Washington Spoke Once at the Convention and Still Made the Constitution Possible

Washington's modern successors give a speech to open a bridge, a speech to close a bridge and a speech about the speech. The first President attended the most important meeting in American history, sat at the front of the room for four months, and made one substantive remark. One. On the last day. About a number. And the meeting succeeded in large part because he was there.

That is the paradox of George Washington at the Federal Convention of 1787. He was its presiding officer and its most famous member, and he almost never spoke. Yet without him the Convention would likely have lacked the authority to propose a new government, and without the confident expectation that he would be the first President, the delegates would never have written Article II as they did. Here is his public career through those years, and what it teaches about power and character.

The man who had already given up power

To understand why Washington's presence mattered in 1787, start with what he had done before it.

In March 1783, at Newburgh, New York, some officers of the Continental Army, unpaid and angry, were circulating anonymous addresses that hinted at defying Congress. Washington called a meeting of officers on March 15 and spoke against the scheme. He urged them not to tarnish the glory they had won and to trust Congress to do them justice. When he paused to read a letter, he put on spectacles, which many had never seen him wear, and remarked that he had grown gray in their service and now found himself growing blind. The movement collapsed.

On December 23, 1783, at Annapolis, he resigned his commission as commander in chief to the Confederation Congress and went home to Mount Vernon. Across Europe, men who had won wars made themselves kings. Washington handed back his sword. King George III is reported to have said that if Washington gave up power, he would be the greatest man in the world; the story comes secondhand, but the sentiment was widely shared. For the full story of both moments, see George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be.

By 1787, then, Washington was the one American every faction trusted not to seize power. That trust was his most important qualification for the Convention, and it is the key to understanding everything that followed.

A reluctant delegate

Washington did not want to go to Philadelphia. In late 1786 the Virginia legislature named him to its delegation, and he wrote to Governor Edmund Randolph declining. He gave several reasons. He had retired from public life and said so publicly. His health was imperfect. And the Society of the Cincinnati, the veterans' organisation of which he was president, was meeting in Philadelphia at the same time; he had already told its members he would not attend, and he worried that appearing in the same city for a different meeting would look like a slight.

There was a deeper reason. If the Convention failed, his reputation would go down with it. He had staked his name on the Revolution once. Staking it again on a meeting that might collapse into bickering was a real risk.

Two things changed his mind. Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts, in the winter of 1786 to 1787, convinced him that the Confederation was dangerously weak; armed men had closed courts, and the national government could do nothing. And friends, Madison and Randolph among them, urged him that his presence would give the Convention the weight it needed. In the spring of 1787 he agreed to go. He arrived in Philadelphia on May 13.

Elected to preside

The Convention did not reach a quorum of seven states until Friday, May 25. Its first act was to choose a presiding officer. Robert Morris of Pennsylvania nominated Washington, and he was elected unanimously. Franklin, the host state's senior delegate and the only other man of comparable fame, would have been the natural alternative, but he was ill and was reported to have intended to nominate Washington himself.

Washington took the chair and said, in substance, that he was conscious of his lack of qualifications for the post and asked the delegates' indulgence for any errors. Then he presided.

For much of the summer the Convention met as a Committee of the Whole, with Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts in the chair, so that the delegates could debate freely before taking formal votes. During those weeks Washington sat with the Virginia delegation and voted with it. When the Convention sat formally, he presided. Either way, he kept his opinions to himself in debate.

His silence was a choice. A presiding officer who argues every question becomes a partisan. Washington's influence was too great to spend on individual motions; if he had spoken for one side of the representation fight, the other side might have walked out. So he sat, listened, and let the delegates know by his presence that this enterprise had the backing of the most trusted man in America.

Shaping Article II without a word

Washington's greatest influence on the text came from what the delegates expected him to do, not from anything he said.

The delegates had every reason to fear executive power. They had just fought a war against a king. Many state constitutions written in 1776 had made their governors weak, chosen by the legislature and hemmed in by councils. Yet Article II created a single President with a four-year term, no limit on re-election, command of the army and navy, the power to make treaties and appoint officers with the Senate's consent, a veto that only two-thirds of each house could override, and the duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

Why were they willing? A large part of the answer is that everyone in the room assumed Washington would be the first to hold the office. Pierce Butler of South Carolina wrote in a letter the following year that the President's powers would not have been so great had not many of the members cast their eyes toward Washington and shaped their ideas of the office by their opinion of his virtue.

That is the double edge of Washington's influence. His character made the delegates willing to create an energetic executive, which the country needed. But constitutions must be written for the officeholders who come after the virtuous one. The Framers' answer was the structure: impeachment, the Senate's role in appointments and treaties, Congress's control of money and the President's duty to execute laws Congress had written rather than make his own. For the clause-by-clause reading, see The Executive Power Shall Be Vested in a President, and Every Word Counts and The Take Care Clause Was Written Against Kings Who Suspended the Laws.

The one remark: September 17

On the last day, after Franklin's closing speech, Nathaniel Gorham moved to change one number. The draft said that the number of representatives should not exceed one for every 40,000 inhabitants. Gorham proposed 30,000, which would allow a larger House.

When Washington rose to put the question, he did something he had not done all summer. According to Madison's notes, he said that although his situation had hitherto restrained him from offering his sentiments on questions before the House, he could not forbear expressing his wish that the change be made. He said that the smallness of the proportion of representatives had been considered by many members an insufficient security for the rights and interests of the people, that it had always seemed to him among the objectionable parts of the plan, and that late as it was for amendments, he thought this one important enough that adopting it would give him much satisfaction.

The change passed unanimously. The final text of Article I, Section 2 reads: "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand." Nobody objected.

Look at what he chose to speak about. Not the executive he would hold, not his own powers, not anything that benefited Virginia. He spoke for a larger House, the branch closest to the people, on the ground that the people's rights needed more representatives to guard them. The one time the presiding officer spoke, he spoke to make the government more answerable.

There is one more remark sometimes attributed to Washington at the Convention: an appeal, at some point in the proceedings, to raise a standard to which the wise and honest could repair. That line comes from Gouverneur Morris's eulogy of Washington in 1799, twelve years after the fact, and appears nowhere in the Convention records. It may be true. It is not documented in the way the September 17 remark is, and a careful reader should treat it accordingly.

The ratification letters

The Convention ended on September 17 with a dinner at City Tavern. Washington wrote in his diary that the members then took a cordial leave of one another, and that he retired to meditate on the momentous work that had been done.

The Convention's letter to Congress, signed by Washington as its president, is a short masterpiece. It explains that it is impracticable in a federal government to secure all the rights of independent sovereignty to each state while providing for the interest and safety of all, and that individuals entering into society must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. It says the delegates kept steadily in view the consolidation of the Union, on which the country's prosperity and safety depended, and that the Constitution was the result of a spirit of amity and mutual deference.

Washington then sent copies to friends and influential Virginians, including Patrick Henry. His letters were modest and firm: he wished the Constitution had been more perfect, but he believed it the best that could be obtained at that time, and he noted that it opened a door for amendments. He did not campaign publicly. He did not need to. Everyone knew where he stood, and opponents in the ratification fight had to argue against a document that Washington had signed first.

The first inaugural

The electors met on February 4, 1789, and every one of them cast a vote for Washington. On April 30, 1789, he took the oath on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York, administered by Robert Livingston, Chancellor of New York, and then gave his first inaugural address to Congress.

Three passages of that address bear on the Constitution. First, he declined any salary beyond his actual expenses, a gesture of the same restraint he had shown at Newburgh and Annapolis. Second, he urged Congress, in considering amendments under Article V, to avoid any change that might endanger an effective union while respecting the rights of free men, which was a quiet endorsement of what became the Bill of Rights. Third, he gave the experiment its stakes:

the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

Notice the last words. The experiment was entrusted not to the President, not to Congress, but to the American people.

The objection, answered

The strongest objection to the Washington story is this: it is hero worship. A Convention is made by its debaters, not by its chairman. Madison drafted the plan, Wilson and Morris argued it, Sherman and Ellsworth brokered the compromise, the Committee of Style wrote the text. Washington sat there. Giving him credit is the kind of myth-making that makes history a pageant instead of a record.

Here is the answer.

1. Legitimacy is a real thing. The Convention had no power to impose anything. Its proposal had to persuade thirteen states. A plan signed first by Washington carried authority that a plan signed only by lawyers and planters did not. Contemporaries said so openly, friend and foe alike.
2. The record shows his influence on Article II. Butler's letter is direct evidence that the delegates shaped the presidency around their confidence in Washington. That is not myth; it is a delegate's testimony.
3. His silence was itself an act. A presiding officer who refrains from tipping the scales protects the deliberation. The Convention survived a deadlock that nearly broke it in July, and part of the reason is that its chairman never became a faction's champion.
4. His one remark is documented and telling. It is in Madison's notes, with its date and its result.

The verdict: Washington did not write the Constitution, and no one should say he did. He made it possible for others to write it, and possible for the country to accept it.

The case in brief

1. Washington had already given up power at Newburgh in March 1783 and at Annapolis on December 23, 1783, and that record made him the one man every faction trusted.
2. He reluctantly agreed to attend, was elected president of the Convention unanimously on May 25, 1787, and stayed almost silent so as not to become a partisan.
3. Delegates such as Pierce Butler said the presidency's powers were shaped by their confidence that Washington would hold the office first.
4. His only substantive remark, on September 17, supported a larger House, one representative for every 30,000, and it passed unanimously.
5. His ratification letters and his April 30, 1789 inaugural address entrusted the republican experiment to the American people.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 2 and Article II on the Constitution page, then read Washington's first inaugural address in full and discuss with your family what the "sacred fire of liberty" asks of citizens.