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

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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.

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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...