In An Unpublished Letter, President of the Constitutional Convention George Washington Informs His Nephew He Has Found His Journal, To Be Used to Record the Actions of the Convention

An extremely rare letter of Washington from the Presidency of the Constitutional Convention; Only 5 appearing in public sale records going back to 1914

Note on rarity: Public records going back to 1914 reveal only 5 letters from the period of the convention having reached the market. None are from the last decade. Of these, only two relate in some way to his work as President of the Convention. This letter has been in the same family for generations.

The basis of the post-Revolutionary War United States government was the Articles of Confederation. This document reflected the states’ wariness of vesting too much power in a central governing authority, and guaranteed the states their “sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” There was no executive or judicial branches of government, just a Congress responsible for conducting foreign affairs and national defense. The Articles denied Congress the power to collect taxes, regulate interstate commerce, enforce laws or take any action that all of the states had not approved. This resulted in a weak and ineffectual government, one which was failing and threatening to drag the country down with it.

Many of the nation’s leading statesmen felt that the Articles needed to be revised. George Washington was one such proponent, arguing “we have errors to correct.” So in September 1786, five states sent delegates to the Annapolis Convention, the first coordinated meeting to deal with these issues. At the Convention, the sparse attendance meant that little could be accomplished substantively. However, at its close, the delegates issued a report to the thirteen state legislatures and Congress, proposing that the states appoint commissioners to meet at Philadelphia in May 1787, for the explicit purpose of framing measures to strengthen the Articles, to “render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union…” The states agreed and determined to send delegates to what would go down in history as the Constitutional Convention.

The convention first met at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), the same brick building in Philadelphia where the Continental Congress adopted and signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Every state except Rhode Island would eventually be represented, but for the first two weeks of the convention only two state delegations were present and they had to keep adjourning daily until a quorum was reached. On May 25 a quorum of seven states was obtained and the convention got down to work. Among the first orders of business was electing George Washington president of the Convention, which was done unanimously.

On May 29, Edmund Randolph proposed the Virginia Plan, which would provide for a centralized government in which representation would be based on the population of each state, and the next day, May 30, the Convention resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole and commenced debate over the Virginia Plan. That debate lasted until June 13. How to determine each state’s representation in Congress was an incendiary question. Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina (the four most populous states, except New York) unsurprisingly favored the big-state-friendly Virginia Plan, which allocated representation proportional to population. South Carolina and Georgia went along with them. But Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland (small states with no prospect of enlargement through western expansion) objected, holding out for equal representation for all states, large and small. New York surprisingly sided with the small states, meaning that there was no way to push the measure through without compromise.

George Washington kept journals and diaries from 1748 until his death in 1799. They offer a unique window into his daily life, and the life of the nation. He realized early the importance of these documents. In January 1754 he was a twenty-one-year-old major serving in the Virginia militia when he was sent on a 900 mile mission into the Ohio country frontier. Upon his return, he delivered the French commandant’s letter of refusal to abandon the Ohio territory to Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddle. Dinwiddle rushed Washington’s journal of the mission into print in Williamsburg in order to awaken colonial and British officials to the urgent need to defend the western frontier from French encroachment. Washington fully intended to keep a diary of the Constitutional Convention.

George Augustine Washington was Washington’s nephew, and while his uncle was in Philadelphia attending the Constitutional Convention, he acted as the manager of Mount Vernon. Washington often provided his nephew advice on farm management matters.

Following his diary entry for May 8, 1787, Washington left Mount Vernon for Philadelphia to attend the Constitutional Convention. He soon realized, however, that his current diary had, he wrote his nephew George on May 27, been left behind. “In the meantime”, he said, “send me my last diary, which, by mistake, I left behind me—It will be found, I presume, on my writing Table. Put it under a good strong paper cover, sealed up as a letter.” Before arriving in Philadelphia Washington bought another blank leaf booklet, and began another, substitute diary with an initial entry for Friday, May 11, 1787, the day he left Baltimore on his journey to Philadelphia. However, upon arriving in Philadelphia, the diary Washington thought he had left in Virginia turned up. In a previously unknown and unpublished letter, Washington wrote to his nephew to inform him of the discovery so that he need not fruitlessly search for it at Mount Vernon.

Autograph letter signed, Philadelphia, May 30, 1787, the very day the Convention commenced debate over the Virginia Plan, to George Augustine Washington, discussing his diary and offering farm information. “The diary I wrote to you for in my last, I find I have with [me], and therefore give this early notice of it to save you a hunt. Mr. Charles Thomson (Secretary of Congress) has given me the enclosed notes, which I send to you that if anything is found useful in them, and can be applied to our farm, it may be done so. I have another which I shall peruse at my leisure. My love & best regards to all…” He adds a P.S. “It is at this moment raining here & promises much from the appearance of the wind and clouds.” Washington erroneously wrote “you” instead of “me” in the first sentence, and we have corrected that here. Mount Vernon has been notified and agrees with our interpretation. Thomson, who here gave farm information, would in April 1789 be the man who traveled to Mt Vernon to officially inform George Washington that he had just been elected first President of the United States.

Washington used the substitute diary during the period of the Constitutional Convention. He apparently intended at first to transfer his Philadelphia journal entries into the diary he thought he had left at Mount Vernon but decided instead to continue using the substitute until the last blank page was filled with his entry of November 15. At this point Washington returned to the found diary where, following his entry for May 8, he proceeded to copy (and expand) all of his entries from his substitute diary through September 22, the date he had returned to Mount Vernon. Washington turned next to abstracting the farm reports that George Augustine Washington had sent to him during his absence in Philadelphia but quickly realized that such elaborate recopying of other records would be a waste of time and effort, as he explains in the diary. He then went on to transfer into that volume the remainder of his daily entries from his Philadelphia journal. When this volume was full he was only through October 27, 1787.