Rescuing the Experiment
As the snow fell at Mount Vernon in March 1785, George Washington was deeply concerned. Two years after the Treaty of Paris ended the War of Independence, America faced imminent ruin.
The 1780s are called “the critical period,” for it was in these years that the American experiment in independence was in its most delicate stage of maturation. Back in 1776, Americans believed they were given “peculiar blessings” that rendered them a “chosen people, in a new world, separate and far removed from the regions and wretched politics of the old world.”
To John Adams, London was “filled with folly,” but “America with wisdom.” Yet by 1785, it seemed that the reverse was true, that the experiment was failing—to others, it had already failed. “No morning ever dawned more favorable than ours,” Washington wrote, “and no day was ever more clouded than the present.”
Washington knew that the source of most, if not all, of America’s ills was the country’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, which created “a half-starved, limping government that appears to be always moving upon crunches and tottering at every step.” Signed in November 1777 but not ratified until 1781, the Articles created only “a league of friendship” between thirteen independent and uncooperative neighbors. There was no executive, no courts, and an impossible voting procedure that required 69% approval of all states to make any substantial decisions. Amendments required absolute unanimity.
The Congress lacked the power to levy taxes and regulate commerce. Its only revenue came from a system of requisitions, but it possessed no power to enforce respect or cooperation. Requisitions were, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, “mere recommendations which the states observe or disregard at their option.” Washington called them “a perfect nihility” and “little better than a jest and bye word throughout the land.” In 1786, the national government requested nearly $4 million; it received less than $700.
Destitute of funds, the Confederation Congress couldn’t pay continental troops. During the war, troops went months without pay. To combat desertion, Congress promised attractive pensions, yet when the time came to pay them, they were unable to deliver.
Disillusionment resulted in near insurrection on two occasions in 1783: the Newburgh Conspiracy and the Pennsylvania Mutiny (Shays’ Rebellion would take place in the winter of 1786-87). The former was a planned insurgency in March within the Continental Army, the latter a mob riot in June that drove the national government out of the capital at Philadelphia and into New Jersey. Washington was involved in suppressing both events.
In a letter to the states the same year, Washington encouraged compliance with requisitions and in settling troop payments. He saw it as “more than a common debt;” it was “a debt of honor.” However, not even Washington could compel the states to obey requisitions. The states, Hamilton barked, were drunk “with a desire of monopolizing all power in themselves.”
Washington advocated an overhaul of the Articles. As James Madison had written, “the present system neither has nor deserves advocates,” and feared that the Union would “quickly tumble to the ground” without proper reform. A new political framework was needed to “redeem the honor of the republican name.”
Washington called for three things to secure “the existence of the United States as an independent power:” an “indissoluble Union” under “one federal head;” “a sacred regard to public justice;” and a “friendly disposition” in the states “to make those mutual concessions” necessary to ensure “general prosperity.”
He added, “it is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse.” Without reform, “we can never hope to be a happy nation.” The states did nothing.
But Washington persisted, and the states couldn’t ignore his influence forever. In March 1785, he hosted commissioners from several states to resolve trade disputes. By October, Washington wrote, “We are either a united people, or we are not.” Americans could either “act as a nation” or “no longer act a farce by pretending it.”
The opportunity came to make a choice. After a failed attempt to reform commercial trade at the Annapolis Convention in late 1786, Madison and Hamilton sought to gather the states in Philadelphia to amend the Articles altogether.
Expressing his support, Washington wrote that it was “a measure of equal necessity and magnitude,” an event that “may be the spring of reanimation.” It was clear that there were “threatening clouds which seem ready to burst,” convincing him that “a thorough reform of the present system is indispensable.” Washington agreed to attend only if “the delegates come… to probe the defects of the constitution to the bottom, and point out radical cures.”
Radical cures prevailed. Almost a year later, in September 1787, Washington transmitted the newly signed Constitution to the doomed Confederation Congress. It was impossible “to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each [state], and yet provide for the interest and safety of all,” he wrote, praising “the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence.”
On the Constitution, he concluded, “That it may promote the lasting welfare of that country so dear to us all, and secure her freedom and happiness, is our most ardent wish.”
Washington, more than anyone, rescued the American experiment from disunion and ruin. It was his consistent leadership that reminded the people that if they “should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.”
Every generation, he knew, must make the choice: whether to have, in Hamilton’s words, “good government from reflection and choice” or suffer the whims of “accident and force.”