Washington

In colonial Virginia the property of debtors, including slaves, was often sold at tavern lotteries, amid a jovial, high-spirited atmosphere, as a way of making partial repayment to creditors.

Slavery was the most vexing topic at the convention. As Pierce Butler of South Carolina commented, “The security the southern states want is that their negroes may not be taken from them, which some gentlemen within or without doors have a very good mind to do.”14 Employing thinly disguised blackmail, some southern delegates vowed to quit the conve

Washington had never made Mount Vernon the thriving productive enterprise he wanted. In his last months, he kept saying that the “first wish” of his heart was to simplify and contract operations and live “exempt from cares.”21 To this end, he planned to rent out his mill, distillery, and fishery businesses and dispose of one of his farms. Three of

AN UNWAVERING ADVOCATE of independence, Washington thought his compatriots would eventually come to share his belief. “My countrymen, I know, from their form of government and steady attachment heretofore to royalty, will come reluctantly into the idea of independency,” he wrote that spring. “But time and persecution brings many wonderful things to

For Washington, the failure to create a permanent army early in the war was the original sin from which the patriots almost never recovered. Of the pernicious effect of short-term enlistments, he later wrote, “It may easily be shown that all the misfortunes we have met with in the military line are to be attributed to this cause.”28

As the historian Joseph Ellis notes, George Mason probably helped Washington “to develop a more expansive vocabulary to express his thoughts and feelings, but the thoughts, and even more so the feelings, had been brewing inside him for more than twenty years.”13

In marching twelve miles through the night toward Princeton, Washington pushed his long-suffering men almost beyond human endurance. It was a long, harrowing march down dark country lanes congealed with ice. The weary men, wrapped in a numb trance, some barely awake, padded against stinging winds; many fell asleep standing up whenever the column ha

Slaveholders won some substantial concessions. For the purposes of representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, they would be able to count three-fifths of their slave population. This was no mean feat: slaves made up 40 percent of the population in Virginia, for instance, and 60 percent in South Carolina. The slave tra

After starting out with 55 delegates—all of them white and male, and many affluent—the convention had suffered a high rate of attrition, with only 42 present at the end; of those, 39 signed the document. Eleven states approved the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton signed individually as the sole remaining delegate from New York. Rhode Island had boy