Washington [372]
At sunset on September 22 Washington’s coach pulled up before the mansion house at Mount Vernon. That he was ready to resume his everyday life is evident in his diary, where he jotted down his absence of “four months and 14 days.”40 The precision of detail suggests how onerous Washington considered the lost time, and he bewailed to a correspondent having “sacrificed every private consideration and personal enjoyment” to attend the convention.41 What he discovered upon returning home confirmed his latent anxieties about his neglected business affairs. As he told Henry Knox, he “found Mrs. Washington and the family tolerably well, but the fruits of the earth almost entirely destroyed by one of the severest droughts (in this neighborhood) that ever was experienced. The crops generally below the mountains are injured, but not to the degree that mine and some of my neighbors’ are here.”42 For Washington, this dispiriting discovery reenacted a now-familiar tale of making huge private sacrifices whenever he was forced to be away from home for public service.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Mounting the Seat
THE CONSTITUTION cherished by generations of Americans was fiercely controversial at first, producing heated polemics on both sides. So that its legitimacy would derive from the people, not the state governments, the framers required ratification by a special convention in each state; the document would be activated when nine states approved. By all accounts, Washington overflowed with enthusiasm for the new charter. When Richmond merchant Alexander Donald stayed at Mount Vernon in early October 1787, he was impressed by Washington’s ebullient advocacy. “I never saw him so keen for anything in my life as he is for the adoption of a new form of government,” Donald informed Jefferson.1 The months in Philadelphia, however trying, had given Washington a needed respite from business worries and revived his faltering health. “He is in perfect good health,” Donald wrote, “and looks almost as well as he did twenty years ago.”2
Everybody recognized the signal importance of Washington’s imprimatur on the new charter, reassuring a public skittish about such fundamental change. His cachet emboldened advocates (called federalists) even as it undermined critics (called antifederalists). “I have observed that your name [attached] to the new constitution has been of infinite service,” Gouverneur Morris wrote. “Indeed, I am convinced that, if you had not attended the convention and the same paper had been handed out to the world, it would have met with a colder reception . . . As it is, should the idea prevail that you would not accept of the presidency, it would prove fatal in many parts.”3
One Boston newspaper regretted that the combined prestige of Washington and Franklin in favor of the Constitution made “too strong an argument in the minds of many to suffer them to examine, like freemen, for themselves.”4 Some antifederalists took refuge in hyperbole, portraying the Constitutional Convention as a baleful nest of conspirators—a charge given some resonance by the secret nature of the proceedings. “The evil genius of darkness presided at its birth; it came forth under the veil of mystery,” wrote an opponent who styled himself “Centinel.”5 That Washington and Franklin had mingled among those conspirators made it more difficult to defame the enterprise. To bypass this problem, “Centinel” depicted Washington as an unwitting