The three travelers rode into Philadelphia on September 4. The next morning they repaired to the City Tavern, where delegates decided to hold their meetings in Carpenters’ Hall. The choice of the jowly Peyton Randolph to chair the Congress furnished Washington with a potent ally. He’d had business as well as political dealings with Randolph, having loaned him 250 pounds a few years earlier, and Randolph had been one of four people assigned to monitor Washington’s handling of the Custis estate for the General Court.

The taciturn Washington, at forty-two, found himself in an assembly of splendid talkers who knew how to pontificate on every subject. John Adams left this slightly mocking commentary on the verbose gathering: “Every man in it is a great man—an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.”²⁷ Relegated to a secondary role, the modest, retiring Washington wasn’t appointed to either of the two new committees: one on colonial rights, the other on trade policy with Great Britain. Nonetheless, in this conclave of talkative egomaniacs, Washington’s understated style had an inevitable appeal. Amid gifted talkers, he was a masterful listener who characterized his role as that of “an attentive observer and witness.”²⁸ It was slowly becoming clear that, in a fractious, boisterous gathering, a calm figure of sound judgment such as Washington could inspire confidence and serve as a unifying figure.

Amid much overheated rhetoric, Washington spoke hard, plain truths. Silas Deane of Connecticut reported home that the stony-faced George Washington had a “hard countenance” and was “a tolerable speaker . . . who speaks very modestly in a cool but determined style and accent.”²⁹ A Virginian praised Washington as “a man noted as well for his good sense as his bravery.”³⁰ From Washington’s recent letters to Bryan Fairfax, we know that he could serve up impassioned language, so that his reticence in Philadelphia reflected not simply a circumspect personality but a fine-tuned political instinct. On the surface, Washington may have been cool and phlegmatic, but he was fiery underneath, blasting the British as “diabolic contrivers.”³¹

The specter of military action preoccupied delegates who sized up Washington as a prospective commander in chief. There was an esprit de corps about Washington and his self-assured Virginians. According to John Adams, the Virginians “were the most spirited” people in the hall, and one Pennsylvanian said that, in comparison, “the Bostonians are mere milksops.”³² The delegates swapped tales of Washington’s youthful exploits in the French and Indian War, with Silas Deane writing excitedly home that Washington “was in the first actions in 1753 and 1754 on the Ohio and in 1755 was with Braddock and was the means of saving the remains of that unfortunate army.”³³ In an inspired mood, Dr. Solomon Drowne of Rhode Island composed a martial tribute in verse to Washington: “With manly gait / His faithful steel suspended by his side, / Pass’d W-shi-gt-n along, Virginia’s hero.” People buttonholed him and pressed him to accept the army command, if offered. While hoping to avert bloodshed, Washington warned one correspondent that “more blood will be spilt on this occasion (if the ministry are determined to push matters to extremity) than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”³⁴

Increasingly a seasoned politician, gifted with a light touch, Colonel Washington seemed to know that self-promotion would only backfire among delegates who, by the nature of their revolt, possessed heightened fears of power-hungry leaders. The last thing they wanted was a general who pushed himself forward too overtly. As stories about Washington swirled around the Congress, he let them do the talking. Thomas Lynch of South Carolina told John Adams that Washington “had made the most eloquent speech at the Virginia Convention that ever was made. Says he, ‘I will raise 1000 men, subsist them at my own expense, and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston.’”³⁵ That the rumor mill churned out such a thrilling (and likely apocryphal) tale about Washington foreshadowed the verdict of the following spring.

Washington worked the First Continental Congress like a mature candidate. He turned ecumenical in his churchgoing habits, attending services at Presbyterian, Quaker, Roman Catholic, and a pair of Anglican churches. With the weather consistently fine and clear, he socialized assiduously in the evenings, dining out in thirty-one private homes in two months and scarcely ever sticking to his lodgings. He became a habitué of something called the Governor’s Club, summarized by one visitor as “a select number of gentlemen that meet every night at a certain tavern, where they pass away a few hours in the pleasures of conversation and a cheerful glass.”³⁶ With his compulsion to record his everyday life, Washington asked Lund Washington to send on his diary, disguised for safekeeping as a letter. “It will be found, I presume, on my writing table,” he wrote. “Put it under a good strong paper cover, sealed up as a letter.”³⁷

Washington showed a knack for expanding his network of acquaintances, meeting with “Farmer” John Dickinson and befriending two young Philadelphians—merchant Thomas Mifflin and lawyer Joseph Reed—who later served as his aides. Along with John Adams, Washington received a memorable guided tour of the Pennsylvania Hospital from Dr. William Shippen, Jr. The finest hospital in the colonies, it still had a vaguely medieval air, as Adams noted: “We saw in the lower rooms underground the cells of the lunatics . . . some furious, some merry, some melancholy.”³⁸ An inveterate shopper, Washington also took time to buy a cloak for his mother and a pocketbook for his wife. This conservative revolutionary decided that Billy Lee should dress a little more fashionably for the historic occasion and plunked down fifteen shillings for new shoes for his slave.

The First Continental Congress balked at the still-radical idea of independence, and George Washington expressed the predominant mood when he declared flatly, “I am well satisfied, as I can be of my existence, that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty that peace and tranquillity, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored and the horrors of civil discord prevented.”³⁹ The delegates clung to the pleasing fiction that a benevolent George III was being undermined by treacherous ministers, and they implored the king as their “loving father” to rouse himself and rescue his colonial subjects. Going beyond mere words, they set up a Continental Association (hence the name Continental Congress) that would block imports sooner, and exports later, from and to Great Britain. To police this agreement, delegates called for creation of local enforcement committees, which could spawn militias if necessary. They also vowed to “wholly discontinue the slave trade” and “discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fightings, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”⁴⁰ This emphasis on moral reformation could only have assisted the likelihood that the clean-living Washington would become commander in chief. An exceptionally conscientious delegate, he was one of only two Virginia delegates still in Philadelphia when the First Continental Congress adjourned on October 26, 1774.

On October 30 George Washington was back at Mount Vernon, where the most urgent matter claiming his attention was the sale of property owned by his business partner George Mercer, then in woeful financial straits. Several weeks later Washington conducted a sale of property, including ninety slaves, from Mercer’s plantation at Bull Run Mountains. “The Negroes, horses, and stock have all sold exceeding high,” Washington reported after the auction .⁴¹ It shows the schizophrenic nature of Washington’s world that he was auctioning off slaves in the immediate aftermath of the First Continental Congress, which had endorsed an end to importing slaves. Ditto for Washington’s action in February 1775, when he paid fifty-two pounds “for value of a Negro boy Tom,” whom he sent off to his western lands .⁴²