“My nerves are too delicate to let me sleep, Aunt Patsie.”
And Harriot: “Why do men take so long over their wine?”
“It isn’t polite to make observations about how long anyone lingers after dinner,” replied Fanny gently, and herded the girls from the room.
Why indeed?
Martha’s breath felt stifled in her chest. They would come out soon.
The last time George had lingered so long over dinner had been the night last October, with Madison and Monroe.
Warily, Martha had watched them then, as she had watched Madison tonight. Too fragile to go to war, he had spent the years from 1775 to 1783 in the Virginia legislature; he knew the ins and outs of local politics with the brilliance of an Alexander viewing a battlefield. Last October, she had heard him speak of the relationship of Congress to the various States, and the States to each other, like a physician observing a dissection, pointing with a needle: a cancer here, a lesion there, a muscular weakness there, and here gangrene is setting in…The patient will die.
“No,” George had said quietly that night, and had raised his eyes from the Madeira into whose golden depths he had been gazing as Madison talked. “We did not fight, and men did not die, that we should become the laughingstock of the world for our inability to hold what we won.”
His eyes met Madison’s, and Madison had made no reply. Martha had watched her husband’s jaw harden, and the muscle in his temple twitch, as it did when he was holding hard to his temper. She had felt in his silence, that October night, the eight years of seeing his men starve because Congress had no power to raise money to feed them; eight years of maneuvering the logistics of fighting battles with only a few rounds of ammunition per man; eight years of keeping his temper as he explained to Congress yet one more time why he didn’t storm into battle more often or why men who put their lives on the line for their country really ought to be recompensed for their pain.
Now, like a debtor’s child, the new confederation calling itself the United States of America came into being owing a hundred and seventy million dollars to France, Russia, Spain, and the Netherlands—twenty-seven million of that payable only in gold. Without the threat of the British guns in the background, the Congress’s financial pigeons all came home to roost. As a “firm league of friendship,” not an actual government, Congress still had no power to tax, and no means of paying off those loans any more than they’d been able to pay the Continental troops.
The Convention of States’ representatives in Annapolis had signally failed to resolve the trade differences separating them.
Another Convention, Madison had said in October, was being planned. It would meet in Philadelphia come May, to further discuss the issues that threatened to lay the divided States open to piecemeal conquest as soon as Britain or France or Spain or Russia thought it safe to do so.
“We cannot let it go for nothing,” George had said, and Madison had folded his thin hands, wrinkled face alert in the candle-glow.
“Nor will we, sir,” he said. “But we cannot go on as we have. And to bring the States together, we must have someone whose authority all will trust.”
“Lady Washington…”
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