“How do you like our new Constitution?” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in mid-November 1787. Jefferson mostly wanted to vent. The two-month-old document left him reeling, especially in its provisions for a new chief executive. The American president, grumbled Jefferson, “seems a bad edition of a Polish king.”
Jefferson was in Paris, Adams in London. Neither knew that no issue had so bewildered the 55 men who, at various times, attended the Constitutional Convention than the shape of the office both were eventually to occupy. The separation of powers, a gift from Montesquieu, had come easily. But how to design a national executive for a people who had jettisoned a king? The Articles of Confederation provided for no such individual.
The question of the presidency arose on the first day of June. It was resolved in September, having come to the floor in so many permutations that one delegate wound up arguing contradictory sides. The sole issue on which everyone could agree was that the words “imperial” and “presidency” should maintain a chaste distance. The idea was to keep the new nation out of the hands of a power-mad, self-serving individual, susceptible, as British oppressors seemed to be, to bribery and flattery.
Pointing out that even Turkish sultans relied on councils, Virginia’s George Mason proposed a six-person executive board, appointed by the House or the Senate and composed of two members from each region of the country. Benjamin Franklin suggested a sort of privy council, adding that it “would not only be a check on a bad president, but be a relief to a good one.” Both ideas were rejected. (There was a reason Franklin later suggested that if an angel had descended from the heavens with an American Constitution, “it would nevertheless meet with violent opposition.”)
Over and over the delegates wrangled with the question of how to protect a president from foreign influence and his own worst instincts. Alexander Hamilton, the great champion of a powerful sole executive, made an eloquent case for life tenure. Nothing, he said, better insulated a president from corruption, which reared its head with every election. It fell to the 81-year-old Franklin to point out that some individuals outlived their prime.
Ultimately, the convention settled on a presidential term of four years, to be repeated without limit. As to executive powers, Franklin objected to any kind of absolute presidential veto. “One man,” he reasoned, “cannot be believed to possess more wisdom than both branches of the legislature.” The questions around the limits of the office so baffled the convention that it settled on how to remove a president before it had defined what one did. Mason and Franklin embraced impeachment. The president did not occupy a law-free zone. The only alternative method by which a president might be removed, Franklin added, was by assassination, which left its victim “not only deprived of his life but of the opportunity of vindicating his character.”
If few could imagine a national executive who was not a monarch, most in that airless Philadelphia room knew what one looked like. He was a six-foot-tall colossus who presided over the convention as he had presided over the Continental Army. George Washington was 55; it was generally assumed that he would serve as president until his death. One South Carolinian later wrote that he believed presidential power would not have expanded as it did “had not many of the members cast their eyes towards General Washington as president; and shaped their ideas of the powers to be given to a president by their opinions of his virtue.” It might well, he worried, turn out that the matchless patriot had inadvertently set the country on a dangerous course. Franklin agreed. The first man would be a good one, he observed, but “nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.” (He could not have guessed that the next would be his longtime nemesis John Adams.)
By the time Jefferson unloaded on Adams, nearly every literate American had read the Constitution. As the bruising battle for ratification was about to make clear, you could oppose British rule and still oppose the new confederation; Jefferson was far from alone in tripping over the design of the presidency. When he invoked Poland, what he feared was a president who could by law be removed every four years but who never was. He railed against the idea that an American president might serve more than one term. If outvoted by a slim margin, he warned, the president would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.”
Other Virginians shared his concerns. “If ever he violates the laws, one of two things will happen:” Patrick Henry pointed out. “If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished powerfully excite him to make this bold push?” Support was strong among newspaper-heavy, urban areas and weak among the rural populace, who viewed the Constitution with indifference and suspicion.
Amid the battle for ratification, few argued as valiantly as Pennsylvania’s Tench Coxe that an American chief executive differed in every way from a British monarch. He was in no danger of serving for life. Before he served at all, the people would weigh in. He would not inherit a throne even if he turned out to be “an idiot, a knave or a tyrant.” And it would be possible to discern who the idiots, knaves and tyrants might be, as those traits tended to assert themselves before a man turned 35 and became eligible for the office. The British leader could moreover do no wrong. In providing for his impeachment, the Americans had “rather presupposed” theirs might.
Adams wasted no time in replying to Jefferson’s letter. The power of the Senate alarmed him more than did that of the executive. He would have allowed the president additional powers. He wished he had a council. As for the multiple terms, he believed the fewer elections the better. Like Jefferson, he suspected the election of an American president would one day be a matter of global consequence, though no one in 1787 anticipated the rise of political parties. For their part, the delegates could not conceive of a Congress that deferred to a president, much less took direction from him.
Republican manners proved no less difficult to navigate. How to design an inauguration that was not a coronation? How even to address the president? John Adams suggested “His Elective Majesty” or — having and eating his cake — “His Highness, the President of the United States of America and the Protector of Their Liberties.”
Franklin worried throughout the convention about greed, reminding his colleagues that the greatest rogues he had known tended to be the richest rogues. He hoped “the wise and moderate; the lovers of peace and good order, the men fittest for the trust” would find their way to government. Were its offices too lucrative, they would instead attract “the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.” Looking to Washington’s selfless service as commander in chief, he suggested that the president serve without pay.
He shared an additional concern. While the convention had no interest in a monarchy, there was, Franklin observed, “a natural inclination in mankind to kingly government.” Men preferred a single tyrant to domination by an elite. It made them feel more equal, which they liked. “I am apprehensive, therefore, perhaps too apprehensive,” confessed Franklin, “that the government of these states may in future times end in a monarchy.” He spoke, he said, in the hope of heading off mischief. If his words elicited no support, he would at least content himself he had done his duty. Hamilton seconded the motion, if only out of respect for his elder colleague. There was no debate.
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