Perhaps most disturbing to Washington was the prospect that liberty would descend into anarchy. Some populist demagogue, he feared, might exploit the weakness of a feeble central government to establish a dictatorship. Where Jefferson and Madison dreaded a powerful national government as the primrose path to monarchy, Washington and Hamilton continued to view a strong central government as the best bulwark against that threat. “What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing!” Washington exclaimed to John Jay in 1786. “I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror.”22

George Washington trusted the long-term wisdom of the American people, but his deep, abiding faith was often qualified in the short run by a pessimistic view. In 1786 he expressed this ambivalence to Madison: “No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did—and no day was ever more clouded than the present!”23 Washington was amazingly sensitive to America’s unseen audience of European skeptics. Far from thumbing his nose at such doomsday prophets, he wanted to prove them wrong and earn their good opinion. In advocating enlarged powers for Congress, he said that it was “evident to me we never shall establish a national character, or be considered on a respectable footing by the powers of Europe,” unless this was accomplished.24 That Washington responded so keenly to European derision reveals, once again, residual traces of his old insularity. On some level he remained the country cousin, eager to vindicate his country’s worth in the metropolitan hubs of Europe.

As someone who thought people should look to the educated, well-to-do members of the community for leadership, Washington had an instinctive sense of public service. From the time he returned to Mount Vernon after the war, his mind dwelled actively on political problems. He must have sensed he would be allowed only a brief interval of repose before being plunged back into the hurly-burly of politics. As political power reverted back to state capitals, he might have guessed that the nucleus of any future federal government would come from the general staff of the Continental Army, which had experienced so dramatically the perils of an ineffective government. His comforting fantasy of a serene Mount Vernon retirement began to fade. “Retired as I am from the world,” he told Jay during the summer of 1786, “I frankly acknowledge I cannot feel myself an unconcerned spectator.” Then he backed away from the implications of that statement: “Yet having happily assisted in bringing the ship into port and having been fairly discharged, it is not my business to embark again on a sea of troubles.”25

At times Washington pretended that he was too remote from political affairs to know what Americans thought about key issues, telling Jefferson, “Indeed, I am too much secluded from the world to know with certainty what sensation the refusal of the British to deliver up the western posts has made on the public mind.”26 Such protestations of ignorance flew in the face of several factors: Washington entertained a large, heterogeneous group of visitors at Mount Vernon; he subscribed to many gazettes; and he conducted a rich correspondence with political intimates. As early as March 1786 he heard from Jay about a movement gathering force to revise the Articles of Confederation. While sympathetic, Washington told him that implementing those changes would require a crisis atmosphere: “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.”27 By that summer Washington sounded as if things had reached a critical impasse, and he described the country’s state as “shameful and disgusting.”28 In mid-August he believed that a great turning point was at hand. “Your sentiments, that our affairs are drawing rapidly to a crisis, accord with my own,” he assured Jay. 29

One man shaping Washington’s views was James Madison. On a Saturday evening in early September 1785, Madison had appeared at Mount Vernon and was quickly closeted in conversation with Washington, lingering through breakfast on Monday morning. A rigorous political theorist with a coolly skeptical intellect, the diminutive, bookish Madison was alarmed by the irresponsible behavior of the state legislatures. Though just thirty-four, he seemed prematurely aged, with thinning hair combed flat atop his head. His dark, intense eyes stared from a pale face with heavy eyebrows. Only five foot four and plagued by delicate health, he was abstemious in his habits. To some, he seemed an austere personality. The wife of one Virginia politician called him “a gloomy stiff creature,” while another woman found him “mute, cold, and repulsive.”30 He was wont to croak and mumble, could scarcely be heard during speeches, and was painfully retiring at first meeting. Nevertheless, with his political allies and students of history, Madison could be an absorbing conversationalist. “He is peculiarly interesting in conversation, cheerful, gay, and full of anecdote . . . sprightly, varied, fertile in his topics, and felicitous in his descriptions and illustrations,” wrote Jared Sparks, an early editor of Washington’s papers.31

Appearances could be deceiving with James Madison. However professorial in manner, he was the largest slaveholder in Orange County, Virginia, and his fragile health masked a fanatic determination. Never a pushover in political debates, he plumbed every subject to the bottom and was invariably the best-prepared person in the room. To prepare for the revision of the Articles of Confederation, he plowed through an entire “literary cargo” of books that Jefferson forwarded from Paris.32 For a young man, he possessed extensive legislative experience, first as an effective member of Congress and now as a member of the Virginia assembly. A skillful legislator, secretive and canny, he exerted his influence in mysteriously indirect ways. Political foes who underrated James Madison did so at their peril.

In September 1786, Madison attended a conference in Annapolis ostensibly devoted to interstate commerce. Here commissioners from five states discussed ways to resolve the trade disputes roiling the country. The Annapolis conference determined that the only way to cure trade disputes was to perform radical surgery on the Articles of Confederation. One of the commissioners, Alexander Hamilton, drafted a bold communiqué calling upon the thirteen states to send delegates to a convention in Philadelphia in May 1787 that would “render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the union.”33 Two days after the Annapolis meeting, Edmund Randolph, head of the Virginia delegation, arrived at Mount Vernon to brief Washington, who fully endorsed Hamilton’s appeal. In late October Madison, accompanied by James Monroe, spent another three days at Mount Vernon and found common ground with Washington as they dissected the Articles of Confederation. Clearly Madison, Monroe, and Randolph were trying to cajole Washington from retirement and enlist him in the growing movement to reform the political structure. He was slowly being swept up in a swelling tide that he would find difficult to resist.

As Washington considered his future role, an outbreak of violence in rural Massachusetts sharpened the reform debate. If ever American history had a useful crisis, it occurred in western Massachusetts in the autumn of 1786. To retire a heavy debt load, the state had boosted land taxes and thereby provoked the wrath of farmers, many of whom lost their land in foreclosures. Led by Daniel Shays, a militia captain during the war, thousands of rebels, heaving pitchforks, swarmed into rural courthouses to menace judges and block foreclosures. Invoking the Revolution’s militant spirit, many donned old uniforms from the Continental Army. When they threatened to march on the army arsenal in Springfield, Congress rushed Henry Knox to the scene to supervise defensive measures. Henry Lee sent Washington an alarming report about the rebels’ plans to subvert state government, abolish debt, and redistribute property: “In one word, my dear General, we are all in dire apprehension that a beginning of anarchy, with all its calamities, has approached.” Citizens appealed to Washington to go to Massachusetts, saying his steadying presence would “bring them back to peace and reconciliation.”34