Volume Three of the Confederation Series of The Papers of George Washington spans the year between May 1785 and April 1786, described by Washington's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman as a year of -drought and distraction.- Washington spent most of these months at Mount Vernon, continuing to wrestle with the problems of restoring the plantation and his personal fortune after years of neglect while serving as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army -- efforts hampered by a long summer drought. During these months Washington was distracted by national affairs, particularly the impotence...

The extensive correspondence regarding Shays' Rebellion and widespread alarm over the state of the Union continues in this volume, and there are the usual letters numbering in the hundreds which deal with his more personal concerns: farm and family, slave and tenant, tradesman and artisan. But the main focus of this volume is the Federal Convention in the summer of 1787 and the fight for ratification of the Constitution beginning in the fall of 1787. About these and other matters of importance Washington wrote to and heard from such Americans as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James...

Beginning with the decision made early in 1787 to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer, Washington's papers in volume 6 of the series reveal him as once again a public figure no longer standing outside and above the fray as he had been seeking to do with some success since leaving the army at the end of 1783. In the first nine months of this year Washington continued to give meticulous attention to his personal affairs at Mount Vernon as he had done before, but his correspondence, particularly that with James Madison, makes it clear that his overriding concern...