Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
framework for a united country. The fulfillment of the founders’ dreams would require that this subject be addressed before this brave new world would be fairly launched. The Congress had purported to spend about $200 million but had no power to tax and was dependent on the colonies, or states, to back its obligations. These jurisdictions were not much friendlier to central authority than they had been with the British, and efforts to pass a federal constitution, including Franklin’s original effort and John Dickinson’s sequel, were rejected. In November 1777, Articles of Confederation were approved which made the states sovereign and ignored federalism. In fact, the only authority in the shattered jurisdiction was General George Washington and his army. The strength, wisdom, and character of the example he set can be best understood by the results when the Latin American republics, 40 years later, revolted and yielded to the temptation of military rule. Washington rejected such overtures, and condemned petitions to Congress urging Greene and others to seize power after vehemently declining to do so himself.
Washington urged his countrymen “to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.”19 He consented reluctantly to the demobilization of the Continental Army, but warned that it remained to be seen whether the Revolution he had led to victory was “a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.” He called for “an indissoluble Union of the States under one Federal Head”; the honoring of public debt; the establishment of armed forces; and a spirit of cooperation and sacrifice among all the states. Washington took leave of his comrades at New York on December 4, 1783, in probably the most emotional public occasion of American history, and on December 23 handed over his sword to the president of the Continental Congress (Thomas Mifflin, whom he despised and had fired as quartermaster general of the army), taking “leave of all my employments of public life.” Mifflin replied with a majestic statement written by Jefferson, concluding somewhat ambiguously with “earnest prayers that a life so beloved may be fostered with all His care; that your days may be happy as they have been illustrious, and that He will finally give you that reward which this world will not give.” Washington was not quite prepared to sign off on the possibilities of the present world, though he returned to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, and wrote to friends and even casual correspondents of his relief at being able now to live quietly on his estates.
In fact, he put himself at the disposition of the public and in the reserve of the new nation, the chief facilitator of the American project, with a greater right than anyone to require that the supreme sacrifices of the 15,000 or so Americans who had died and the devastation that had laid waste much of the country and reduced the economic product by about 45 percent20 not have been in vain. He was charging the Congress with the task of justifying and completing the Revolution, knowing that the chances of it doing so were zero.
In Paris and Versailles, despite the abrasions of the peace process, Franklin was a national hero, even appointed by King Louis XVI to a scientific commission. He and Washington were almost universally admired, and Franklin was the lion of the salons of both London and Paris, in a manner probably never approached by anyone else. He became acquainted and often friendly with the leading philosophes, and counseled liberal reforms but warned against anything violent. As always, his advice was good, and as was often also true, it was not followed. He retired his commission in 1785, aged 79, and then stopped with friends in England, his immensely alluring personality and intelligence overcoming all the vexations of epochal disputes. He was reconciled with his son, the former governor of New Jersey, and returned to a hero’s welcome in Philadelphia.
The Congress and all the states were printing money and the Congress eventually devalued all currency by 97.5 percent. Washington’s brilliant but impulsive aide, Alexander Hamilton; Jefferson’s understudy, James Madison; and Robert Morris, the Philadelphia financier who financed much of the war, proposed a 5 percent import duty, but a number of the states refused to cooperate. To some extent the states reneged on their financial obligations generated by the Revolutionary War, just as they had refused to contribute to the British to help pay for the eviction of the French from Canada. It was the same stingy impulse, but they were now largely, themselves, the creditors of their own almost worthless war debts.
Poverty stalked the country except for parts of Pennsylvania and New York and New Jersey; debtors’ courts were busy, and reformers such as Jefferson, whose talents were much more evident in peacetime as he abolished primogeniture and proposed universal education, broadened the franchise to assure a voice to the less prosperous. It was clear by 1785 that the system was not working, as the British, in particular, had predicted.
A land dispute between Maryland and Virginia had been settled amicably under Washington’s auspices at Mount Vernon, and Washington asked the 34-year-old James Madison, a brilliant Virginian lawyer and legislator, to convene a meeting between representatives of the states to discuss interstate commerce. Five states were represented at Annapolis, Maryland, at the meeting in September 1786. Shays’ Rebellion in late 1786 and January 1787, an uprising of destitute Massachusetts farmers, was put down by swiftly recruited militia, but led to suspension of some taxes, and emphasized the absurdity and impotence of the political system. Congress was reduced to asking the states to grant it the power to impose certain taxes, and New York vetoed this.
Twelve states, all but Rhode Island, then called for a constitutional convention to meet at Philadelphia in May 1787. Enthusiasm for the idea of a federal constitution was sketchy in many state elites. In Virginia, Washington and most of the rest of the 40 families that owned the great plantations favored a strong federal government. Jefferson was absent as minister in Paris (where he succeeded Franklin in 1785), and Jefferson’s cousin, Edmund Randolph, was skeptical. Patrick Henry, the radical Virginian independence leader, disapproved the project and did not attend, though he was elected a delegate. John Adams was absent as minister in England (where he was graciously received by George III). Also absent were his anti-federalist cousin, Samuel Adams, and states’ rights advocate John Hancock. The autonomist governor of New York, General George Clinton, boycotted, and the New York delegation was effectively led by the young and brilliant, but none too democratic or representative, Alexander Hamilton. Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris led the Pennsylvanians. Some delegations were chosen by state assemblies, but some were supplemented by invitations from the conveners.
Washington was in the background, but he and Franklin, who had been proposing federal arrangements since the Albany Congress of 1754, were the real champions of a strong federal state. Washington’s challenge to the state assemblies to justify the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the long and bloody war that followed it had, as he expected, not been met. He would not seize power as many had urged when his army was demobilized, but he was conspicuously available now, to be the legitimately chosen father of the nation in peace as he had been in war. At the instigation of the 81-year old Franklin, Washington was elected president of the Constitutional Convention, and as host, in his splendid role of president of Pennsylvania, Franklin was elected chairman, the two indispensable founders of the nation ensconced at the head of the unfolding process. Franklin, suffering from gout and gallstones, was conveyed by sedan chair to and from the proceedings, by inmates of the municipal prison (with whom he was courteous and jaunty). The two grand strategists and chief elders of America were ready for the supreme effort to complete their work: the replacement of the French threat to British America, and of the British overlordship of a post-French America, with a government that could lead independent America to greatness and fulfill the promise of Jefferson’s luxuriant Declaration of Independence.
9. THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were effectively self-chosen. It was assumed that state governors and some senior figures of the legislatures could come ex officio. The Virginians arrived first, led by their governor, Edmund Randolph (Washington being present in his national capacity by common wish, ratified by his election as president of the Convention). At first, the advocates of states’ rights and autonomy hung back, not wishing to be involved in a project whose aims they disapproved. As more states sent delegates and the sponsorship of Washington and Franklin lent it momentum and gravity, most decided that