Washington [360]
Wisely, Washington had allowed the issue to percolate for months, encouraging the perception that he was following rather than leading events. On March 19 Knox sent him a letter that may have clinched his decision. He said that he took it for granted that Washington would be elected president of the convention. If the convention still faltered and produced only a “patchwork to the present defective confederation, your reputation would in a degree suffer.” But if the convention forged a vigorous new federal government, “it would be a circumstance highly honorable to your fame . . . and doubly entitle you to the glorious republican epithet ‘The Father of Your Country.’”20 This was the perfect double-barreled appeal to Washington’s vanity and patriotism. Because of the high caliber of the delegates selected, Knox wagered that the convention would spawn a superior new system, and “therefore the balance of my opinion preponderates greatly in favor of your attendance.”21
In retrospect, it seems foreordained that Washington, with his unerring sense of duty, would go to Philadelphia. He was a casualty of his own greatness, which dictated a path in life from which he couldn’t deviate. Had he turned down the call to duty, he would have felt something incomplete in his grand mission to found the country, but he patently had to convince himself and the world of his purely disinterested motives. Now he could proceed as if summoned from self-imposed retirement by popular acclaim.
On March 28 Washington wrote to Governor Randolph and submitted to his fate: he would indeed attend the convention. He made it clear that he was doing so involuntarily and only submitting to the entreaties of friends. In Washington’s life, however, one commitment led ineluctably to the next, and he acknowledged that his attendance would have “a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs.” 22 To solve his dilemma with the Cincinnati, he planned to go to Philadelphia a week early and address the group, so they would not attribute his attending the Constitutional Convention instead “to a disrespectful inattention to the Society.”23 Henry Knox was bowled over by Washington’s decision. “Secure as he was in his fame,” he wrote to Lafayette, “he has again committed it to the mercy of events. Nothing but the critical situation of his country would have induced him to so hazardous a conduct.”24 Having made his decision, Washington gave unstinting support to a convention that would do far more than just tinker with the Articles of Confederation: like Madison, he wanted root-and-branch reform. He told Knox that the convention should “probe the defects” of the Articles of Confederation “to the bottom,” and he worried that some states might not send delegates or would hobble them with “cramped powers,” fostering an impasse.25 By this point, Washington was clearly primed for decisive action in Philadelphia.
BEFORE TAKING ON THE BURDEN OF AMERICA, Washington had to deal with a piece of unfinished family business: the chronic discontent of his mother. Mary Washington, with her flinty independence, was still stewing with grievances. Right before John Augustine died in early January, she had written to him to complain of an absence of corn at her four-hundred-acre farm in the Little Falls quarter of the Rappahannock River. “I never lived soe pore in my life,” she insisted.26 Had it not been for succor from a neighbor and her daughter, Betty, she contended, “I should be almost starvd, butt I am like an old almanack, quit out of date.”27 After Mary’s wartime petition to the Virginia legislature, John Augustine, at George’s behest, had