By an Associate.
Continuing the narrative that began here.
Parson Weems had retired to Georgetown across the river to work on his tracts, of which he issued a steady stream: “On the Falsity of All Human Traditions, Saving Certain Exceptions Herein Enumerated”; “On the Poor Fashion Sense of the Romish Hierarchy”; “An Inquiry into the Scandalously Immoral Behavior of Certain Orders of Nuns, with Numerous Woodcuts”; “Whether the Pope Possesses a Hidden Tail, with a Commentary on the Seventeenth Chapter of Revelation”; and other similar titles, most of which sold very well, assuring their author a comfortable living. He had them printed at the Gazette office in Alexandria, and would generally stop for dinner with us after a day at the printer’s; I was always glad to see him, and Susanna was at least polite to him, though she was not as fond of him as I was.
Of course we were frequent guests at Mount Vernon. Washington was not a man to forget loyal friends, and I believe Susanna, Parson Weems, and I saw more of him than did all the great men of the age who stopped to pay tribute to the greatest of them all, and to seek his advice, an experience that usually left them more baffled than they had been before they arrived.
In short, I will say that my own life was very pleasant in the few years after our victory in the War of Independence; and so, I believe, was Washington’s. Our country, however, was suffering.
The difficulty, as all agreed, lay in the Articles of Confederation. That agreement, hastily put together when the states were in the throes of their war for independence, gave us a national government that existed only at the whim of the states; and we soon discovered that the states could be quite whimsical. The Congress depended on the contributions of the states for its budget, and there were no consequences for states that failed to make the agreed-on contributions. Moreover, the Empire of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation showed a distressing tendency to bully the other states, which the Articles of Confederation provided no means of counteracting. Clearly some revisions were necessary, and it must be soon, preferably before Connecticut declared war on Rhode Island.
Thus the Congress voted to call a convention in Philadelphia for the purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, and naturally Virginia chose Washington as one of her delegates.
“I should like to have you and Phillips with me,” Washington said when he told me about the convention. “Your steadying influence, and his incisive mind, will be of great use to me in Philadelphia. We ought to have Parson Weems as well, if he can spare the time, for a bit of spiritual advice would not come amiss at this important juncture.”
“I’ll have to ask Su— Phillips, but for my part I should be glad to offer whatever assistance I can give.”
Susanna was reluctant to leave the children for so long, though we had a capable and intelligent nurse whom they loved, and who would be more than adequate to the task of caring for them. “But on the other hand, if Virginia has chosen Washington, the other states have probably chosen the usual lot of imbeciles; and if I can be there to speak for sanity— Very well; we’ll go, and the children will come with us.”
“Is that wise?” I asked.
“Crispus is already speaking in complete sentences,” said Susanna. “Perhaps he can draft some of the articles.”
So it was done. We made slow progress to Philadelphia with Jane and Crispus, but they enjoyed the new sights along the way, and certainly Susanna and I were happier for not worrying about what might be happening to them at home.
When we arrived in Philadelphia, we found the preparations for the convention already in progress, and already encountering their first difficulty. Washington had grown considerably since the successful conclusion of the war. He was now a little over thirteen feet tall, and while this height presented no architectural problem in the ample chamber chosen for the convention, it was clear that none of the furniture was at all adequate to Washington’s current dimensions.
Here was a problem the convention would have to solve before it could even begin to address the perceived weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation. It was imperative that at least one chair be made in Washington’s size. Yet no one wished to be the one who drew attention to Washington’s unusual height. We all preferred not to mention it, and I was never quite sure how much Washington himself was aware of his own size. Furthermore, the pride of some of the other delegates would hardly admit of one delegate’s having an obviously larger seat than the rest. The representatives from Rhode Island, where size has often been a sensitive question, threatened to withdraw from the union altogether and form an independent and potentially hostile Empire if any Virginian sat in a chair whose dimensions exceeded those of the chairs occupied by Rhode Island by so much as a single inch.
In the end it was decided by the Standing Committee on Seating that all furniture in the hall should be so made as to accommodate any delegate up to fourteen feet tall. Thus the problem was addressed without any specific reference to Washington himself, and the feelings of smaller delegates were spared. Most of the delegates required stepladders, or for some of the more infirm hoisting tackle, to make the ascent into their seats; but the important thing was that harmony was preserved, and the convention was not irreparably split over questions of protocol before any of the more important issues had been dealt with.
Susanna and I did not attend the sessions with Washington, so we heard about the actual debates second-hand; but we heard them in great detail, for Washington loved to talk about them. The first debate, of course, was over the presidency of the convention, and as far as Washington was concerned there could be only one reasonable choice. Fortunately, he was able to make the other delegates see reason, or see how difficult it would be if they did not see things his way. The first day he came back to the inn where we were staying (a house with comfortably high fifteen-foot ceilings, and a large back parlor where we accommodated Washington by laying four beds side by side) to announce that he had been chosen president of the convention. Furthermore, he was quite pleased to find that his old friend Alexander Hamilton had come to the convention as the delegate from New-York state. “The men of New-York sent only one delegate,” said Washington, “and in this I believe they have shown wisdom; for one Hamilton is worth half a dozen of the rest. I believe his ‘one-dollar-one-vote’ proposal has a very good chance of acceptance.”
“One-dollar-one-vote?” I repeated.
“Hamilton explained it to me. It seems very clever. Each man would have a voting power proportional to his wealth, so that the burden of government falls most heavily upon those who most naturally have an interest in the stability of the Union.”
“I’d like to talk to Hamilton about that personally,” said Susanna. I did not like the way the fingers of her right hand were closing into a fist.
“The thing that worries me,” Washington continued, “is that the delegates from the Empire of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation have gone home and refused to have anything further to do with the convention. I hope that troublesome state is not bent on causing us more difficulties. We need the cooperation of all the states, for a civil war between Rhode Island and the other states would be destructive and unpleasant. However, we can only trust in our own wisdom to erect a government that will, by its obvious utility, recommend itself even to the mobs in Newport and Providence.”
“Perhaps,” Susanna suggested, “we ought to trust in God instead.”
We did in fact see quite a bit of Mr. Hamilton as the days went on. He often dined with us, and he spoke of his plans for a government “of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy” with great enthusiasm. I kept one eye on Susanna’s right fist, for there was something about Mr. Hamilton that unsettled her.
Eventually, however, it became clear that Hamilton’s most audacious proposals would not gain the support of most of the states. Many of the delegates, indeed, were insisting that every man should have a vote.
“Why every man?” Susanna asked when Washington brought us this news.
“That is indeed the question Hamilton has been asking. He believes that at least a property requirement—”
“No, I mean, why should the franchise be limited to men?”
“What do you mean? Would you have horses and mules vote as well?”
“Why should women not vote for their elected representatives? In all matters with which this government is concerned, they are equally affected. It is their homes that will be taxed, their husbands and sons who will be sent to war; it is they who will suffer most from bad government and benefit most from good.”
“Yes, Phillips,” replied Washington, “but women have not the analytical capacity which you and I enjoy. Surely you, of all people, with your exceptionally keen mind, can appreciate that difference. Your suggestion of extending the franchise to horses and mules may, however, be worthy of consideration.”
Susanna was about to say something in reply, but clearly thought better of it, and merely sat with her head down and her fingers on her temples. Many of her conversations with Washington seemed to end the same way.
The apportionment of representation in Congress was another difficulty that much concerned Washington. Susanna suggested an elegant compromise in which there would be two houses of Congress, like the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the one apportioned by population, and the other with equal representation from each state. This was eagerly adopted when Washington brought it up the next day, but then the question of how to determine the population of a state came up. The states of the South wished to have their slaves included; the states of the North, naturally, did not wish to concede so much influence to the South.
“They are still debating it—the representation question,” Washington told us one evening.
“They seem to be unable to face the real question of slavery,” said Susanna.
“And they have spent days debating,” Washington continued, “with no result that I can see other than frayed tempers and a considerable diminution of the Madeira stock.”
“It is because no one is bold enough to ask the real question,” said Susanna. “Instead they will talk themselves in circles, never touching on the one thing no one dares mention, until they are so weary of talking that they will make some absurd compromise and decide that a slave counts as, oh, three-fifths of a person, and then call it a job well done and hope no one ever reads the text.”
“Three-fifths of a person,” Washington repeated quietly. And then he suddenly brightened. “My word, Phillips, what a mind you have! Yes, that’s the answer!”
Susanna began to protest: “But I was just—”
“Yes, yes, it solves the problem perfectly—an almost mathematical balance between the regions!”
“But it’s abs—”
“I must tell Hamilton at once!” He had risen and was already headed for the door, with that odd hunching walk he had developed in unconscious adaptation to the usual dimensions of interior doorways. “I don’t know what we’d do without you, Phillips! This is the best idea you’ve had since that Electoral College thing.” He ducked out the door.
“What? Wait—they adopted that too? But that was—”
The door closed.
“But that was a joke!” she almost wailed to the closed door. Then she turned to me. “Christopher, can we stop him?”
“I don’t think anything can stop the General once he has an idea stuck in his head.”
“But they’re making a hash of my country, and it’s all my fault!”
I stood and took her hand. “My dearest, the greatest minds of these United States are gathered here in Philadelphia. Every point in this new form of government is accepted only after mature deliberation.”
“Yes, but…” She laid her head on my shoulder. “But the greatest minds in these United States are all a bunch of imbeciles.”
Susanna was not well pleased when, the next day, Washington came back from the day’s session with the news that the “three-fifths” compromise had been accepted with minimal debate. She had to endure Washington’s congratulations over dinner, which she did with silent mortification; and Washington kept bringing up the subject for the rest of the evening, so that Susanna found it necessary to retire early on the excuse of a headache.
She was still awake when I joined her in bed, and she was still feeling gloomy. “I’ve made a mess of the Constitution,” she said as we lay in the dark (speaking quietly, so as not to wake the children), “and there’s nothing I can do to change it.”
“The Constitution need not be perfect,” I assured her. “It will still be better than the fraying fabric of Confederation.”
“But I’ve just increased the power of the slaveholders by an enormous amount. Slavery will simply wither away, you keep saying. Do you see it withering now?”
“With a strong federal government, the men of the North and East who oppose slavery will find partners in the South, and the institution will be ended peacefully, with minimal disruption. The alternative is disunion and bloodshed. You may have been responsible for saving the Union, Susanna, and averting a bloody civil war. In a few decades at most, slavery will be extinct, and—”
“And all the men and women and little helpless children who died as slaves will look down from heaven and say, ‘Thank you, Susanna Gist—thank you for letting us die without tasting freedom. Thank you for making sure—’ ”
She stopped. There was a loud whooping coming from downstairs, accompanied by rhythmic pounding. Washington was laughing.
“Someone must have told him a joke this afternoon,” I remarked.
The whooping continued, and then we very distinctly heard him shouting, “Three-fifths of a person!” Then more pounding, as of heels kicking on the floor.
Susanna turned over and pulled the coverlet over her head.
There were times, indeed, when it seemed to all of us that the convention must end in failure, and that no agreement could ever be reached among the states. Nature, however, proved our ally. The insupportable heat of a Philadelphia summer was now fully upon us. Curiously, the children seemed to grow more cheerful as the heat grew more oppressive; but Washington reported that the delegates were withering. More and more provisions were accepted in this new constitution simply because it was easier to say “yes” than to debate in the sweltering furnace where the convention was meeting. Washington told us that the delegates from Massachusetts had nearly got a constitutional prohibition of red chowder written into the document before Mr. Hamilton woke from his afternoon somnolence and vetoed it.
When at last the Constitution of the United States had been accepted by the convention, we returned home and awaited the verdict of the states. It took a year and a half, but at last the Constitution was ratified by the state conventions. Now there was much to be done. A whole national government had to be built from the very foundation. But in Washington’s mind there was really only one interesting question: who was to take on the exalted and onerous duties reserved in the Constitution for the President of the United States?
To be continued in Chapter XII.