After 1783 the States, virtually bankrupt at home, discordant, fickle, and aimless, and without credit or prestige abroad, were filled with many citizens who recognized that the system was bad and must be amended. The wise among them wrote treatises on the remedies they proposed. The wisest went to school of experience and sought in history how confederations and other political unions had fared. Washington wrote for his own use an account of the classical constitutions of Greece and Rome and of the more modern states; of the Amphictyonic Council among the ancient, and the Helvetic, Belgic, and Germanic among the more recent. John Adams devoted two massive volumes to an account of the medieval Italian republics. James Madison studied the Achaian League and other ancient combinations. There were many other men less eminent than these—there was a Peletiah Webster, for instance.
Washington viewed the situation as a pessimist. Was it because the high hopes that he had held during the war, that America should be the noblest among the nations, had been disappointed, or was it because he saw farther into the future than his colleagues saw? On May 18, 1786, he writes intimately to John Jay:
… We are certainly in a delicate situation; but my fear is that the people are not yet sufficiently misled to retract from error. To be plainer, I think there is more wickedness than ignorance mixed in our councils. Under this impression I scarcely know what opinion to entertain of a general convention. That it is necessary to revise and amend the Articles of Confederation, I entertain no doubt; but what may be the consequences of such an attempt is doubtful. Yet something must be done, or the fabric must fall, for it certainly is tottering.
Ignorance and design are difficult to combat. Out of these proceed illiberal sentiments, improper jealousies, and a train of evils which oftentimes in republican governments must be sorely felt before they can be removed. The former, that is ignorance, being a fit soil for the latter to work in, tools are employed by them which a generous mind would disdain to use; and which nothing but time, and their own puerile or wicked productions, can show the inefficacy and dangerous tendency of. I think often of our situation, and view it with concern. From the high ground we stood upon, from the plain path which invited our footsteps, to be so fallen! so lost! it is really mortifying.[1]
[Footnote 1: Ford, xi, 31.]
One of the chief causes of the discontents which troubled the public was the increasing number of persons who had been made debtors after the war by the more and more pressing demands of their creditors. These debtors knew nothing about economics; they only knew that they were being crushed by persons more lucky than themselves. In Massachusetts they broke out in actual rebellion named after the man who led it, Daniel Shays. They were put down by the more or less doubtful appeal to veterans of the National Army, but their ebullition was not forgotten as a symptom of a very dangerous condition. In 1786 representatives from five States met in a convention at Annapolis to consider the hard times and the troubles in trade. Washington, Hamilton, and Madison were thought to be behind the convention, which accomplished little, but made it clear that a large general convention ought to meet and to discuss the way of securing a strong central government. This convention was discussed during that summer and autumn, and a call was issued for a meeting in the following spring at Philadelphia. Virginia turned first to Washington to be one of its delegates, but he had sincere scruples against entering public life again. He wrote to James Madison on November 18th:
Although I had bid adieu to the public walks of life in a public manner, and had resolved never more to tread upon public ground, yet if, upon an occasion so interesting to the well-being of the confederacy, it should have appeared to have been the wish of the Assembly to have employed me with other associates in the business of revising the federal system, I should, from a sense of obligation I am under for repeated proof of confidence in me, more than from any opinion I should have entertained of my usefulness, have obeyed its call; but it is now out of my power to do so with any degree of consistency.[1]
[Footnote 1: Ford, XI, 87.]
Washington's disinclination to abandon the quiet of Mount Vernon and the congenial work he found there, and to be plunged again into political labors, was perhaps his strongest reason for making this decision. But a temporary aggravation ruled him. The Society of the Cincinnati, of which he was president, had aroused much odium in the country among those who were jealous or envious that such a special privileged class should exist, and among those who really believed that it had the secret design of establishing an aristocracy if not actually a monarchy. Washington held that its original avowed purpose, to keep the officers who had served in the Revolution together, would perpetuate the patriotic spirit which enabled them to win, and might be a source of strength in case of further ordeals. But when he found that public sentiment ran so strongly against the Cincinnati, he withdrew as its president and he told Madison that he would vote to have the Society disbanded if it were not that it counted a minority of foreign members. Stronger than a desire for a private life and for the ease of Mount Vernon was his sense of duty as a patriot; so that when this was strongly urged upon him he gave way and consented.
Spring came, the snows melted in the Northern States, and through the month of April the delegates to this Convention started from their homes in the North and in the South for Philadelphia. The first regular session was held on May 25th, although some of the delegates did not arrive until several weeks later. They sat in Independence Hall in the same room where, eleven years before, the Declaration of Independence had been adopted and signed. Of the members in the new Convention, George Washington was easily the first. His commanding figure, tall and straight and in no wise impaired by eight years' campaigns and hardships, was almost the first to attract the attention of any one who looked upon that assembly. He was fifty-five years old. Next in reputation was the patriarch, Benjamin Franklin, twenty-seven years his senior, shrewd, wise, poised, tart, good-natured; whose prestige was thought to be sufficient to make him a worthy presiding officer when Washington was not present. James Madison of Virginia was among the young men of the Convention, being only thirty-six years old, and yet almost at the top of them all in constitutional learning. More precocious still was Alexander Hamilton of New York, who was only thirty, one of the most remarkable examples of a statesman who developed very early and whom Death cut off before he showed any signs of a decline. One figure we miss—that of Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, tall and wiry and red-curled, who was absent in Paris as Minister to France.