Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

A determined man, George Washington reveled in having overcome great skepticism to establish the Potomac River Company.

The Potomac River Company never lived up to these grandiose expectations: in the nineteenth century it went bankrupt, having penetrated no farther than Cumberland in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. But its real value in American politics had long since been realized.

As he warned Washington, “Many people secretly wish that every state should be completely independent and that, as soon as our public debts are liquidated, that Congress should be no more—a plan that would be as fatal to our interest at home as ruinous to it abroad.”

Patience Wright, a Quaker sculptor from Philadelphia, specialized in waxwork portraits. While mother and son were based in wartime London, she had patented a unique form of espionage by relaying secret messages to Benjamin Franklin and American politicians at home through messages sealed inside her waxed heads.

EVEN AS HOUDON WORKED ON HIS STATUE OF WASHINGTON, which reflected a hopeful stance toward America’s future, the latter was heartsick at the country’s disarray and feared that peace would undo the valiant work accomplished by the Continental Army. His complaints about the Articles of Confederation were consistent with those voiced during the war.

The government had no real executive branch, just an endless multiplicity of committees. The few executive departments were adjuncts of a chaotic, ramshackle Congress, which Washington condemned as “wretchedly managed.”

The United States wasn’t a country but a confederation of thirteen autonomous states, loosely presided over by Congress.

As Washington phrased it in a letter, “We are either a united people under one head . . . or we are thirteen independent sovereignties, eternally counteracting each other.”

Meanwhile America was fast becoming an irredeemably profligate nation.

The federal government also lacked the power to regulate trade among states or with foreign nations.

the country had a federal army of fewer than a thousand men.

There was a more distant threat to peace: in 1785 Barbary pirates from northern Africa began preying on American merchant vessels, which no longer enjoyed the protection of the British Navy.

Where Jefferson and Madison dreaded a powerful national government as the primrose path to monarchy, Washington and Hamilton continued to view a strong central government as the best bulwark against that threat. “What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing!” Washington exclaimed to John Jay in 1786. “I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror.”

Washington had an instinctive sense of public service. From the time he returned to Mount Vernon after the war, his mind dwelled actively on political problems.

Clearly Madison, Monroe, and Randolph were trying to cajole Washington from retirement and enlist him in the growing movement to reform the political structure. He was slowly being swept up in a swelling tide that he would find difficult to resist.

“They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent,” he said, and want to convert private property into “the common property of all.”

That Congress had abdicated its role in squashing the protest again exposed a dangerous vacuum of national power.

Madison believed that Shays’s Rebellion “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the constitution and prepared the public mind for a general reform” than all the defects of the Articles of Confederation combined .41 It made it almost certain that George Washington’s days as a Virginia planter were numbered.

Deep questioning was typical of Washington’s political style. Holding himself aloof, he had learned to set a high price on his participation, yielding only with reluctance.

Having learned to accumulate power by withholding his assent, he understood the influence of his mystique and kept people in suspense.

The mythology that he could not tell a lie had some basis in fact. He may also have hesitated to attend the Constitutional Convention from a premonition that it would initiate a sequence of events that would pull him away indefinitely from Mount Vernon. After all, the last time he heeded his country’s call in a crisis, it had embroiled him in more than eight years of war.

His response to the predicament shows how delicately he could weigh conflicting claims and cloak the real reason behind an apparent one.

Since he personified the country, he stood to lose the most from accusations of partisanship.

In soliciting opinions, he again preferred to give a passive appearance to active decisions, making it seem that he was being reluctantly borne along by fate, friends, or historical necessity, when he was actually shaping as well as reacting to events. This technique allowed him to cast himself into the modest role of someone answering the summons of history. It also permitted him to wait until a consensus had emerged on his course of action. If Washington could never entirely resist the allure of fame, neither could he openly welcome it.

To pique Washington’s interest, Jay sent him a clairvoyant sketch of a new government divided into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. “Let Congress legislate,” he told Washington. “Let others execute. Let others judge.”15 The letter foreshadowed the exact shape of the future government.

Washington’s internal deliberations began to shift on February 21, when Congress approved a convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”

This was the perfect double-barreled appeal to Washington’s vanity and patriotism.

For all his mixing in high society, Washington was an extremely hardworking delegate at the convention.

It had been decided that Franklin would nominate Washington as president.

After being seconded by John Rutledge, Washington was unanimously elected the convention president, while Major William Jackson, who had been on General Lincoln’s wartime staff, became its secretary.

The post of president raised Washington to a nonpartisan, nonspeaking role—ideal for his discreet nature.

Although highly intelligent, Washington lacked a philosophical mind that could originate constitutional ideas.

He was doubtless content to be consigned to the sidelines and contributed little during the debates.

At the same time he lent the proceedings his tacit blessing, allowing others to act as architects of the new order. He embodied the public excluded from the secret proceedings, and his mere presence reassured Americans that the delegates were striving for the public good instead of hatching a secret cabal behind closed doors.

The vignette shows how Washington functioned as the conscience of the convention and could make this room full of dignitaries feel like guilty schoolboys, summoned to the headmaster’s office for a reprimand.

Wherever Washington went, he was treated as a head of state, and people flocked after him.

Nonetheless, sharp clashes soon emerged, especially on the explosive issue of representation.

On June 6 James Madison spoke in favor of direct election to the House of Representatives, based on proportional representation—a position supported by the populous states—and conjured up a vision of a broad, pluralistic republic. In mid-June William Paterson of New Jersey, champion of the smaller states, countered with a plan that foresaw states represented equally in Congress. Though mute on the podium, Washington supported Madison’s view.

On June 30, the weather having grown sweltering, Gunning Bedford of Delaware delivered a hot-tempered tirade, aimed at the larger states, demonstrating just how bruising the discourse had become. “I do not, gentlemen, trust you,” he told them. He even hinted at secession, saying apropos of the smaller states that “sooner than be ruined, there are foreign powers who will take us by the hand.”2 Washington and Madison gazed in dismay as their worst fears of disunion threatened to materialize before their eyes.

Although he held his tongue during the debates, Washington was never a neutral party, and the interminable squabbling only reinforced his view that the country needed a potent central government to override the selfish ambitions of local politicians.

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.

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.”

Slavery was the most vexing topic at the convention.

William Lloyd Garrison would later castigate the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

The debate over the executive branch was likewise steeped in controversy.

That the delegates overcame their dread of executive power and produced an energetic presidency can be traced directly to Washington’s imperturbable presence.

For Washington, the beauty of the document was that it charted a path for its own evolution.

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.

THE CONSTITUTION cherished by generations of Americans was fiercely controversial at first, producing heated polemics on both sides.