in all matters of general concern act as a nation which has a
national character to support; if we are not, let us no longer act a
farce by pretending to it.” As the months passed it began to look as if
the farce might be turned into a tragedy.
The troubles of the country, though he filled his letters with them and
wrung his heart for phrases of protest and persuasion that would tell
effectually in the deep labor of working out the sufficient remedy of a
roused and united opinion, though he deemed them personal to himself,
and knew his own fame in danger to be undone by them, did not break the
steady self-possession of Washington’s life at Mount Vernon. “It’s
astonishing the packets of letters that daily come for him, from all
parts of the world,” exclaimed an English visitor; but it was not till
he had struggled to keep pace with his correspondence unassisted for a
year and a half that he employed a secretary to help him. “Letters of
friendship require no study,” he wrote to General Knox; “the
communications are easy, and allowances are expected and made. This is
not the case with those that require researches, consideration,
recollection, and the de--l knows what to prevent error, and to answer
the ends for which they are written.” He grew almost docile,
nevertheless, under the gratuitous tasks of courtesy thrust upon him.
His gallantry, bred in him since a boy, the sense of duty to which he
was born, his feeling that what he had done had in some sort committed
him to serve his countrymen and his friends everywhere, though it were
only in answering questions, disposed him to sacrifice his comfort and
his privacy to every one who had the slightest claim upon his attention.
He even found sitting for his portrait grow easy at last. “_In for a
penny, in for a pound_, is an old adage,” he laughed, writing to Francis
Hopkinson. “I am so hackneyed to the touches of the painter’s pencil
that I am _now_ altogether at their beck; and sit ‘like Patience on a
monument’ whilst they are delineating the lines of my face.... At first
I was as impatient at the request, and as restive under the operation,
as a colt is of the saddle. The next time I submitted very reluctantly,
but with less flouncing. Now no dray-horse moves more readily to his
thill than I do to the painter’s chair.” Besides the failure of the
public credit, it concerned him to note the fact that, though he kept a
hundred cows, he was obliged to buy butter for his innumerable guests.
He saw to it that there should be at least a very definite and efficient
government upon his own estate, and, when there was need, put his own
hand to the work. He “often works with his men himself--strips off his
coat and labors like a common man,” measures with his own hands every
bit of building or construction that is going forward, and “shows a
great turn for mechanics,” one of his guests noted, amidst comments on
his greatness and his gracious dignity. It was such constancy and candor
and spirit in living that took the admiration of all men alike upon the
instant; and his neighbors every day saw here the same strenuous and
simple gentleman they had known before ever the war began.
It was through the opening of the Potomac, after all--the thing nearest
his hand--that a way was found to cure the country of its malady of
weakness and disorder. Washington had been chosen president of the
Potomac Company, that it might have the advantage both of his name and
of his capacity in affairs; and he had gone upon a tour of inspection,
with the directors of the company, to the falls of the river in the
summer of 1785, keeping steadily to the business he had come upon, and
insisting upon being in fact a private gentleman busy with his own
affairs, despite the efforts made everywhere he went to see and to
entertain him; and it presently became evident even to the least
sanguine that the long-talked-of work was really to be carried through.
A visitor at Mount Vernon in the autumn of 1785 found Washington “quite
pleased at the idea of the Baltimore merchants laughing at him, and
saying it was a ridiculous plan, and would never succeed. They begin
now, says the General, to look a little serious about the matter, as
they know it must hurt their commerce amazingly.”
The scheme had shown its real consequence in the spring of that very
year, when it brought commissioners from the two States that lay upon
the river together in conference to devise plans of co-operation. Both
Virginia and Maryland had appointed commissioners, and a meeting had
been set for March, 1785, at Alexandria. For some reason the Virginian
commissioners were not properly notified of the place and time of
conference. The meeting was held, nevertheless, a minority of the
Virginian commissioners being present; and, as if to give it more the
air of a cordial conference of neighbors, Washington invited the
representatives of both States to adjourn from Alexandria to Mount
Vernon. There they sat, his guests, from Friday to Monday. He was not
formally of the commission; but conference was not confined to their
formal sessions, and his counsel entered into their determinations. It
was evident that two States were not enough to decide the questions
submitted to them. Pennsylvania, at least, must be consulted before the
full line of trade they sought could be drawn from the head-waters of
the Ohio to the head-waters of the Potomac; and if three States were to
consult upon questions of trade which concerned the whole continent, why
should not more be invited, and the conference be made general? Such was
the train of suggestion, certainly, that ran in Washington’s mind, and
which the commissioners carried home with them. Every sign of the time
served to deepen its significance for Washington. Just before quitting
the army he had ridden upon a tour of inspection into the valley of the
Mohawk, where a natural way, like this of the Potomac, ran from the
northern settlements into the west. He knew that the question of joining
the Potomac with the Ohio was but one item of a policy which all the
States must consider and settle--nothing less than the policy which must
make them an empire or doom them to remain a weak and petty confederacy.
The commissioners did not put all that they had heard at Mount Vernon
into their reports to their respective Assemblies. They recommended only
that, besides co-operating with each other and with Pennsylvania in
opening a way to the western waters, Virginia and Maryland should adopt
a uniform system of duties and of commercial regulations, and should
establish uniform rules regarding their currency. But the Maryland
Assembly itself went further. It presently informed the Virginian
Legislature that it had not only adopted the measures recommended by the
commissioners, but thought it wise to do something more. Delaware ought
to be consulted, with a view to carrying a straight watercourse, by
canal, from Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware River; and, since conference
could do no harm and bind nobody, it would be as well to invite all the
States to confer with them, for the questions involved seemed
far-reaching enough to justify it, if not to make it necessary. Governor
Bowdoin, of Massachusetts, had that very year urged his Legislature to
invite a general convention of the States in the interest of trade. The
whole country was in a tangle of disagreement about granting to Congress
the power to lay imposts; Gardoqui, it was rumored, was insisting, for
Spain, upon closing the Mississippi: ’twas evident enough conference was
needed. Every thoughtful man might well pray that it would bring peace
and accommodation. When Maryland’s suggestion was read in the Virginian
Assembly, there was prompt acquiescence. Virginia asked all the States
of the Union (January, 1786) to send delegates to a general conference
to be held at Annapolis on the first Monday in September, to consider
and recommend such additions to the powers of Congress as might conduce
to a better regulation of trade. “There is more wickedness than
ignorance in the conduct of the States, or, in other words, in the
conduct of those who have too much influence in the government of them,”
Washington wrote hotly to Henry Lee, upon hearing to what lengths
contempt of the authority of Congress had been carried; “and until the
curtain is withdrawn, and the private views and selfish principles upon
which these men act are exposed to public notice, I have little hope of
amendment without another convulsion.” Perhaps the conference at
Annapolis would withdraw the curtain and give the light leave to work a
purification; and he waited anxiously for the issue.
But when the commissioners assembled they found only five States
represented--Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York.
Maryland had suddenly fallen indifferent, and had not appointed
delegates. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North
Carolina had appointed delegates, but they had not taken the trouble to
come. Connecticut, South Carolina, and Georgia had ignored the call
altogether. The delegates who were in attendance, besides, had come with
only the most jealously restricted powers; only New Jersey, in her great
uneasiness at being neighbor to the powerful States of New York and
Pennsylvania, had authorized her representatives to “consider how far a
uniform system in their commercial regulations _and other important
matters_ might be necessary to the common interest and permanent harmony
of the several States.” The other delegates had no such scope; all
deemed it futile to attempt their business in so small a convention; and
it was resolved to make another opportunity. Alexander Hamilton, of New
York, drew up their address to the States, and in it made bold to adopt
New Jersey’s hint, and ask for a conference which should not merely
consider questions of trade, but also “devise such further provisions as
should appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the
federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” Hamilton
held with Washington for a national government. He had been born, and
bred as a lad, in the West Indies, and had never received the local
pride of any colony-state into his blood. He had served with the army,
too, in close intimacy with Washington, and, though twenty-five years
his captain’s junior, had seen as clearly as he saw the deep hazards of
a nation’s birth.
The Congress was indifferent, if not hostile, to the measures which the
address proposed; and the States would have acted on the call as slackly
as before, had not the winter brought with it something like a threat of
social revolution, and fairly startled them out of their negligent
humor. The central counties of Massachusetts broke into violent
rebellion, under one Shays, a veteran of the Revolution--not to reform
the government, but to rid themselves of it altogether; to shut the
courts and escape the payment of debts and taxes. The insurgents worked
their will for weeks together; drove out the officers of the law, burned
and plundered at pleasure through whole districts, living upon the land
like a hostile army, and were brought to a reckoning at last only when a
force thousands strong had been levied against them. The contagion
spread to Vermont and New Hampshire; and, even when the outbreak had
been crushed, the States concerned were irresolute in the punishment of
the leaders. Rhode Island declared her sympathy with the insurgents;
Vermont offered them asylum; Massachusetts brought the leaders to trial
and conviction only to pardon and set them free again. Congress dared do
no more than make covert preparation to check a general rising. “You
talk, my good sir,” wrote Washington to Henry Lee, in Congress, “of
employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I
know not where that influence is to be found, or, if attainable, that it
would be a proper remedy for the disorders. _Influence_ is no
_government_. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties, and
properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.” It was an
object-lesson for the whole country; the dullest and the most lethargic
knew now what slack government and financial disorder would produce. The
States one and all--save Rhode Island--bethought them of the convention
called to meet in Philadelphia on the second Monday in May, 1787, and
delegates were appointed. Even Congress took the lesson to heart, and
gave its sanction to the conference.
The Legislature of Virginia put Washington’s name at the head of its own
list of delegates, and after his name the names of Patrick Henry, Edmund
Randolph, John Blair, James Madison, George Mason, and George Wythe--the
leading names of the State, no man could doubt. But Washington
hesitated. He had already declined to meet the Society of the Cincinnati
in Philadelphia about the same time, he said, and thought it would be
disrespectful to that body, to whom he owed much, “to be there on any
other occasion.” He even hinted a doubt whether the convention was
constitutional, its avowed purposes being what they were, until Congress
tardily sanctioned it. His real reason his intimate friends must have
divined from the first. They knew him better in such matters than he
knew himself. He not only loved his retirement; he deemed himself a
soldier and man of action, and no statesman. The floor of assemblies had
never seemed to him his principal sphere of duty. He had thought of
staying away from the House of Burgesses on private business twenty
years ago, when he knew that the Stamp Act was to be debated. But it was
not for the floor of the approaching convention that his friends wanted
him; they told him from the first he must preside. He was known to be in
favor of giving the Confederation powers that would make it a real
government, and he thought that enough; but they wanted the whole
country to see him pledged to the actual work, and, when they had
persuaded him to attend, knew that they had at any rate won the
confidence of the people in their patriotic purpose. His mere presence
would give them power.
Washington and the other Virginians were prompt to be in Philadelphia on
the day appointed, but only the Pennsylvanian delegates were there to
meet them. They had to wait an anxious week before so many as seven
States were represented. Meanwhile, those who gathered from day to day
were nervous and apprehensive, and there was talk of compromise and
halfway measures, should the convention prove weak or threaten to
miscarry. They remembered for many a long year afterwards how nobly
Washington, “standing self-collected in the midst of them,” had uttered
brave counsels of wisdom in their rebuke. “It is too probable,” he said,
“that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful
conflict is to be sustained. If, to please the people, we offer what we
ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us
raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is
in the hand of God.” It was an utterance, they knew, not of
statesmanship merely, but of character; and it was that character, if
anything could, that would win the people to their support. When at last
seven States were represented--a quorum of the thirteen--an organization
was effected, and Washington unanimously chosen president of the
convention. He spoke, when led to the chair, “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”; but no mere
parliamentarian could have given that anxious body such steadiness in
business or such grave earnestness in counsel as it got from his
presence and influence in the chair. Five more States were in attendance
before deliberation was very far advanced; but he had the satisfaction
to see his own friends lead upon the floor. It was the plan which
Edmund Randolph proposed, for his fellow Virginians, which the
convention accepted as a model to work from; it was James Madison, that
young master of counsel, who guided the deliberations from day to day,
little as he showed his hand in the work or seemed to put himself
forward in debate. No speeches came from the president; only once or
twice did he break the decorum of his office to temper some difference
of opinion or facilitate some measure of accommodation. It was the 17th
of September when the convention at last broke up; the 19th when the
Constitution it had wrought out was published to the country. All the
slow summer through, Washington had kept counsel with the rest as to the
anxious work that was going forward behind the closed doors of the long
conference; it was a grateful relief to be rid of the painful strain,
and he returned to Mount Vernon like one whose part in the work was
done.
“I never saw him so keen for anything in my life as he is for the
adoption of the new scheme of government,” wrote a visitor at Mount
Vernon to Jefferson; but he took no other part than his correspondence
afforded him in the agitation for its acceptance. Throughout all those
long four months in Philadelphia he had given his whole mind and energy
to every process of difficult counsel by which it had been wrought to
completion; but he was no politician. Earnestly as he commended the plan
to his friends, he took no public part either in defence or in advocacy
of it. He read not only the _Federalist_ papers, in which Hamilton and
Madison and Jay made their masterly plea for the adoption of the
Constitution, but also “every performance which has been printed on the
one side and the other on the great question,” he said, so far as he
was able to obtain them; and he felt as poignantly as any man the deep
excitement of the momentous contest. It disturbed him keenly to find
George Mason opposing the Constitution--the dear friend from whom he had
always accepted counsel hitherto in public affairs--and Richard Henry
Lee and Patrick Henry, too, in their passionate attachment to what they
deemed the just sovereignty of Virginia. He could turn away with all his
old self-possession, nevertheless, to discuss questions of culture and
tillage, in the midst of the struggle, with Arthur Young over sea, and
to write very gallant compliments to the Marquis de Chastellux on his
marriage. “So your day has at length come,” he laughed. “I am glad of it
with all my heart and soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now you are
well served for coming to fight in favor of the American rebels all the
way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible
contagion--domestic felicity--which, like the small-pox or the plague, a
man can have only once in his life, because it commonly lasts him (at
least with us in America--I don’t know how you manage such matters in
France) for his whole lifetime.”
Ten months of deep but quiet agitation--the forces of opinion in close
grapple--and the future seemed to clear. The Constitution was adopted,
only two States dissenting. It had been a tense and stubborn fight: in
such States as Massachusetts and New York, the concerted action of men
at the centres of trade against the instinctive dread of centralization
or change in the regions that lay back from the rivers and the sea; in
States like Virginia, where the mass of men waited to be led, the
leaders who had vision against those who had only the slow wisdom of
caution and presentiment. But, though she acted late in the business,
and some home-keeping spirits among even her greater men held back,
Virginia did not lose the place of initiative she had had in all this
weighty business of reform. Something in her air or her life had given
her in these latter years an extraordinary breed of public men--men
liberated from local prejudice, possessed of a vision and an efficacy in
affairs worthy of the best traditions of statesmanship among the English
race from which they were sprung, capable of taking the long view, of
seeing the permanent lines of leadership upon great questions, and
shaping ordinary views to meet extraordinary ends. Even Henry and Mason
could take their discomfiture gracefully, loyally, like men bred to free
institutions; and Washington had the deep satisfaction to see his State
come without hesitation to his view and hope.
The new Constitution made sure of, and a time set by Congress for the
elections and the organization of a new government under it, the country
turned as one man to Washington to be the first President of the United
States. “We cannot, sir, do without you,” cried Governor Johnson, of
Maryland, “and I and thousands more can explain to anybody but yourself
why we cannot do without you.” To make any one else President, it seemed
to men everywhere, would be like crowning a subject while the king was
by. But Washington held back, as he had held back from attending the
Constitutional Convention. He doubted his civil capacity, called himself
an old man, said “it would be to forego repose and domestic enjoyment
for trouble, perhaps for public obloquy.” “The acceptance,” he declared,
“would be attended with more diffidence and reluctance than I ever
experienced before in my life.” But he was not permitted to decline.
Hamilton told him that his attendance upon the Constitutional Convention
must be taken to have _pledged_ him in the view of the country to take
part also in the formation of the government. “In a matter so essential
to the well-being of society as the prosperity of a newly instituted
government,” said the great advocate, “a citizen of so much consequence
as yourself to its success has no option but to lend his services, if
called for. Permit me to say it would be inglorious, in such a
situation, not to hazard the glory, however great, which he might have
previously acquired.”
Washington of course yielded, like the simple-minded gentleman and
soldier he was, when it was made thus a matter of duty. When the votes
of the electors were opened in the new Congress, and it was found that
they were one and all for him, he no longer doubted. He did not know how
to decline such a call, and turned with all his old courage to the new
task.
THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES