Arthur St. Clair’s year in the chair feels like a hinge cut out of iron: heavy, cold to the touch, load-bearing in a way that is easy to miss if you only glance at the door it is holding up. In February 1787 he took his seat as President of the United States in Congress Assembled at a moment when the Confederation government had very nearly taught the country to stop expecting anything from it. The treasury was a rumor; requisitions sounded princely and worked like charity; British garrisons still sat in the old Northwest as if the treaty that ended the war were a weather report; Spain toyed with the Mississippi as if it were a faucet at the end of its corridor; states taxed one another as if borders were levees against neighbors rather than seams of a single cloth; and in the hills west of Boston, men who had marched for liberty were now marching court to court to keep sheriffs from selling their farms for debt. Into that thin air stepped a compact Scotsman with an old soldier’s bearing and a clerk’s appetite for exact forms.
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