Being George Washington (30 page)
The delegates shook in their boots. Imagine being reprimanded by George Washington! They fished into their pockets and desk drawers to find their own copy—and prayed that the copy on Washington’s desk wasn’t theirs. The panic-stricken South Carolina delegate Pierce Butler rushed home to find his in the pocket of his other coat.
Unsurprisingly, no member of the delegation ever dared to claim the lost document and risk Washington’s ire. But the message had been delivered.
There is a second moral to this story: the Thomas Mifflin who brought the lost papers to Washington was none other than General Thomas Mifflin, the grotesquely incompetent quartermaster general of the army who had caused so much of the suffering at Valley Forge. Yet
Washington had clearly not ostracized Mifflin. In fact, Mifflin, along with Henry Knox, was among the old army buddies who had lunched with Washington just before he first arrived in Philadelphia for the convention.
Washington believed that men of good faith and character could be forgiven.
… on the other hand, there
was
that Arnold fellow.
For 4,500 years the ancient, immense figure of the Sphinx at Giza has fascinated mankind.
And so has its eternal silence.
What profound secrets does this great stone beast of the desert hold? What wonders—and horrors—have its limestone eyes beheld through the millennia?
Its silence captivates us. We use it as a metaphor and we compare it to that of famous figures of our own history. But the greatest sphinx of all is George Washington. While the University of Virginia is publishing his papers, and they are expected to reach ninety volumes—his diaries alone are six volumes—he reveals very little about himself in all those pages. He is remarkably self-effacing, and, if he is introspective at all, he does not commit his self-questioning to paper.
That is one reason why recent generations have found him so remote. It’s not right to say that he wasn’t a man of words; he certainly was—they just weren’t the type of words that we’re used to hearing. He didn’t pen an autobiography or a memoir, nor did he grant interviews about his decisions and life. He merely achieved.
Almost nowhere in his career is Washington more sphinxlike than during the Constitutional Convention. He is not merely guarded concerning his role in that crucial drama; he is unalterably silent and self-censoring. He seals off the convention’s deliberations from the general public. He posts armed guards outside its door. He takes almost no part in its official deliberations, merely ruling on its coming and goings and limiting himself to an occasional arched eyebrow or the rare hint of a smile. Those gestures, as influential as they may have been at the time,
are, of course, completely lost to history. He kept no diary of those days. He took no chance of written notes falling into the wrong hands.
Silence. Absolute silence.
And yet we know his influence must have been immense. He was not one to leave things to chance. He would not have left Mount Vernon once more to merely be a spectator at the birth of a new nation. Life—and patriotism—were not spectator sports for George Washington.
That’s why our story of the convention contained a very special twist. It’s a historical detective story, and the mystery we wanted to solve was this: How did that faithful voting deadlock regarding senatorial representation come to be broken? The large states had always swept every vote. Yet, on that day, they stumbled badly and were forced back to the bargaining table. As a result, a constitution was ultimately born.
Was it again the hand of Providence intervening?
Perhaps. Or, maybe, it was a different hand: Washington’s.
No direct evidence exists that Washington was behind the mysterious series of events that unfolded that day, but a wealth of circumstantial evidence that we merely hint at in our chapter certainly does. We have connected the dots, and the dots may finally paint a picture of how Washington worked so ably behind the scenes throughout his entire life to influence public affairs. At dinners and dances and at taverns and even at the theater, Washington subtly, but tirelessly, lobbied his associates to reach certain conclusions.
This may have been Washington’s greatest such coup, but, if it was not, if it was merely once again the remarkable hand of Providence, then well … that is not such a bad thing, either.
Watch Your Step
Washington almost never lived to become president—or even to return to Mount Vernon.
He wanted to rush home after the convention. He’d been away for over four months, and that was a lot longer than he had ever expected the proceedings to last.
Unfortunately, he hurried too much. In Maryland he ran into a raging
storm. Rain poured down in sheets. The deluge was so heavy that his party could not make it across the swollen Elk River. But he wanted to get home so badly and was in no mood to wait—particularly not when waiting meant sitting around and getting soaked.
He ordered his driver to take his carriage across a rickety bridge—a bridge so old that it had been abandoned.
It was one of George Washington’s few wrong decisions.
As the carriage started across, something seemed to warn him of the danger. He climbed out, and, then suddenly—
CRASH!!
—one of the horses pulling it fell straight through the rotted planks, plunging fifteen feet into the raging river below. Some workers from a nearby mill rushed in to save the situation, but it was a close call.
Once again, the Invisible Hand seemed to have spared George Washington.
One of the major issues facing the Continental Congress was the presidency.
Some people wanted the country’s new chief executive to be a king—or something very similar to a king. Some wanted him to serve for life. Some wanted him to possess unlimited veto power. People felt safe proposing such things because they assumed Washington would be their president. They knew that whatever powers they gave him would be respected.
At the convention one day, wise old Ben Franklin commented that “the first man put at the helm will be a good one.”
Wink. Wink.
But the real question that Washington and others wrestled with wasn’t who would be first, but who would be
next
. Who would be fifth, seventeenth, or sixtieth? Would that person be as honorable and trustworthy with their power as Washington, or merely another George III?
South Carolina’s Pierce Butler remembered that “many members cast their eyes toward General Washington and shaped their ideas of the powers to be given to a president by their opinions of his virtue. So
that the man, who by his patriotism and virtue contributed largely to the emancipation of the country, may be the innocent means of being, when he is laid low, oppressed.”
Washington was accustomed to command. He gave the orders at Mount Vernon. He issued orders as commander in chief. He might have demanded that he possess virtually unlimited powers as president. But he knew that wouldn’t be right. And, just as important, he was asking himself the same questions that troubled Pierce Butler. The presidency was not about him. If, however, he became the first to fill the office, then he had to ensure that the presidency served the nation—and not the other way around.
No section on the Constitution is complete without revisiting the topic of slavery. It’s become accepted fact that the Founders believed that blacks were worth only “three-fifths” of a human. That, however, is simply wrong.
The “three-fifths” clause was really about the census and, consequently, state representation in Congress. Slave populations in the southern states were huge at that time. If slaves were counted on a one-for-one basis then southern states would have far larger populations, and therefore, far more federal representation than the northern ones. As a result, slavery would have been nearly impossible to abolish.
Some revisionists would have you believe that those slaves were not going to be counted at all and that the three-fifths clause actually gave the southern states
more
power than they otherwise would have. (This allegation is, I think, supposed to “prove” just how racist and hateful our Founders really were.) But think about that logically: would the South really have been that willing to give up so much federal representation right off the bat? Of course not—they would have fought to have slaves counted as full people along with everyone else. The three-fifths compromise was just that, a
compromise
. It appeased the South, got the Constitution ratified, and paved the way for slavery to eventually end.
George Washington wasn’t crazy about everything in the new constitution.
At one point, he complained to Alexander Hamilton: “I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of the Convention, and do therefore repent having had any agency in the business.”
Translation: I regret ever attaching my name to this.
A while later, he wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette: “I am fully persuaded it is the best that can be obtained at the present moment under such diversity of ideas that prevail.” And, in a separate letter to Lafayette, he was even more plainspoken:
It appears to me, then, little short of a miracle, that the Delegates from so many different States (which States you know are also different from each other in their manners, circumstances and prejudices) should unite in forming a system of national Government, so little liable to well founded objections. Nor am I yet such an enthusiastic, partial or undiscriminating admirer of it, as not to perceive it is tinctured with some real (though not radical) defects.
A little better, but still not exactly a rousing endorsement.
Look carefully at Washington’s words and you’ll see something else besides his lackluster vote of confidence: the art of compromise, or as he said, “the best that can be obtained at the present moment.”
He didn’t get his way on everything;
nobody
got everything they wanted. And, sometimes, at the end of such a process, nobody can explain quite what happened—that’s why they call it the art of compromise and not the science of compromise. If it were science we’d have a formula and we’d know right from the start what the end result was going to be.
But Washington and the rest of the convention got enough of what they wanted—without sacrificing their core principles. They forged a large enough coalition, not only in their little meeting room, but nationwide. They got enough people behind them to launch words and ideas and values into action.
Today the Republican Party doesn’t agree with the Tea Party on everything. Libertarians differ with Republicans. Social conservatives may
disagree with fiscal conservatives. And, of course, Democrats and Republicans can’t even seem to have lunch together anymore. On and on and on it goes. But like-minded people
can
work together on what they
do
believe in. It’s not impossible to do that. In fact, it’s more necessary now than ever. “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally,” Ronald Reagan taught us, “
not
a 20 percent traitor.”
But some people will never see it that way. Some people are just cranky. Robert Kennedy once said, “Twenty percent of the people are against everything all the time.” And some people always want it “my way or the highway.” But the problem with that approach is that everybody, except the people you
really
disagree with, end up on the highway, including
you
. The liberals, the progressives, the big union bosses, and the red-tape-creating bureaucrats all whiz past you in their Chevy Volts (okay, maybe they don’t “whiz”), while you stand there with your thumb pointed to Utopia.
My point is that you should never surrender your core principles. Never—ever—never. But don’t try to get 100 percent of what you want from an ally, while giving up zero percent
And don’t expect to get everything you want this instant; this is going to be a long fight. It won’t be decided in the next election. It may not be decided ever. The key is to continually push the needle in your direction and lay the foundation for the next group of people to push it a bit further.
Washington had his qualms about the new constitution, but he signed it anyway. Three members of the convention—Edmund Randolph (presenter of the Virginia Plan), George Mason (Washington’s very close friend), and Massachusetts’s Elbridge Gerry (inventor of the gerrymander)—all refused to sign the U.S. Constitution, period. New York’s Robert Yates hated the idea of a constitution so much that he just up and left early on in the proceedings.
George Washington, on the other hand, toughed it out and worked with others. He didn’t like everything in the end, but he liked enough. He didn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good and the results have been nothing short of extraordinary.
Washington got the nation’s capital, the state I was born in, and several monuments named in his honor. Robert Yates got a housing project in Schenectady.
April 29, 1796
Executive Mansion
Philadelphia
It was well past suppertime and on cobblestoned Market Street, not five hundred feet to the north of Independence Hall, the public lamplighter had already made his rounds, setting torch to wick on the oil lamps just outside the Executive Mansion.
In George Washington’s second-floor office, the president rummaged through his desk to locate his metal eyeglass case. His young manservant carefully lit the room’s tallow candles. Billy Lee, the trusted servant who had served with him throughout the war, had grown lame years earlier and no longer traveled from Mount Vernon.