The events in Massachusetts struck the law-abiding Washington with horror, and the pitch of his letters instantly rose in intensity. “But for God’s sake, tell me, what is the cause of all these commotions?” he asked David Humphreys. If there were legitimate grievances, why had they not been redressed? If it was merely a case of licentiousness, why didn’t the government step in at once? “Commotions of this sort, like snowballs, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them.”35 Once again Washington feared disgrace among Europeans, who would seize upon any lapse to validate their cynical view of America, and this became a leitmotif of his letters during the Massachusetts crisis: “I am really mortified beyond expression that, in the moment of our acknowledged independence, we should by our conduct verify the predictions of our transatlantic foe and render ourselves ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of all Europe.”36 However much he wished to refute these skeptics, Washington had clearly internalized their doubts.

In late October Knox told Washington that the rebels paid little in taxes and had seized on that issue as a pretext to wage class warfare. He warned of the insidious spread of a radical leveling doctrine. “They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent,” he said, and want to convert private property into “the common property of all.”37 Overstating the menace, Knox conjured up a desperate army of twelve thousand to fifteen thousand young men prowling New England and challenging lawful government. If this movement spread, he thought, the country would be drawn into the horror of civil war. From New Haven, David Humphreys predicted that a civil war would flush Washington from retirement, forcing him to take sides: “In case of civil discord, I have already told you, it was seriously my opinion that you could not remain neuter and that you would be obliged, in self defence, to take part on one side or the other.”38

For Washington, who cherished his retirement, this news must have been disturbing. Not surprisingly, Shays’s Rebellion crystallized for him the need to overhaul the Articles of Confederation. “What stronger evidence can be given of the want of energy in our governments than these disorders?” he asked Madison. “If there exists not a power to check them, what security has a man of life, liberty, or property?”39 What most troubled Washington was that people were flouting a political order for which they had recently risked their lives: “It is but the other day we were shedding our blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live—constitutions of our own choice and framing—and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them!”40

The Massachusetts uprising terminated in a full-blown military confrontation. In late January Shays and his followers marched on the Springfield arsenal, intending to seize its stores of muskets and powder, when a Massachusetts militia fired point-blank into the crowd, killing several rebels. The next day General Benjamin Lincoln arrived with four thousand soldiers and dispersed the remnants of the dissident army, ending the protest. Even though Washington had supported the overwhelming show of force, once the insurrection was broken, he favored leniency for the culprits, showing how subtly he could parse the political demands of a complex situation. That Congress had abdicated its role in squashing the protest again exposed a dangerous vacuum of national power. Madison believed that Shays’s Rebellion “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the constitution and prepared the public mind for a general reform” than all the defects of the Articles of Confederation combined .41 It made it almost certain that George Washington’s days as a Virginia planter were numbered.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

A House on Fire

IN LATE 1786 George Washington’s life was again thrown into turmoil when Madison informed him that the Virginia legislature planned to name him head of the state’s seven-man delegation at the forthcoming convention in Philadelphia. Having made no effort to join the group, Washington was cast into a terrible state of indecision. “Never was my embarrassment or hesitation more extreme or distressing,” he wrote.1 Deep questioning was typical of Washington’s political style. Holding himself aloof, he had learned to set a high price on his participation, yielding only with reluctance. Whenever his reputation was at stake, he studied every side of a decision, analyzing how his actions would be perceived. Having learned to accumulate power by withholding his assent, he understood the influence of his mystique and kept people in suspense.

Complicating his attendance in Philadelphia was that he had already declined to attend the triennial meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati, which by an extraordinary coincidence was also slated for May 1787 in Philadelphia. He had just sent out a mailing to members, explaining that he would neither attend nor stand for reelection as president. It irked him that many state chapters had voted down his proposed reforms, especially the one banning the hereditary provision. He had wanted to remain with the organization long enough to dispel any speculation that he had repudiated its principles. Now that the dissent had died down, he thought it an opportune moment to extricate himself. In declining the invitation, he also cited the press of private business and “the present imbecility of my health, occasioned by a violent attack of the fever and ague, succeeded by rheumatic pains (to which till of late I have been an entire stranger).”2

If Washington used his health problems as an excuse, he didn’t conjure them from thin air. In late August 1786 he had contracted a “fever and ague” that lasted for two weeks. Since Dr. Craik prescribed the bark of the cinchona tree, a natural source of quinine, one suspects a recurrence of the malaria that had pestered him as a young soldier. Despite early illnesses, the younger Washington had been mostly a picture of ruddy health. Now as aches and pains invaded his body, he was losing his youthful grace, and he complained to Madison of feeling his rheumatic pains “very sensibly.”3 These pains became so debilitating that he couldn’t “raise my hand to my head or turn myself in bed.”4 By April 1787, to counter this sharp pain, he had to immobilize his arm in a sling. He went from having a boundless sense of health to feeling his age abruptly—what he called “descending the hill”—and may have wondered whether he possessed the necessary fund of energy for the momentous political challenges ahead.5 Washington may also have worried anew about his poor genetic endowment after his favorite brother, John Augustine, yet another short-lived Washington male, died suddenly in early January from what Washington called “a fit of gout in the head.” 6

On November 18 Washington explained to Madison that, having spurned the Cincinnati meeting, he couldn’t attend the Constitutional Convention without being caught in an embarrassing lie, “giving offense to a very respectable and deserving part of the community—the late officers of the American Army.”7 Were it not for this dilemma, he said, he would certainly attend an event so vital to the national welfare. He wanted to be true to the principles of the Revolution, but he also wanted to be faithful to his colleagues, a sacred trust for him. In his 1783 circular letter to the states, he had solemnly pledged that he would not reenter politics, a public vow that the honorable Washington took seriously. The mythology that he could not tell a lie had some basis in fact. He may also have hesitated to attend the Constitutional Convention from a premonition that it would initiate a sequence of events that would pull him away indefinitely from Mount Vernon. After all, the last time he heeded his country’s call in a crisis, it had embroiled him in more than eight years of war.