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5

Wield the Sword

From the start of the Constitutional Convention, Washington was “held in awe by the delegates and already the de facto leader of the country.”¹ In one of their first acts, his fellow delegates unanimously elected him president of the convention. Washington, meticulously groomed in his characteristic understatedly elegant fineries, presided from a lone desk in the front of the room. Adding to the pomp, his station was elevated by two steps above the rest. Here, he sat on a throne-like wooden chair with a high back, topped with a gilded carving of a rising sun that vaguely resembled a halo over his head.²

When Washington rose to speak, a reverent hush seized the delegates. This silence was not just respectful but also practical—Washington was not a powerful speaker. It would take some effort to hear his words.

Washington did not like making speeches. At parties he was “much more open and free in his behaviour,” especially “in the company of ladies,” but when addressing large crowds he came off as stiff and mumbling.³ This awkwardness owed partly to his horribly uncomfortable false teeth, which continuously chafed his mouth as he labored to project his voice. He had begun losing his teeth in his twenties and they were almost all gone now. He blamed this on his penchant for cracking nuts with his teeth, but it was more likely due to the nutrition and dental hygiene typical of the time, along with the noxious substance called calomel that was used as a medicine for the many illnesses from which he suffered as a young adult. As was common practice for a man of his stature, he obtained dentures made from hippopotamus ivory and human teeth. However, in an age when dentists typically only offered teeth they purchased from white men, what was uncommon was that Washington used teeth pulled from slaves—more likely due to his frugality than egalitarianism.⁴ In any case, while his language was “manly and expressive,” his voice was hushed and his words indistinct.⁵

Being such a force of nature, he nevertheless commanded the room when he set forth the challenge they faced:⁶

It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.

After this statement, Washington remained largely silent for the rest of the convention. His silence, however, did not mean he was not heard. He was still a dominating presence, one that was crucial to keeping the delegates in check as they argued over how to salvage the nation. His glance was often enough. Even though these men were prominent in their own right, they all revered Washington to the point of trepidation.

Washington, distant and aloof as he monitored the debates, was like a stern judge before a courtroom. In fact, at one point during a lull in the discussions, Hamilton dared a fellow delegate to slap Washington on the back like a close chum and say, “My dear General, how happy I am to see you look well.” Accepting Hamilton’s challenge, the delegate stepped up onto Washington’s platform, bowed, and carried out the dare. Washington was offended by the young man’s audacity. Not taking kindly to displays of familiarity, he frigidly pulled his hand away and glared. The silence was broken only by the sounds of the other delegates squirming with embarrassment.⁷

With this intimidating man watching over them, the delegates met day in and day out, engaging in fervent debates. But they did have a way to calm their nerves—for while the state of the nation was sobering, the delegates were not. They began their mornings with light breakfasts accompanied by beer or hard cider.⁸ The discussion continued during their large midday meal, consisting of pork, beef, stews and meat pies, potatoes and puddings, along with relishes and sauces.⁹ All was washed down with plenty of rum, wine, ale, and hard cider, as the delegates talked on into the night by flickering candlelight.

On one particularly rambunctious night at a local tavern, 55 delegates ran up a tab showing 60 bottles of claret, 54 of Madeira, 22 of porter, 12 of beer, 8 of whiskey, 8 of hard cider, and 7 bowls of alcoholic punch “so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them.”¹⁰ Since that equaled three bottles of alcohol and multiple shots per delegate, it is likely they had some assistance from thirsty locals.

While Washington viewed alcohol as “the source of all evil” and partook only sparingly in such gatherings,¹¹ Franklin was happy to take advantage of the delegates’ thirst. During the proceedings in the assembly room, he sat near the front immediately opposite Washington’s “throne,” peering wisely through the bifocals he invented and only occasionally making a pointed statement.¹² Franklin chose instead to conduct his important diplomacy during the after-hours parties at his nearby home.¹³ He was credited with saying, “God, to relieve [man’s] dryness, created the vine and revealed to him the art of making le vin. By the aid of this liquid he unveiled more and more truth.”¹⁴ With alcohol in their systems, Franklin was able to uncover his fellow delegates’ candid views and use one-on-one diplomacy to make them more amenable to his “truths” for the direction of the nation.¹⁵

The delegates soon came to the realization that the Articles of Confederation needed to be scrapped, just as Madison had planned. Their convention had originally been intended to fix the existing government rather than scrap it, but the delegates decided it was unsalvageable. As Madison and Hamilton so ardently insisted, if the nation was to survive, they would need to “rethink leadership of the colonies from the ground up.”¹⁶ And so they began to discuss radical new ways to govern. Their goal was to craft a new kind of constitution to replace the Articles that would govern the nation effectively and according to the Revolution’s principles of liberty and equality. This was easier said than done, however.

The precious few words in this new constitution would, they hoped, govern the nation for many years into the future. Washington and the Founders were quite cognizant of the need to structure a government that would function not only during their lives, but for generations to come.¹⁷ Therefore, they needed to create a written constitution that was acceptable to the people of the present, but also flexible enough to respond to the needs of the future. This central governing document would serve as the “Supreme Law of the Land” for millions of Americans over many generations, and so the delegates agonized over what to include in it. The stakes could not be higher.

Washington and his compatriots sought to create a sweeping new system in which the failings of the British monarchy would never reemerge.¹⁸ William Maclay, a skeletal-looking, outspoken veteran of both the Seven Years’ War and the Revolution, captured the prevailing sentiment among the citizenry, writing “We have lately had a hard struggle for our liberty against kingly authority [and] everything related to that species of government is odious to the people.”¹⁹ Unsurprisingly, the office of the presidency became a hotly contested issue, since the delegates feared it would lead to a new kind of king.

The delegates spoke out fiercely against creating a presidency that could potentially serve as “the foetus of monarchy.”²⁰ Although monarchy was a time-honored form of governance, Madison declared that creating even a “limited monarchy . . . was out of the question.” He added, “The spirit of the times—the state of our affairs, forbade the experiment.”²¹ Washington and the vast majority of other delegates could not agree more. They “did not consider the Prerogatives of the British Monarch as a proper guide in defining the Executive powers,”²² and worked to ensure that “America’s president would wield a less threatening kind of executive power than Britain’s king.”²³ As the delegates debated how to accomplish this goal, the heat of their passions filled the room—quite literally, since the windows remained shut and the heavy green drapes drawn in order to maintain secrecy.

To these patriots, one of the most dangerous of the president’s powers was his command of the military. After all, the Americans had just fought a bloody war against the British Crown’s abuse of his military power. The Declaration of Independence, which listed their justifications for rebellion a few years earlier, clearly stated:

[King George III] has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power . . . : For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States . . .²⁴

The British monarch’s use of his commander-in-chief power had led to the bloody war. And a repeat was to be avoided at all costs.²⁵

At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775, the king’s example certainly had a profound impact on Americans’ understanding of the term “commander in chief.”²⁶ Many of the states had previously modeled their respective governors’ military powers around British precedent, and the Founders had looked to them as a starting point of reference at the beginning of the war. But as the Revolution escalated, the king’s powers—and even some of the governors’—were increasingly rejected. Americans feared that if they merely followed the British example, they would wind up having their liberties quashed all over again. The patriots sought to build their own commander from the ground up.

Luckily, by the time of the Constitutional Convention twelve years later, Americans had an intellectual antidote to the evils of the British example. To find a model for the new American commander in chief, the delegates and the citizenry at large had to look no farther than the statuesque man sitting quietly at the front of the room. “As Americans in 1787 tried to envision a republican head of state who could protect them against old King George without becoming a new King George, they did have a particular George in mind.”²⁷

Washington afforded the nation “an example of the national leader par excellence.”²⁸ While America had seen other commanders in chief,²⁹ it was Washington who distilled these precedents into a distinctive, American version. He had overcome many of the evils of the old ways and introduced new meaning to the term commander in chief amid the bloodshed of war. Thus, when it came time to contemplate how to allocate military powers within the new government, the Americans looked to the decorated war hero whom many considered “the greatest man in the world.”³⁰

While the delegates originally considered spreading the commander-in-chief powers among multiple persons, that notion changed when they appealed to their memories of the “situation during the late war.”³¹ The memories of Washington’s actions as revolutionary commander convinced the delegates that “[f]rom the nature of the thing, the command of armies ought to be delegated to one person only. The secrecy, dispatch, and decision, which are necessary in military operations can only be expected from one person.”³²

And with Washington in mind, the delegates scrapped the idea of dividing up the commander-in-chief role. Instead they determined “that the sword ought to be put in the hands of the representatives of the people.”³³ That person would be the president of the United States.