Washington [373]
After a pleasing October visit from Elizabeth and Samuel Powel, Washington had to cope with another frigid winter at Mount Vernon. Severed from the outside world by snow, he stayed in touch by mail with federalists in many states. Resigning himself to a common eighteenth-century practice, he assumed that his letters would be opened, telling Lafayette, “As to my sentiments with respect to the merits of the new constitution, I will disclose them without reserve (although by passing through the post offices they should become known to all the world) for, in truth, I have nothing to conceal on that subject.”8
While preserving an air of Olympian detachment, Washington moved stealthily in the background of the ratification process, one of his chief worries being that the Constitution’s detractors would prove more adept than its advocates. Although he admitted to defects in the charter, he tended to regard supporters as righteous and reasonable, opponents as wrongheaded and duplicitous. As a stalwart realist, he thought it dangerous to demand perfection from any human production and questioned “the propriety of preventing men from doing good, because there is a possibility of their doing evil.”9 When Lieutenant John Enys stopped by Mount Vernon in February, Washington explained that he had followed doggedly the constitutional debates, consuming all the pertinent literature. “He said he had read with attention every publication,” Enys wrote, “both for and against it, in order to see whether there could be any new objections, or that it could be placed in any other light than what it had been in the general convention, for which . . . he said he had sought in vain.”10
New York quickly emerged as a major locus of dissent, and Madison, based there as a delegate in the waning days of the Confederation Congress, warned Washington of a powerful backlash gathering force: “The newspapers here begin to teem with vehement and virulent calumniations of the proposed gov[ernmen]t.”11 After leaving the convention in July, Hamilton had fired anonymous salvos in the New York press against Governor George Clinton, who felt threatened by centralized power. On September 20 the Clinton forces retaliated with vicious glee, accusing Hamilton of insinuating himself into Washington’s good graces during the war. Said the nameless critic: “I have also known an upstart attorney palm himself upon a great and good man, for a youth of extraordinary genius and, under the shadow of such a patronage, make himself at once known and respected. But . . . he was at length found to be a superficial, self-conceited coxcomb and was of course turned off and disregarded by his patron.”12 This remark hatched an enduring mythology of a wily Hamilton tricking the dunderheaded Washington into supporting him.
Distraught over these accusations, the hypersensitive Hamilton appealed to Washington to rebut the notion that he had imposed himself upon the commander in chief and had then been dismissed by him: “This, I confess, hurts my feelings and, if it obtains credit, will require a contradiction.”13 By return mail, Washington laid both falsehoods to rest: “With respect to the first, I have no cause to believe that you took a single step to accomplish [it] or had the most distant [ide]a of receiving an appointment in my [fam]ily till you were invited thereto. And [with] respect to the second . . . your quitting [it was] altogether the effect of your own [choic]e.”14
To combat vocal foes of the Constitution in New York, Hamilton published in late October the first essay of The Federalist under the pen name “Publius” and rushed a copy to Washington. Washington had told David Humphreys that the Constitution’s acceptance would depend upon “the recommendation of it by good pens,” and