The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government - Softcover

Fergus M. Bordewich is the author of several books, among them America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history. His articles have appeared in many magazines and newspapers. He lives in San Francisco. Visit him at FergusBordewich.com.

The First Congress CHAPTER 1

An Ocean Always Turbulent

Our Constitution is like a vessel just launched, and lying at the wharf; it is not known how she will answer her helm, or lay her course; whether she will bear in safety the precious freight to be deposited in her hold.

—Representative James Jackson of Georgia

Winter in the Potomac River Valley was unpredictable. Sheets of icy rain, sleet, and sometimes snow waterlogged much of the farmland around Alexandria and turned the roads into glutinous muck that played havoc with travelers’ schedules. One of those travelers, in late February of 1789, a diminutive figure bundled against the cold, had crossed Virginia from his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains to see a friend who was also the most famous man in America. As he approached George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Madison would first have noticed the long avenue of broad-boughed, winter-bare oaks, and eventually the stately house itself, porticoed and colonnaded on its bluff overlooking the river. Madison was en route to New York City, to take up his duties in the new Congress that was about to come into being. Mount Vernon was out of his way. A more direct route would have taken him across the Potomac at Georgetown, Maryland, and from there directly to Baltimore. But Washington had summoned him, a trusted protégé who they both knew was likely to play a central role in the great debates that were to come. Denied one of Virginia’s Senate seats by his political opponents, Madison had just won a hard-fought contest against his friend James Monroe for a seat in the House of Representatives. Enemies of the Constitution, who were both passionate and powerful in Virginia, had warned that the election of Madison would produce “rivulets of blood throughout the land.” Fortunately such dire predictions did not come to pass.

Washington wanted help with his inaugural address, which the president-to-be would deliver in April. He had first entrusted the job to his aide David Humphreys, who had delivered a seventy-three-page behemoth of an oration full of policy proposals that expressed Washington’s support for a powerful federal government and an assertive executive. Madison told Washington, in essence, to toss Humphreys’s handiwork: it was too long and tried to say too much. Instead, he urged Washington to speak more simply to a fragile nation that was about to embark on a political experiment whose outcome few could see, and many feared. They dismembered and finally discarded Humphreys’s prolix draft and boiled down what Washington would say to the nation to essential ideas that every American could support. Drafting any address might have seemed like presumption on Washington’s part: he was not yet president. Voting for presidential electors was still taking place in several states—no citizen could cast a vote directly for president—and the results could not be officially declared until Congress met. But since he had no opposition, the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

The two men could hardly have been more dissimilar. At fifty-seven the aging war hero, a giant by the standards of his time, with his great beak of a nose, broad shoulders, and massive thighs that seemed to have been crafted by the Almighty to fit the back of a horse, was a living demigod. During the war, he had exhibited superhuman stoicism through the years of brutal winters, hunger, battlefield defeat, and civilian disaffection. He was also brave to the point of foolhardiness, repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire; allegedly, at one point during the rout of American troops on Long Island, with a large rock in both hands, he was said to have stormed up to a boat filled with fleeing soldiers and threatened to “sink it to hell” unless the men went back to the fight. Popular writers commonly called him the nation’s “deliverer” and “savior” and occasionally even likened him to Jesus Christ. “O WASHINGTON! How do I love thy name!” declared Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale University, in a widely reprinted sermon. “How have I often adored and blessed thy God, for creating and forming thee the great ornament of human kind! Not all the gold of ophir, nor a world filled with rubies and diamonds, could effect or purchase the sublime and noble feelings of thine heart. Thy fame is of sweeter perfume than arabian spices in the gardens of persia.” His face, which appeared everywhere—on engravings, mezzotints, dinner plates, wall plaques, jugs, and mugs—was probably the only one that was known to virtually every American. Although he had publicly professed “the most unfeigned reluctance” to take on the presidency, Washington was, as one New Englander put it, “the only man which Man, Woman & Child, Whig & Tory, Fed’s and Antifed’s appear to agree in.”

Madison, twenty years Washington’s junior, was respected in political circles for his scholarship and persuasive powers, but not much loved. Sickly and slight—he stood five feet four and weighed only a hundred pounds—and deemed “unmanly” by many of his contemporaries, it seemed as if all his vigor had been sucked into his copious and muscular mind. The wife of one prominent Virginia politician dismissed him as “a gloomy, stiff creature . . . the most unsociable creature in Existence.” The two men had first met in 1781, when Madison was serving in the Continental Congress. Washington immediately recognized the Princeton-educated Madison as a young man of unusual talent. Although his wartime soldiering consisted only of a brief turn in the Virginia militia, his background in government was impressive. He had already served as a member of Virginia’s revolutionary convention, and then—still only in his midtwenties—as a political adviser to Governor Patrick Henry, and to Henry’s successor, Thomas Jefferson. After the war, as a member of the Virginia Assembly, Madison advocated for Washington’s commercial interests in the Potomac Valley and became one of the former general’s closest advisers.

Although Madison spoke in a whispery, often-difficult-to-hear voice, and without oratorical flourish, he consistently impressed those who worked with him with his “most ingenious mind,” and his mastery of parliamentary strategy. He understood, as many of his more emotional colleagues did not, his biographer Richard Brookhiser acutely observed, that “losing a vote was not the same as losing the argument, because if you could then write the guidelines for implementing the decision, you could nudge it in a better direction.” It was a lesson well learned at the Constitutional Convention, where Madison had unsuccessfully proposed, among other things, that the president be chosen by the legislative branch rather than by a popular vote channeled through an electoral college, that Congress be given the power to override state laws, and that the membership of both houses of Congress be based on population. Madison would carry with him to the First Congress a disdain for Pyrrhic moral victories, and a pragmatic determination to make the imperfect machine of government work.

Madison, more than any other man, had convinced the conflicted Washington first to attend the convention, and then to accept its chair. Washington would have preferred to remain at Mount Vernon beneath his “vine and fig tree,” his favorite euphemism for political disengagement, although he well knew that he could not remain so if the convention were to succeed. Though he shared Madison’s anxiety for the country, he feared that he would be accused of selfish ambition if he reentered public life, having so publicly proclaimed his official retirement from it in 1783. Madison, however—he was nothing if not persuasive, everyone agreed—made the case that no other American had the prestige to win nationwide support for a radical overhaul of the hapless Confederation government. Once committed, Washington was unshakable. Jefferson observed of him, “Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but, when once decided, going through with his purpose whatever obstacles opposed.” As Madison had hoped, Washington’s presence in Philadelphia helped to balance the discontent of those in the convention who felt that it was going too far in reinventing the government.

Madison’s reputation increased during the long campaign for ratification of the Constitution when, as a coauthor of The Federalist (with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay), he had laid out a reasoned case for a powerful central government, arguing that it would not weaken but strengthen personal liberties, and explaining to a doubtful public how its machinery would actually function. He boldly challenged the widely held belief that stable republics could work only in miniature societies, such as Greek city-states or homogeneous American communities. “Latent causes of faction”—that is, individual self-interest—he argued, was “sown in the nature of man,” and because it was inescapable, it had to be accommodated, not denied. This could best be accomplished in an extensive republic whose very diversity would prevent dangerous majorities from riding roughshod over political minorities, where it was less likely that any single party could outnumber and oppress the rest, and that a representative government rather than direct democracy would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”

Like many political men at the time, Madison believed that the legislature would long remain the most powerful branch of government, and the most likely to suck “all power into its impetuous vortex.” To restrain the legislature’s greed for power, he maintained that all three branches of government had to be made equally vigorous and endowed with the “means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others,” to prevent an accumulation of legislative power that would inexorably lead to tyranny. Mere “parchment barriers”—that is, well-meaning sentiments with no force to back them up—would not be enough. Dividing Congress itself into two branches vested with different powers was just a first step. The greater challenge was empowering the two weaker branches of government—the executive and judiciary—to resist legislative dictatorship. To this end, the president had been given a veto to protect the independence of the executive branch, while lifetime tenure for members of the Supreme Court would help insulate the judiciary from political interference. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he declared, in a famous formulation. “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

As election results for the new Congress trickled in from the states—there was no fixed day for elections—the results proved vastly more favorable than Washington, Madison, and their fellow supporters of the new Constitution had hoped. Federalists had won overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. Americans, in Washington’s opinion, had shown good sense, but the future remained fraught with risk. It might not take much to unravel the tentative fabric of a nation that had been rewoven at the Constitutional Convention less than two years earlier. “Some unforeseen mischance,” Washington worried, could still “blast [our] enjoyment in the very bud.”

The pressure on Washington was immense, and public expectations so high that he could never fully satisfy them, he knew. The president-to-be had received any number of importunate pleas from men such as John Armstrong Jr., a former member of the Continental Congress, who had begged him “to yield your services to the providential voice of God expressed in the voice of your country.” (Armstrong may have been one of the less convincing voices, however: In 1783, he had been a central figure in the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, which toyed with the idea of a military coup against the Congress.) So many conflicting worries tore at Washington, both political and personal: the unrest on the frontier and the financial instability in the states, the resurgence of the Constitution’s opponents in Virginia, the planting schedules for his next season’s crops of wheat and rye, the challenge of managing the remote lands he owned in the West, the declining health of his eighty-year-old mother, who was dying of cancer at Fredericksburg. And now he was about to shoulder the unprecedented burdens of the presidency. To his neighbor Samuel Vaughn he confessed, as he doubtless did to Madison, “The event which I have long dreaded, I am at last constrained to believe, is now likely to happen. From the moment, when the necessity had become more apparent, & as it were inevitable, I anticipated in a heart filled with distress, the ten thousand embarrassments, perplexities & troubles to which I must again be exposed in the evening of a life, already near consumed in public cares.”

What was left of the old Confederation government was scheduled to cease functioning on March 3, and the new Congress to begin on March 4. But continuing wretched weather slowed Madison’s northward progress to a crawl. From Baltimore, he wrote Washington the happy news, reported to him by a courier from Georgia, that Federalists had triumphed in that state’s elections, too: “All the Candidates I understand are well affected to the Constitution.” But Madison’s spirits sank a few days later at Philadelphia, when a traveler from New York told him that only a handful of senators and congressmen had arrived there, and that neither New Jersey nor New York had even completed their elections. (The traveler, a planter whom Madison trusted, also delivered the ominous news that British agents were active in the trans-Appalachian Kentucky district of Virginia, agitating against the American government, a development that Madison knew would have to be dealt with.) Much more worried Madison as well during the long, muddy journey to New York: the country’s chaotic financial state . . . the angry veterans who everywhere were demanding back pay . . . the divisive debate raging over the site for a permanent federal capital . . . the numerous amendments that roiling popular conventions had demanded be made to the Constitution, which might well undo all the work that Madison had done. He also knew that popular hopes for the new government were unrealistically high. “The people,” wrote one Massachusetts voter, “are on tiptoe in their expectation from Congress, we expect more than Angells can do from your Body.”

From all over the eleven states that had approved the Constitution, newly elected members of Congress were heading, if glacially, toward New York. None of them knew with confidence whether they could rise to the demands of a new, untested government whose machinery they would have to invent as they went along. “Leaving my domestick peace and hapiness and plungeing into the Ocean of Publick Business, Politicks, and Etiquette is unaccountable even to...