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September 1783.
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    Many of the former slaves who’d fought for Britain fled to the Canadian colonies of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and to Britain. Eleven hundred of these black Nova Scotians later helped establish Freetown in Sierra Leone. Those who couldn’t escape the new United States were returned to slavery.
    The majority of Loyalists were dispossessed of their property. Some of the eighty thousand who left the United States found various positions and opportunities in Britain or in other British colonies, particularly Canada. One such Loyalist was James Matra of New York. He had sailed as midshipman with Captain James Cook in his first great voyage of discovery. After American independence, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the eventual British settlement of Australia in 1788. A suburb of Sydney, Australia, is named for him.
    Another was Ben Franklin’s son William, the last governor of New Jersey Colony. He remained steadfastly loyal to Britain, and his father cut him from his will and his life. William, too, left the United States. Civil wars are the bitterest of all.
    During the long war, Washington had managed to keep the fragilecolonial alliances together and maintain the Continental army in the field. In March 1783 there was mutiny. Claims for large arrears of pay—supported by Washington—and arguments about the future leadership of the federated thirteen states led to the Newburgh mutiny. Some wanted Washington to be crowned king. During his rejection speech, Washington stopped to put on spectacles. He glanced at the assembled officers and said: “Gentlemen, I have grown gray in your service, and now I am going blind.” It was the end of the mutiny. The Continental army was disbanded in November, leaving a small standing force of artillery, while the last British forces left New York in December. Washington resigned his commission at Annapolis and returned to Mount Vernon.
    Except for the one brief visit it was the first time he’d been home since 1775. He’d taken this step before, of course, after his first unsuccessful military endeavors and after his successful defense of Virginia Colony. At fifty-one years of age, he was tired, but it was also a canny political move. There were the usual complaints, jealousies, rivalries, retributions, and vendettas that follow every civil war. There was a postwar economic depression, and the new federation of states was bankrupt, with no way to collect revenue to pay its debts. The loose union created by Franklin’s Articles of Confederation gradually began to break apart.
    At Mount Vernon, Washington was well out of such petty politics. He was also in debt again. For three years he reorganized Mount Vernon and its crops. He made only the one trip away, to view his western lands and the new land near the Ohio River given him by Congress for his services.
    By 1787, however, the states had decided an actual constitution was necessary to replace the defunct federation. The Virginia assembly unanimously elected Washington to lead its delegation, and at Philadelphia he was unanimously elected by the delegates to chair the Constitutional Convention itself. It lasted four months. The resulting constitution leaned heavily upon the Magna Carta of 1215, Britain’s Declaration of Rights of 1689, and John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government of 1690.
    Washington actually made few contributions in the debating chamber, reputedly breaking silence only once. Yet by the time the Constitution was ratified by each state assembly in 1788, he had become the automatic choice for first president. Of his popularity, he said: “I feel very much like a man who is condemned to death does, when the time of his execution draws near.”
    Ratification itself was not easy: in Washington’s state of Virginia it passed by just ten votes. It’s argued that the seeds for the next civil war of 1861 were actually sown in the