by Ray Raphael
ALSO BY RAY RAPHAEL
FOUNDING ERA
A People’s History of the American Revolution:
How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence
The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord
Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past
Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation
Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (coeditor)
CALIFORNIA HISTORY AND REGIONAL ISSUES
An Everyday History of Somewhere
Edges: Human Ecology of the Backcountry
Tree Talk: The People and Politics of Timber
Cash Crop: An American Dream
Little White Father: Redick McKee on the California Frontier
More Tree Talk: The People, Politics, and Economics of Timber
Two Peoples, One Place: Humboldt History, volume I (with Freeman House)
EDUCATION AND SOCIOLOGY
The Teacher’s Voice: A Sense of Who We Are
The Men from the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Ray Raphael
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raphael, Ray.
Mr. president : how and why the founders created a chief executive / by Ray Raphael.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95856-3
1. Presidents—United States—History—18th century.
2. United States—Politics and government—1783–1809. I. Title.
JK511.R36 2012
352.230973—dc23 2011033471
Jacket image: Presidential seal (details) by Danita Delimont/Gallo Images/Getty Images
Jacket design by Jason Booher
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: A Pregnant Moment
PART I: PRECEDENTS (FOR BETTER AND MOSTLY WORSE)
1. “Little Gods on Earth”: Monarchs and Their Governors
2. Revolution and the Retreat from Executive Authority
PART II: CONJURING THE OFFICE
3. First Draft
4. Second Guesses
5. Gouverneur Morris’s Final Push
PART III: FIELD TESTS
6. Selling the Plan
7. The Launch
8. Washington and the Challenge to Transcendent Leadership
9. System Failure: Partisan Politics and the Election of 1800
10. Jefferson Stretches the Limits
Epilogue: Then and Now—Translations
Postscript: Why the Story Has Not Been Told
A Note on Capitalization
Notes
A Note About the Author
PROLOGUE
A Pregnant Moment
They had been meeting together in the east chamber of the Pennsylvania State House for a week, and their time had not been wasted. The delegates were almost at full strength—forty-three men from eleven states—and they were working their way down the list of proposals suggested by Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia. Having dwelled at some length on the first six items, which focused on the structure and purpose of a new national legislature, they set out to tackle the seventh. James Madison, who would chronicle this and every other moment for more than three months, recorded in his copious notes what happened next:
FRIDAY JUNE 1ST 1787
The Committee of the whole proceeded to Resolution 7th “that a national Executive be instituted, to be chosen by the national Legislature—for the term of ____ years &c to be ineligible thereafter, to possess the executive powers of Congress &c.”
The first speaker to the resolution, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, said he favored a “vigorous Executive,” but not with powers that extended “to peace & war &c.” That, he feared, “would render the Executive a monarchy, of the worst kind, to wit an elective one.” Other delegates no doubt shared this concern, yet before addressing what executive powers might be, they took up one essential question that was on all their minds. From Madison’s notes: “MR. WILSON moved that the Executive consist of a single person.” Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Charles’s cousin, seconded and clarified the motion—“National Executive,” he said.
Then there was silence. For the first and only time during the Federal Convention of 1787, not one eminent statesman ventured even a passing comment, much less a reasoned position.
Not Gouverneur Morris, the flamboyant, peg-legged orator who spoke more than anyone else at the convention and had a particular fascination with the executive office. Morris was never at a loss for words—except this once.
Nor James Wilson, perhaps the sharpest legal mind in the room, who gave more speeches than anyone but Morris. Wilson undoubtedly hoped someone else would step forth to support his motion, but nobody did.
James Madison, the third-most-talkative delegate over the course of the summer, had an excellent excuse for not coming forth: he was genuinely perplexed. Six weeks earlier, before the convention, he had outlined a broad plan of government to his friend George Washington. The national legislature should have supreme power over the states, Madison stated boldly, and it should be composed of two branches, organized much as they are today. A central judiciary department should also exercise “national supremacy.” On the other hand, “the national supremacy in the Executive departments is liable to some difficulty,” he admitted. “I have scarcely ventured as yet to form my opinion either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed.”1
The three delegates next in line for the honor of most loquacious, Roger Sherman, Elbridge Gerry, and George Mason, also passed. Sherman, a veteran of the drafting committees for both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, undoubtedly had some ideas on the matter, but he didn’t wish to share them just yet. Neither did Gerry, who voiced wildly unpredictable notions on almost every item discussed, nor Mason, Washington’s neighbor and intellectual mentor, who had co-authored the Virginia Constitution in 1776 and who had preempted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence by declaring in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights that “all men are born equally free and independent.” All these great orators held their tongues.
Even Alexander Hamilton, who would soon hold the floor for an entire day and who would suggest at that time that a single executive serve for life, opted at this moment not to say what he really thought.
Two of the three superstars in the room, George Washington and Robert Morris, also remained silent. Washington, of course, was blessed with an excuse even better than Madison’s, for as the convention’s presiding officer, he was supposed to remain above the fray. Morris, the all-powerful “Financier” or “Great One,” possessed exclusive firsthand experience as a national executive, for he had run the affairs of the United States virtually on his own not once but twice, first for a few weeks during the winter of 1776–77, and later for three whole years at the end of the Revolutionary War, from 1781 to 1784—but Morris, like the others, said nothing.
It fell to the oldest and wisest among them, Benjamin Franklin, to end the eerie quiet. Madison’s notes contin
ue:
A considerable pause ensuing and the Chairman asking if he should put the question, Doctor FRANKLIN observed that it was a point of great importance and wished that the gentlemen would deliver their sentiments on it before the question was put.
“A point of great importance”—that was precisely the problem. Eleven years earlier, the United States of America had made a great to-do about rejecting the British monarch, in principle as well as in person. The new nation had buttressed its very existence with the cardinal principle that people can and must rule themselves, free and clear of any king or queen, so how could they now place one man above all the rest, in charge of executing the myriad affairs of government?
Yet most delegates believed their national government, which currently lacked an executive branch, had proved too weak. (Morris’s three-year “reign” had been a temporary aberration, born of necessity to bring the struggling government out of bankruptcy.) Americans should be more realistic, they felt, or the new nation might not survive.
To explore their dilemma and its full implications, let us transport ourselves to that time and place, June 1, 1787, the Assembly Room of the State House in Philadelphia, with James Wilson’s motion to create a one-man national executive suspended in the air, unsupported but also unchallenged, and as yet poorly defined. Stripping away our knowledge of what has transpired since, let us savor that moment of indecision. Would this really be such a good idea? Did the prospects for increased efficiency outweigh the manifold dangers?
Further, aside from theoretical concerns, how would Wilson’s proposal play politically? Would the people “out of doors”—the politicized populace that had pushed the Revolution forward—ever allow a single person to rule?
PART I
Precedents
(for better and mostly worse)
CHAPTER ONE
“Little Gods on Earth”:
Monarchs and Their Governors
Most of the men who pondered James Wilson’s motion in silence had been raised to honor and love their king. Benjamin Franklin spent his early years under a female monarch, Queen Anne, but for the rest the protector and benefactor whom they were taught to include in their prayers had been either King George I, who ascended to the throne in 1714, or his son, King George II, who succeeded him in 1727.
All but a handful of delegates were old enough to remember the death of King George II and the ascension of his twenty-two-year-old grandson, King George III. The date was October 25, 1760, shortly before the first hints of colonial unrest. The youngest, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, had been born just a week and two days before, while Benjamin Franklin, by far the oldest, was fifty-four years old. Respected internationally for his scientific achievements, Franklin was then in England, politicking on behalf of Pennsylvanians who were trying to limit the special privileges and power of the Penn family, the colony’s proprietors. The British Crown was a likely ally in this endeavor, he reasoned. If Pennsylvania could be changed from a proprietorship to a royal colony, it would be freed from the Penns’ grip. Thus, for the most practical of reasons, Benjamin Franklin on the eve of the Revolution was a Royalist. He broke off from vacationing with his son William to attend King George III’s coronation.
George Washington, aged twenty-eight in 1760, and his neighbor George Mason, then thirty-four, had reasons of their own to seek the Crown’s good graces. Mason held shares in the Ohio Company of Virginia, which needed the approval of the British king to stake claims in the North American interior. Washington, while serving as the company’s surveyor back in 1753, had explored its alleged holdings west of the Appalachian Mountains, and the following year he led an assault on a small party of French scouts at Jumonville Glen, a minor skirmish that by 1760 had turned into a global war. Had the king’s army not come to their aid, Virginia militiamen under Colonel Washington would have been no match for their French and Indian opponents. To acquire land and defend it, Washington, Mason, and all other colonial speculators were beholden to both the legal authority and the military might wielded by King George II or King George III or whoever else might sit on the British throne.
Robert Morris, aged twenty-six at the ascension of King George III, had spent the first half of his life in Liverpool, England. As a teenager he settled in Philadelphia, where he rose quickly to a partnership in a prominent mercantile firm, and by the time of George III’s ascension the French and Indian War was treating this merchant prince well. By selling scarce and strategic goods, and also through state-sponsored piracy known as privateering, Morris was setting himself on a trajectory that would make him the richest man in America, but he could not possibly ply his trade across the high seas without the protection of HMS Vanguard, HMS Sutherland, HMS Nightingale, and all the rest of His Majesty’s ships in the king’s navy. Robert Morris had every reason to bless the power of the British monarch.
So it went, down the line.
In 1760, James Wilson, the delegate who offered the motion for a single executive, was an eighteen-year-old student living in Scotland. Five years later, when he immigrated to America, Wilson would not have to alter his allegiance to the British Crown, for he would still be living safely within the king’s realm.
James Madison, aged nine, was being raised to believe that the British monarch was not only the head of state but also the embodiment of religious authority, the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” Perhaps the lad was still too young to realize how closely his family’s tobacco-producing plantation depended on the Crown’s ability to hold the British Empire together, but that would come with time.
Gouverneur Morris, aged eight, had no reason to question his privileged position in the British social order. His father was in fact a titled aristocrat, the Lord of Morrisania, which comprised much of the present-day Bronx in New York City. Although Gouverneur was not the firstborn son and would never himself become a lord, he was still greatly privileged, thanks to the traditional British hierarchy, with a monarch at the top.
Of all the delegates other than Franklin, only Alexander Hamilton, aged three or five at the time (the record is unclear), was not imbued in his earliest years with reverence for King George I or II. An illegitimate child in the West Indies, Hamilton was tutored at home by his French Huguenot mother and by a local Sephardic Jewess, neither of whom was likely to have encouraged adoration of the British monarch. For all the rest, however, professing gratitude and pledging allegiance were taught early and renewed often, at every stage of their political education.
To our modern sensibilities, the hierarchical relationship between British subjects and their monarch in 1760 might appear overly submissive, but as people viewed the matter then, subjects received as much as they gave. Sir William Blackstone, the mid-eighteenth-century jurist who defined the British polity in his authoritative Commentaries on the Laws of England, explained that allegiance was “the tie, or ligamen, which binds the subject to the king, in return for that protection which the king affords the subject.” The bond was symbiotic.1
Protection took two forms. Most obviously, as commander of armies and navies, the monarch was expected to shield subjects from any and all external enemies. This was particularly apparent for British colonials in 1760, who felt they had been “freed from the invasions of a savage foe” when the king’s forces defeated the French in Canada.2
Equally important, however, was the guarantee against lawlessness or tyranny within the monarch’s realm. The Crown was legally present in all courts; any violation of the law was an offense to his power and authority, to be punished accordingly. Further, the Crown was charged with guaranteeing the people’s liberties. George II, in his first speech to Parliament in 1727, proclaimed that it was his special duty “to secure to all my subjects, the full enjoyment of their religious and civil rights.”3
To protect the people from foreign foes and domestic disorders, a British monarch needed to possess formidable, across-the-board powers. The monarch was the commander in chief of the armed f
orces, the head of state, the pinnacle of the titled hierarchy, the wealthiest individual, and the largest landowner. When new lands were added to the empire, they immediately became the king’s property, to be dispensed at his pleasure.
The monarch also headed the official state religion, the Church of England, and even with respect to the affairs of state he or she was said to govern by the divine grace of God. When King George II died in 1760, the governor, council, and house of representatives from Massachusetts welcomed his successor by “beseeching GOD (by whom Kings do Reign) to bless the Royal King George the Third with long and happy years to reign over us.”4
But with power such as this, couldn’t the Crown also deprive the people of their liberties?
Of course it could, and it had. King James I, who succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603, described kings as “little Gods on Earth.” Parliament at that point in time held no force of law. It could pass bills, but it had no way of enforcing them. It was essentially an advisory body to the king, who could dissolve it at his will. Parliament did wield the power of the purse, however. Historically, it had been created to raise money for the Crown, and that was still the only real card it could play.
Throughout the 1630s, King Charles I, James’s successor, tried to rule without convening Parliament at all. During the Eleven Years’ Tyranny, as it was called by his opponents, Charles ruled with autocratic power. He arrested people who refused to comply with the increasingly doctrinaire policies of the Church of England, and he raised money by extracting archaic fees that were still on the books but hadn’t been collected for centuries. By the time he reconvened Parliament in 1640, members there were prepared to challenge his power, and they did.