Signing Their Rights Away (24 page)

Carroll remained in the new government until 1791. He then accepted an appointment from his pal, President George Washington, to work with two other men to oversee the surveying, designing, and construction of a new federal district, which would become home to the nation’s new capital. Its location, along the Potomac, was certainly fortuitous for Carroll: he owned most of the land that was designated to become Washington, D.C. This fact is largely forgotten today, but it wasn’t at the time—indeed, many people questioned his impartiality.

Carroll resigned in 1795 because of poor health and died at the age of sixty-five at his home near Rock Creek. There were so many Carrolls—and a fair number of Daniels among them—that the precise location of his grave is unknown; it is believed to be in St. John’s Catholic Cemetery in Forest Glen, Maryland.

IX. Virginia

The President of the Constitutional Convention

BORN
: February 22, 1732

DIED
: December 14, 1799

AGE AT SIGNING
: 55

PROFESSION
: Planter

BURIED
: Mount Vernon Estate, Mount Vernon, Virginia

No, he never chopped down that cherry tree. That pleasant fiction was concocted by a preacher seeking to instill good moral values in America’s youth. But the false teeth? George Washington definitely had those. By the time he was president he’d lost all but one of his original teeth, and so he made do with ill-fitting dentures fashioned of all kinds of crazy stuff: hippo, walrus, or elephant ivory studded with pig teeth, cow teeth, elk teeth, and even human teeth from the mouths of slaves. The falsies worked passably well, but he became self-conscious about speaking or smiling in public. That deadpan look he wears on the dollar bill was the uncomfortable result.

But don’t let the dour image fool you: the father of his country was
a gregarious, athletic man who loved good times, drinking, gambling, cockfights, horse races, dancing, and salty jokes. He also knew how to present a dignified self-image to the world, especially when his troops, foreign dignitaries, and the American people were watching.

Washington, the first man to sign the U.S. Constitution, was the eldest of six children of a Virginia plantation owner named Augustine and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington. Dad died when the children were young, and eleven-year-old George helped his domineering, nagging mother raise his siblings. A relatively poor child who lacked the resources to attend college, young George was mentored by his older stepbrothers. As a teen, he longed to go to sea, but his mother forbade it. He ended up becoming a surveyor and mapmaker who used his earnings and connections to acquire land. He became fascinated with the promise of frontier territories in the west and began dreaming of their possibilities. In his spare time, he rode horses, hunted, and wandered the woods in search of adventure. Despite a desire to see the world, he grew up to become a man somewhat kept, bound, hemmed in, or trapped by a life of duty and service.

Washington joined the Virginia militia when he was only about seventeen years old and served bravely during the French and Indian War in the 1750s, when Britain was battling France for control of North America. As a young lieutenant colonel, he won his first skirmish against the French in a Pennsylvania town in 1754, but later had to surrender his entire force when the French tracked them down. Released and allowed to return home, he resigned his post rather than accept a demotion. He enlisted again as an aide to British general Edward Braddock, and, though sick, he led the troops in retreat after Braddock was mortally wounded. In battle, he miraculously escaped injury countless times. Two horses were shot out from under him and bullets tore his jacket and hat to shreds, but he was unharmed. Yet, when Washington twice tried to attain an officer’s post in the British army, he was rebuffed. He angrily returned home to serve in his colony’s militia. A practical, tidy, and
moody man with a mathematical mind and surveyor’s appreciation for precision, he soon grew impatient with the disorganized way he felt the government was running the militia.

Washington quit and married a young widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, and adopted her two children. Enriched by Martha’s own wealth and plantation, the young family settled at Mount Vernon, a family home Washington had inherited upon the death of his older stepbrother Lawrence. Throughout the rest of his life, even when he was at war, Washington would work at remaking the estate in his own image, establishing fields of crops, gardens, and distillery and pushing the plantation’s boundaries from two thousand to eight thousand acres. (Today the famous home hosts a million tourists each year.) For a while, he embarked on the life of a fashionable Virginia planter. He dabbled in politics at the House of Burgesses, which met in Williamsburg. Though not as radical as other patriots, Washington felt that all English gentlemen were entitled to the rights abrogated by the king and Parliament and, if necessary, should be prepared to defend those rights by force. In 1775, after the shots had rung out in Lexington and Concord, he was sent to the first Continental Congress, which chose him to lead the Continental Army. And it was just as well, too. The thought of restless Washington languishing in Congress while John Adams and the others squabbled is enough to make one want to take a hatchet to a hundred fruit trees.

Washington didn’t have much to work with when he took over the fledgling nation’s military, but he did the best he could. Although unimpressed with the recruits, he decided they were at least worthy of training. He was a man who had once swum across a freezing river and who had crawled on his belly to scout retreat lines; he was willing to endure miserable conditions and expected the same of his men. Knowing that he was being watched, he gave them the role model that he himself would have wanted. He arrived for work in a gorgeous custom-made uniform and kept it looking spiffy throughout the battles. When times called for it, he could be
tough, ordering habitual deserters hanged and others whipped.

You could say he was a good model to the congressmen back home in Philadelphia, though some schemed to oust him. Washington was nothing if not loyal to the rebel cause. When offered military wages, he declined them. He did accept roughly $65,000 in Continental currency to cover his wartime expenses, but even that money—printed on paper—lost value the longer he held it.

Only forty-three years old when he took over as commander in chief, Washington had much to learn and made a few early blunders in his defense of Brooklyn and Manhattan. By the numbers, he lost more battles than he won, but that didn’t really matter, did it? He was a quick study who learned how to opportunistically pounce when he could seize the advantage. Though his troops were frequently outsupplied and outnumbered (20,000 U.S. troops to 50,000 British troops and mercenaries), Washington managed to train them into an efficient and nimble fighting force. If you had to pinpoint his military style, you could say that he worried his opponents incessantly with small battles, striking and retreating, until he found the right moment to launch a decisive attack. After he mopped Yorktown with Cornwallis’s troops in 1781, the battle that won the war, Washington could have used his power to seize control of the weak U.S. government, as many of his angry unpaid soldiers wanted to do. He could have crowned himself king. But no. He addressed his troops with a few sentimental words and left them all weeping like babies. Any chance of rebellion was quashed on the spot.

When the war was over, Washington happily returned to his beloved home to rebuild his neglected finances. He managed to have a little fun, too, obsessively canoeing waterways in search of a passage to his property out west. When among friends, he let down his hair and attended parties and dinners; some historians, studying his papers, conclude that he almost never ate a meal alone. Clearly the six-foot-two general with the size thirteen shoes loved people.

Though his finances took a hit during the war, he was regarded as one
of the richest men in America. But his wealth was mostly tied up in land and slaves. After the war, grateful states showed their thanks by awarding him massive tracts of land, and he added to these holdings with expensive impulse transactions. Once, on a trip to upstate New York with then governor George Clinton, he saw a huge parcel that he simply had to have. Though still owing money on other land he’d purchased, Washington proceeded to borrow $6,000 from Clinton and bought the property. Though it took him four years to repay the loan, he managed to turn a profit by selling the land in small pieces.

Washington’s time off from service was exceedingly brief. In 1785, he hosted statesmen who were becoming irritated by the apparent deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. In 1787, he went uneasily to the Constitutional Convention. He was no lawyer; what he knew was math, crops, horseflesh, and war. But his appearance in Philadelphia was necessary strategically, and he knew it. Just as he’d sported that perfect uniform, he now garbed himself as a statesman and let himself become the dignified face of the proceedings. Madison, Hamilton, James Wilson, and the others all knew that it would be impossible to dismiss the work of the delegates if the world’s two most famous Americans—the libertine Dr. Franklin and the upright Gen. Washington—were in the room.