The Founders Flee to Philadelphia
In early May, 1787, George Washington, well tailored and
well appointed, stepped into a fine coach, bid a farewell to his beloved Mount
Vernon, and, attended by three men, headed for Philadelphia for a Convention
that would change the course of American history.
We are at a moment in time where the viability of the new
American nation is at risk. The War for
Independence has been won, but the British are not exactly speeding their way
out of town (or country). The government
envisioned by the original Articles of the Confederation really doesn’t work,
and the major movers in the country (Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton,
Madison, John Jay, etc. all know it.)
The national currency, such as there is one, is basically worthless
script. There is no ability as a nation to do much of anything
collectively, because each state guards its own priorities and privileges—and
those priorities do not include giving up much power to a central government.
Not everyone agrees that something has to be done. It has taken many months to even get people
to come to a convention—and the word “Constitutional” is so fraught for some
states that it can’t really be used.
But, eventually, enough of them buy into the idea that they are willing
to send representatives—if for no other reason to make sure that not one iota
of their authority is in any way abridged.
Washington’s trip is filled with irony from the start. The three men escorting him north are not
really whole men at all, at least in the eyes of the law. All three are slaves—his personal manservant,
a coachman, and a groom. One wonders
what thoughts might have been going through their minds, or how they might have
felt when they learned that the leading men of the country had assigned their
lives a 3/5 value.
The Founders Head For The Kitchen
There is a great story about George Washington’s taste in
food. He, and Martha, were apparently fond of English-style cooking, and
particularly meat pies. For Christmas
one year, their kitchen turned out a favorite—a savory delicacy made of a
bushel of flour for crust, stuffed with five different types of boiled fowl—pigeon,
partridge, duck, goose, turkey, all baked on high heat for four hours.
When you think about how the Founders actually came to
create the elegant mechanism known as the Constitution, you should disavail
yourself of the notion that it emerged, somehow whole, as a product of a few
men’s transcendent genius, arrived at after erudite discussion at the very highest plane of thinking. Rather, think of George and Martha’s groaning
table, and all the grinding, steaming, and plucking that brought them holiday
cheer.
It is Spring, 1788, and George Washington has left Mount
Vernon and arrived in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention. He is, as always, punctual in the extreme,
and so is one of the first people to get there.
Ultimately, nearly eighty delegates join him, and when they are not
eating, drinking, dancing, and otherwise entertaining themselves (Philadelphia
being a party town) they get down to the business at hand, conceptualizing the
framework of a new government. While
much of the work is being done in the kitchen below, Washington is the center
of attention, and the elephant in the room.
It is hard for any of us to fully grasp the esteem in which
Washington was held. As a frame of
reference, in 1788 there were no political parties, so we didn’t have 2/3 of
the country immediately forming a fixed, partisan opinion. There were no trails of emails or text
messages, no inappropriate tweets, no votes on obscure riders that could be
held against them, and no primary voters demanding fealty to a long set of
articles of faith. People judged
Washington on his service to the fledgling nation, which was considered
unsurpassed. They saw him as incorruptible man, honor-bound
to duty first. Poems and songs were
written about him, in the very best of 18th Century fulsomeness.
