The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783–1789

by Edward J. Larson

IT WAS AND REMAINS one of the most remarkable events in the history of war, revolution, and politics. General George Washington retired.

In a similar letter to Lafayette, Washington expanded on what he meant by court intrigue. He described the statesman—a role he boasted of avoiding—as someone “whose watchful days & sleepless Nights are spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of his own—perhaps the ruin of other countries, as if the Globe was insufficient for us all.”

and by the 1780s came to recognize the inefficiency of a slave economy even though he felt powerless to change it.

In short, he acted the part of a self-employed citizen-statesman with a national perspective and international reputation.

Negotiating a satisfactory arrangement with two states would give Washington an object lesson in the value of assigning control over interstate commerce to the national government.

“The motives which predominate most in human affairs is self-love and self-interest.”

That was how he had seen the American Revolution and that would be how he would see the Constitution: viable and worthwhile because they served both common and individual interests.

Washington blamed the situation on ignorance among the people regarding the dangers to freedom and property from the excesses of democracy and wickedness by some who sought to take advantage of those excesses.

“Ignorance & design are difficult to combat,”

“Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured.”

In long letters to each and an even longer memorandum on the “vices” of the American state governments, he laid out his ideas for what became the Virginia Plan for a new constitution.

Madison elaborated more than the others on the judiciary. He viewed national courts as essential to avoid local bias in expounding national laws and deciding cases involving citizens of different states.

Madison laid the blame on factions, chiefly majority ones. “In republican Government the majority

however composed, ultimately give the law,” he wrote in his memorandum and implied in his letters, and “what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?”

Such faith in the national legislature fit Madison’s theory that, in a republic, majority factions posed the gravest threat to individual and minority rights.

Pierce Butler flatly stated that his colleagues at the Convention “shaped their Ideas and Powers to be given to the President, by their opinions of [Washington’s] Virtue.”

“The first man, put at the helm would be a good one. No body knows what sort may come afterwards. The executive will always be increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy.”21

In its provisions on slavery as much as in its conception of the presidency, the Constitution was crafted in Washington’s image.

Also by this time, they knew Washington better and perhaps trusted him more to define the President’s role by his practice.

Mason also decried the lack of a bill of rights and predicted that the new government “would end either in monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy.”26

Hamilton going so far as to say that “no man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his”—but would sign it anyway because, in the words of both, the alternative was “anarchy.”

Hamilton and Morris viewed the proposed government as too weak rather than too strong,

By this point, Washington identified with the Constitution and tended to take criticism of it personally.

“Our President will fall very far short indeed of any prince,” Coxe concluded, and “whatever dignity or authority he possesses is . . . transiently vested in him by the people themselves for their own happiness.”98

While trusting Washington with the “use of great power,” the author warned that, if a future President lacked Washington’s virtue, moderation, and love of liberty, then “this country will be involved at once in war and tyranny.”

Wartime experiences had made Washington an American—arguably the first American—but

Washington all but ordered Madison to stand for election to the convention so that he could answer Henry point for point—a task that the mild-mannered Madison dreaded. When Madison’s election looked doubtful without campaigning, Washington told him to return from Congress to stump for votes—another unpleasant task.

“The consciousness of having discharged that duty which we owe to our Country, is superior to all other considerations,” Washington wrote to Madison in words that may have reflected his current thinking on his own duty to accept the presidency.

“We have the unequaled privilege of choosing our own political Institutions,” he wrote in August, “and of improving upon the experiences of mankind in the formation of a confederated government, where due energy will not be incompatible with the unalienable rights of freemen.”

“We exhibit at present the novel & astonishing Spectacle of a whole People deliberating calmly on what form of government will be most conductive to their happiness; and deciding with an unexpected degree of unanimity in favor of a system which they conceive calculated to answer the purpose.”

The third, the one that Washington would have most treasured, relates in large part to the trust and affection he earned between those two periods of official service, when he voluntarily relinquished power yet never stopped nurturing the new republic.