by Ray Raphael
This would be their sixth session and their third day of active deliberations. To understand the dramatic events of June 1, the day the American presidency was first discussed by a public body, we need some familiarity with the terrain they had already explored.
The previous Friday, May 25, delegates had convened and unanimously chosen George Washington as their president. They presented credentials from the eleven states they represented, chose a committee to prepare the rules, and then retired for the weekend to settle into their temporary lodgings.
On Monday, May 28, they decided on some rules. Since the delegates were hardly strangers to deliberative bodies, they had little difficulty agreeing on the customary blend of democracy (no member would be permitted to speak a second time “upon the same question” before every other member had been given a chance) and deference (upon adjournment, “every member shall stand in his place, until the President pass him”).
Then, on Tuesday, they imposed one more behavioral regulation: “That nothing spoken in the house be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated, without leave.” Enforced secrecy, unlike the other rules, defied the prevailing ethic of the times. Throughout the Revolutionary era, Americans had insisted on transparency in their deliberative bodies, but these men wanted to speak their minds freely, without regard to how their words might be portrayed, understood, or misunderstood by the public.
The convention then began to address substantive matters. Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, the largest state in the confederation, announced that since Virginia had been the first to call for a convention, its delegation would lay matters on the table for proper consideration. Randolph and his colleagues had arrived in Philadelphia earlier than the rest, and while waiting for the others, they had drafted a coordinated list of proposals for altering the Articles of Confederation. Randolph, as head of the delegation, then read aloud fifteen resolutions, known collectively as the Virginia Plan, to be accepted, rejected, or amended as the convention might see fit.
On Wednesday, May 30, delegates started discussing Randolph’s resolutions, item by item. The first proposal set out its basic premise, “that the Articles of Confederation ought to be so corrected & enlarged as to accomplish the objects proposed by their institution; namely, common defence, security of liberty and general welfare.” Hold it right there, Gouverneur Morris said. The convention should come right out and state its true intention: to transform the confederation into a genuine government. Randolph, in agreement, moved to delete the words “the Articles of Confederation ought to be so corrected & enlarged” and substitute in their stead: “A national government ought to be established consisting of a supreme Legislative, Executive & Judiciary.”
The key words here, “national” and “supreme,” differentiated the new government sharply from the old one. According to Morris, the confederation was “a mere compact resting on the good faith of the parties,” not a government per se, which must involve a “compulsive operation.” “In all communities there must be one supreme power, and one only,” he argued, and that power should be a supreme, national government.
Six states voted with Morris and Randolph, one against, and one divided. The consequences of the decisive vote, taken so early in the proceedings, were monumental. Having abandoned the Articles of Confederation, delegates would no longer have to bow to any of its provisions; instead, they could create a new government on an open slate. Morris and his fellow “nationalists”—delegates favoring a unitary national government rather than a confederation of states—had just staged a revolution in favor of strong government.2
With this new framing, delegates proceeded to tackle items two through six of the Virginia Plan, which addressed the composition, selection, and authority of a proposed national legislature. Some issues, such as the small-state/large-state debate over representation in Congress, were deemed too divisive and hence tabled, but the convention did settle the matter of who should be allowed to vote for representatives to the lower house of the legislature. This was tricky. Most delegates agreed with Elbridge Gerry, who held that “the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” and Roger Sherman, who proclaimed, “The people immediately should have as little to do as may be about the government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled.” Yet they also understood that in any republic the people must have something to do about their government. James Madison, searching for a broad consensus, managed to synthesize these views in a manner the convention could accept. In several states, he noted, the first branch of the legislature appointed the second, which in turn appointed a governor or council, and these made still further appointments. This process of “successive filtrations” could be adapted to the national government. If delegates allowed people to vote directly for their representatives, the delegates would then be able to leave the people out of the mix in selecting higher officials—including executive officers.
That’s where matters stood on Friday, June 1, when Secretary Jackson read to them Randolph’s seventh resolution:
Resd. that a National Executive be instituted; to be chosen by the National Legislature for the term of ___ years, to receive punctually at stated times, a fixed compensation for the services rendered, in which no increase or diminution shall be made so as to affect the Magistracy, existing at the time of increase or diminution, and to be ineligible a second time; and that besides a general authority to execute the National laws, it ought to enjoy the Executive rights vested in Congress by the Confederation.
Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, hoping to give the incipient executive office a personal face, immediately moved “that the Executive consist of a single person,” and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, seconding the motion, added “National” before “Executive.” Wilson’s motion brought the convention, which was just reaching its stride, to a sudden standstill. “A considerable pause ensuing”—that’s how Madison denoted the embarrassing silence that followed Wilson’s motion. The delegates to the “grand federal convention” had been chosen at least in part for their ability to deliberate and communicate, but just this once all communication ceased.
At first glance, we might think these seasoned statesmen held their tongues because the notion of a single executive departed so radically from the Articles of Confederation, which had kept all executive authority within Congress, but the Articles had been tossed out two days before, so that was not their major concern. They hesitated to speak because Wilson’s motion magnified a host of other sticky issues, each a land mine in its own right.
Who would elect a chief executive?
How long would he serve?
What authority would he exercise?
Who could check his power?
Such questions would surface even if executive authority was shared among several individuals, but the very hint of one-man rule raised the stakes across the board. Each question suggested a range of possible solutions, and further, all fields were interconnected; a single executive imbued with extensive powers, for instance, might need greater checks or shorter terms. The problem, then, was where to start.
Perhaps the executive(s) should be selected by the national legislature, but why not by the state legislatures, or state governors, or some assemblage of judges or special electors, or even the people themselves?
Should he/they be elected annually, as was the custom for most officers in the Revolutionary era, or should he/they serve for longer terms—two years or four, seven or even more?
Should he/they be eligible for reelection, or would that place the new government on a slippery slope toward monarchy?
Most critically, what would be the province of this new office, with no direct historical precedent? Should the executive officer(s) have powers of war and peace? Foreign diplomacy? Coining money? Patronage? Where would his/their powers start—and end? Who might serve as a check on the possible abuse of those powers?
Each of these related to the question James Wil
son had placed on the table. Perhaps there should be one man at the top, but why not three or even more, to distribute the burden and limit the potential for abuse?
Each delegate arrived at the convention with preexisting views, based on his particular situation and experience. Certainly the six men who had served as presidents or governors of their states had developed opinions on whether executive functions would best be accomplished by one man or several. So did the two who had been presidents of Congress, and also the Financier, Robert Morris, well accustomed to giving orders from the top. Most of the delegates had been members of Congress at one point or another, while all had served on deliberative bodies. Each and every one had confronted issues dealing with the implementation, or execution, of acts and resolutions. All these would come to bear in due time.
Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, for instance, was unlikely to trust any independent authority to the executive. He was a legislature man through and through, having participated in the Continental Congress for more days than any other member. Sherman had been blessed with neither pedigree (his father was a farmer who had lost more than half his land) nor charisma. “Mr. Sherman exhibits the oddest shaped character I ever remember to have met with,” wrote William Pierce, a delegate from Georgia fond of producing thumbnail sketches of his colleagues. “He is awkward, un-meaning, and unaccountably strange in his manner.” Yet Sherman did possess ambition. A farmer and cordwainer (shoemaker) in his early years, he became in rapid succession a surveyor, shopkeeper, and almanac publisher—more or less in the Ben Franklin mold, without the flash. Upwardly mobile, he studied law, passed the bar, and was elected to the Connecticut Council in 1766 and the Continental Congress in 1774. For twenty-one years, Sherman’s major contributions in the public arena had come from service in the legislative arena, where government by committee prevailed. In his view, since the legislature was the sole “depository of the supreme will of society,” executive authority was an oxymoron.3
John Rutledge, on the other hand, had resigned from the presidency of South Carolina back in 1778, in protest over the new state constitution that terminated his veto power. Less than two years later he once again became the state’s chief executive, assumed extraordinary powers to counteract the British invasion, and was dubbed “Dictator.” As much as anyone in the room, and that included many a powerful figure, he felt perfectly at ease with a system of government that featured top-down command, notwithstanding the many challenges to that political orientation throughout the Revolutionary era. As a plantation owner who had commanded the labor of hundreds of slaves, as a leader of the low-country elite that dominated South Carolina’s political life, and as president and then governor of the state, he had always been at the top of the chain of command and resisted legislative restrictions on his authority.
Gouverneur Morris, formerly of New York but now representing Pennsylvania, had both legislative and executive experience. In 1775, at the age of twenty-three, he served as a delegate to New York’s Provincial Congress, but two years later he helped write the state’s first constitution, which allowed the people, not the legislature, to choose their governor. He represented New York in the federal Congress in 1778, and then, after moving to Pennsylvania because of a political dispute in New York, he became Robert Morris’s assistant superintendent of finance, making him the second most powerful executive officer in the brief history of the young nation. Morris, like Rutledge and unlike Sherman, came from a class that was accustomed to exercising personal authority. The youngest son of the Lord of Morrisania (the present-day Bronx in New York City), he had both the lineage and the demeanor of an aristocrat, and he was not likely to have scruples about granting extensive powers to the fledgling executive department. Yet Morris was known to be “fickle and inconstant,” in the words of William Pierce. Politically, he could play the field. (He played the field romantically as well, not in the least slowed down by the loss of one leg.) So despite his privileged standing, nobody could predict with any certainty where his affinity for executive command might lead him on any specific issue.
James Wilson, Morris’s colleague from Pennsylvania, had been fighting for a strong executive at the state level for more than a decade. The radically democratic Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 placed all authority in the hands of a single-house legislature, which was elected by a greatly expanded franchise and which held a weak executive under its sway. For Wilson and other moderate-to-conservative men of the “better sort,” this was no way to run a government, but their repeated attempts to overturn the Pennsylvania Constitution failed. Wilson had reason to expect a better reception from the present assembly. When this esteemed lawyer and scholar moved for a single executive, “single” implied strong and independent. That was his agenda.
All delegates, like these men, arrived with their own personal inclinations, but how would these translate to positions on specific issues? Even Wilson’s proposal for a single executive did not necessarily imply a strong one. Some might argue, conversely, that vesting executive authority in multiple hands would make it stronger.
The concept of a national executive office was raw and undefined. It was up for grabs, but nobody reached forward to grasp it. Any opening gambit would undoubtedly provoke a round of responses, some perhaps rather harsh, and everybody shied off. Not until Benjamin Franklin, the folk philosopher turned elder statesman, chided delegates for their failure to “deliver their sentiments” on a point of so “great importance” did John Rutledge finally break the ice.
Rutledge opened strategically by echoing Dr. Franklin, always a safe bet. He “animadverted on the shyness of gentlemen” for not “frankly disclos[ing] their opinions,” according to Madison’s notes. That, of course, gave Rutledge permission to frankly disclose his: “He said he was for vesting the Executive power in a single person, tho’ he was not for giving him the power of war and peace. A single man would feel the greatest responsibility and administer the public affairs best.”
If Rutledge had hoped to end the silence, he certainly succeeded. He was immediately challenged, and the battle was on:
Mr. SHERMAN said he considered the Executive magistracy as nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the Legislature into effect, that the person or persons ought to be appointed by and accountable to the Legislature only, which was the depositary of the supreme will of the Society. As they were the best judges of the business which ought to be done by the Executive department, and consequently of the number necessary from time to time for doing it, he wished the number might not be fixed but that the Legislature should be at liberty to appoint one or more as experience might dictate.
So much for the desirability of any independent executive, let alone a single one. The president or presidents (whichever Congress might choose, at its discretion) should continue to function as they always had under the Articles of Confederation, mere administrators of the acts of legislators.
With the parameters set—a single, strong, and independent executive versus a loose conglomerate subservient to the legislature—James Wilson weighed in on his own behalf, trying to strike some sort of balance between the first two speakers. With Rutledge, he “preferred a single magistrate, as giving most energy dispatch and responsibility to the office,” but to appease Sherman, he agreed that the executive should not interfere in legislative matters. Politically, Wilson’s strategy was to disassociate the new executive office from any monarchical associations; this would be a totally new type of executive office, without the historical baggage of European regimes. Wilson “did not consider the prerogatives of the British Monarch as a proper guide in defining the Executive powers”—an argument meant to allay popular fears, and one that would reappear in the ratification debates.
Wilson’s disavowal of monarchy didn’t work on Virginia’s governor, Edmund Randolph. According to Madison’s notes, Randolph “strenuously opposed a unity in the Executive magistracy,” which he regarded “as the foetus of monarchy.” As a sitting
governor, Randolph favored a strong executive but not a single executive. “The fixt genius of the people of America,” he observed, was set against any imitation of the British monarchy. The only way to sell a strong and independent executive department was to vest authority in more than one person.
For all the plausibility of a single executive, this was hardly the proper time to go that route, not with Edmund Randolph so adamantly opposed. Randolph was the chief executive of the largest state, grandson of Virginia’s only knight (Sir John Randolph), and nephew of Peyton Randolph, longtime leader of the House of Burgesses during the prewar protest years and president of both the First and the Second Continental Congresses. When Peyton died suddenly in 1775, Edmund administered his estate and inherited at least some of his political clout. Now, twelve years later, there was a Randolph once again atop the patriots’ hierarchy. Edmund Randolph had been chosen by a delegation that included such luminaries as George Washington, George Mason, and James Madison to present the plan currently under consideration, and to buck him at the outset, with so little consideration, was unthinkable.
