Mr. President

by Ray Raphael

40. Madison to Washington, April 16, 1787, in Madison, Papers, Congressional Series, 9:384–85.

  41. Madison, Notes, September 7, 8, 12, 14, and 15.

  42. On February 24, 1815, Morris wrote to W. H. Wells, “I was warmly pressed by Hamilton to assist in writing the Federalist, which I declined” (Farrand, Records, 3:421).

  43. Hamilton, Papers, 4:185–86.

  44. Madison, Notes, September 7 and July 17.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE LAUNCH

  1. Washington to Pierce, January 1, 1789, and Washington to Madison, January 2, 1789, in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 1:227, 229; editorial comment, in ibid., 2:152–53; Washington to Henry Lee, September 22, 1788, in Washington, Writings, 30:97–98.

  2. The draft Washington sent to Madison was originally composed by David Humphreys, his longtime aide, then copied and edited by the presumed author. Both the draft and the final speech, with editorial explanation, appear in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 2:152–77.

  3. Maclay, Journal, 9–12.

  4. Ibid., 24–29, 34–36; Senate Journal, 1:23–25, Library of Congress, American Memory, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, http://​memory​.​l​oc​.gov​/ammem​/amlaw​/lwej​.html; Annals, 1:331–37; Stuart to Washington, July 14, 1789, in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 3:199.

  5. Henry Knox to Washington, May 13, 1789, in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 2:289–94.

  6. Washington to Adams, May 10, 1789, in ibid, 245–47; Washington to Madison, May 12, 1789, in ibid, 282; and Washington to David Stuart, July 26, 1789, in ibid., 322–23; Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of George Washington (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974), 26. See also Washington to Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham, January 9, 1790, in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 4:552.

  7. Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 2:165.

  8. Annals, 1:473–78.

  9. Ibid., 479–82.

  10. Ibid., 514–15, 574, 544.

  11. Ibid., 558, 599. The full debate extends from page 473 to 599. The following Monday, the House returned to the issue from a slightly different perspective. The vote to make the secretary of foreign affairs removable by the president implied congressional authority to make such a decision; this made many members uneasy, for they had argued that this was a matter of constitutional interpretation, not a grant by Congress. So, in its stead, they substituted a convoluted motion that implied the power already existed within the Constitution, and this motion passed by approximately the same margin (ibid., 599–608).

  12. Maclay, Journal, 111–16. Thirty-five years later, William Harris Crawford stated (not from firsthand evidence) that Washington “at an early period of his administration” had “gone to the Senate with a project of a treaty to be negotiated, and been present at their deliberations upon it. They debated it and proposed alterations, so that when Washington left the Senate chamber he said he would be damned if he ever went there again.” James Monroe, present during Crawford’s telling of this story, said that some eighteen months after the forming of the government he had gone to the Senate and heard that “something like this had happened.” These tales do not reliably depict what happened on August 22 and 24, 1789, but they do speak to the legacy of what transpired. (James Hart, The American Presidency in Action, 1789: A Study in Constitutional History [New York: Macmillan, 1948], 96, citing The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1876], 6:427.)

  13. The removal debate was not forever settled. In 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited a president, without consent from the Senate, from removing key executive officers who had been appointed by a previous president. This was specifically intended to shift control over Reconstruction from President Andrew Johnson, a foe to the radical Republicans who controlled Congress, to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, their ally. Although the act remained in force for twenty years, it was not effective. Johnson removed Stanton anyway, for which he was impeached, but the Senate acquitted him. Subsequent presidents in those years found ways around the Tenure of Office Act, affirming their control over removal. In 1926, while ruling on a similar law, the Supreme Court declared in Myers v. United States “that the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, insofar as it attempted to prevent the President from removing executive officers who had been appointed by him by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, was invalid.”

  14. Charles C. Thach, The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1922), 157–59. Adding to the confusion was a clause in Article II, Section 2 authorizing the president to “require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices.” On the one hand, this would seem to imply presidential authority over executive officers, but opponents of presidential removal could argue the reverse. Why would the framers grant this one very specific authority if they had intended the president to have absolute control over other officers, his alleged underlings, in all matters?

  15. Washington to the U.S. Senate, August 22, 1789, in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 3:521–25.

  16. Maclay, Journal, 128–31.

  17. Washington to Morris, October 13, 1789, in ibid., 4:176.

  18. Washington, Diaries, 5:452–53, 460–97. For a map of the tour, see Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 4:200–201.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: WASHINGTON AND THE CHALLENGE TO TRANSCENDENT LEADERSHIP

  1. Maclay, Journal, 174.

  2. Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 4:543–46.

  3. Hamilton, “Report on the Public Credit,” January 9, 1790, in Hamilton, Papers, 6:65–168.

  4. Hamilton, Papers, 6:99; Franklin to James Parker, March 20, 1750 (or 1751), in Franklin, Papers, 4:119.

  5. Maclay, Journal, 189, 194.

  6. Ibid., 177.

  7. Randolph to Washington, February 12, 1791, in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 7:337.

  8. Jefferson to Washington, February 15, 1791, in ibid., 352.

  9. Washington to Hamilton, February 16, 1791, in ibid., 357.

  10. Madison to Washington, February 21, 1791, in ibid., 395.

  11. Hamilton to Washington, February 23, 1791, in ibid., 425, 429, 430.

  12. For Hamilton’s personal meeting with Washington, see ibid., 452.

  13. Richard H. Kohn, “The Washington Administration’s Decision to Crush the Whiskey Rebellion,” Journal of American History 59, no. 3 (December 1972): 584; Washington, Writings, 34:28–37.

  14. Washington to Graham, January 9, 1790, in Washington, Papers, Presidential Series, 4:552.

  15. Washington to Burgess Ball, September 25, 1794, in George Washington in the Ohio Valley, ed. Hugh Cleland (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 369–71; Washington, Writings, 34:37.

  16. James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 76; Hamilton, “Defense of the President’s Neutrality Proclamation,” in The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates, ed. Morton J. Frisch (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 3.

  17. Frisch, Pacificus-Helvidius Debates, 1.

  18. Madison to Jefferson, June 19, 1793, in Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 77.

  19. Hamilton, “Pacificus Number 1,” in Frisch, Pacificus-Helvidius Debates, 12–13.

  20. Jefferson to Madison, July 7, 1793, in Madison, Papers, Congressional Series, 15:43; Frisch, Pacificus-Helvidius Debates, 54.

  21. Madison, “Helvidius Number 1,” in Frisch, Pacificus-Helvidius Debates, 59–63.

  22. Ibid., 63–64. Ironically, later writers who treat Hamilton’s views in The Federalist as definitive expositions of the Constitution rather than arguments in favor of the Constitution also treat his Pacificus essays as explanations of what the Constitution really means, even though in this instance the views of Publius and Pacificus are diametrically opposed.

  23. Madison,
Notes, June 1 and August 6.

  24. Ibid., September 7.

  25. Ibid., August 17.

  26. Hamilton, “Pacificus Number 1,” 13.

  27. Senate Executive Journal, April 19, 1794, Library of Congress, American Memory, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 152, http://​memory​.​loc​.gov​/ammem​/amlaw​/lwej​.html.

  28. The full treaty appears in Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), 442–84.

  29. Thomas J. Farnham, “The Virginia Amendments of 1795: An Episode in the Opposition to Jay’s Treaty,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, January 1967, 84–85.

  30. In the nine-day period leading up to its final decision, it received 104 petitions containing 17,400 signatures urging a vote one way or the other. By this time, Federalists had been able to mobilize support among the educated and politically active mercantile class, and slightly more than half the petitions favored the treaty (Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 129, 132).

  31. Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 88–106.

  32. Jefferson to William Branch Giles, December 31, 1795, in Jefferson, Papers, 28:566.

  33. For Hamilton’s authorship of Washington’s Farewell Address, see Hamilton, Papers, 20:168–83, 264–88, 294–303. While the introductory and concluding sections drew on Madison’s draft, the heart of the address, which concerned policy issues, was largely Hamilton’s doing. When Hamilton presented both a reworked draft of Madison’s and Washington’s authorship and one he had written himself, Washington chose Hamilton’s original.

  34. Aurora General Advertiser, July 22, 1795; Hamilton, Papers, 18:471–72, 485–88, and 20:42; Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), 489–91.

  35. Documents from the Democratic-Republican Societies that Washington decried are collected in The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts, ed. Philip S. Foner (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976). Washington’s Farewell Address can be accessed through the Web site of Yale Law School’s Avalon Project, http://​avalon​.​law​.yale​.edu​/​18th​_century​/washing​.asp.

  36. Ames to Oliver Wolcott, September 26, 1796, cited in Alexander DeConde, “Washington’s Farewell, the French Alliance, and the Election of 1796,” in Political Parties in American History, vol. 1, 1789–1828, ed. Winfred E. A. Bernhard (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 160.

  CHAPTER NINE: SYSTEM FAILURE

  1. Hamilton to Wilson, January 25, 1789, in Hamilton, Papers, 5:248.

  2. Madison, Notes, September 4.

  3. After revealing to Wilson his plan to “throw away” seven or eight votes, Hamilton elaborated: “Under this impression I have proposed to friends in Connecticut to throw away two to others in Jersey to throw away an equal number & I submit it to you whether it will not be well to lose three or four in Pennsylvania” (Hamilton to Wilson, January 25, 1789, in Hamilton, Papers, 5:248–49). He then added, “Your advices from the South will serve you as the best guide,” suggesting the network of communication on strategizing for the election extended wider yet. Hamilton also communicated on this matter with Theodore Sedgwick in Massachusetts, James Madison in Virginia (the two were still allies at that point), and no doubt Federalist colleagues in New York (ibid., 236, 247, 250–53).

  4. Richard P. McCormick, The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 41.

  5. James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 149 (Wolcott and Troup letters); Hamilton to King, May 4, 1796, in Hamilton, Papers, 20:158.

  6. Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 156.

  7. Hamilton to ——, November 8, 1796, in Hamilton, Papers, 20:376–77.

  8. John Adams to Abigail Adams, December 26, 1793, in My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, ed. Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2007), 345; Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 160.

  9. Jefferson to Adams, December 28, 1796, and Jefferson to Madison, December 17, 1796, in Jefferson, Papers, 29:235–37, 223.

  10. Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 162.

  11. Jefferson to Madison, January 1, 1797, in Jefferson, Papers, 29:247–51; John Adams to Abigail Adams, December 12, 1796, in Adams, Works, 1:496.

  12. Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 213–15.

  13. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 535.

  14. Jefferson to Edward Rutledge, December 27, 1796, in Jefferson, Papers, 29:232.

  15. Jefferson, The Anas, in Jefferson, Writings, 1:415; Adams, Works, 9:286.

  16. Jefferson to Rutledge, June 24, 1797, in Jefferson, Papers, 29:456–57.

  17. Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://​avalon​.​law​.yale​.edu​/18th_​century​/kenres​.asp and http://​avalon​.​law​.​yale​.edu​/18th_​century​/virres​.asp.

  18. Hamilton, Papers, 22:4–5, 17–19.

  19. Ibid., 9.

  20. Washington to Adams, September 25, 1798, in ibid., 14–15.

  21. Adams to Washington, October 9, 1798, in ibid., 15; Senate Executive Journal, July 2, 1798, Library of Congress, American Memory, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, http://​memory​.​l​oc​.gov​/ammem​/amlaw​/lwej​.html.

  22. William Heth to Hamilton, January 14, 1799, in Hamilton, Papers, 22:415; Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 209; David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 485.

  23. Adams, Works, 9:291; Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 179. Abigail Adams, protective of her husband, was perhaps more forthright in her advocacy of the Sedition Act than John. Before the bill was passed, responding to a wave of personal attacks issued by Benjamin Franklin Bache, she wrote, “In any other country Bache & all his papers would have been seized and ought to be here, but congress are dilly dallying about passing a bill enabling the President to seize suspicious persons, and their papers.” Then, after the bill was passed and Congress had adjourned, she commented, “Their last deeds may be marked amongst their best, an Alien Bill a Sedition Bill and a Bill declaring void, all our treaties and conventions with France” (Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 879n29).

  24. Thomas L. Purvis, Revolutionary America, 1763 to 1800, Almanacs of American Life Series (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 102–3, 124–25.

  25. McCormick, Presidential Game, 60.

  26. Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Free Press, 2007), 78–80; Annals, 10:33, 47 (January 24 and February 14). The original bill, before being amended, awarded the final slot to the chief justice of the Supreme Court. All actions on the bill at various dates, taken from the Annals of Congress, are collected in The Presidential Counts: A Complete Official Record (New York: D. Appleton, 1877), 414–34.

  27. Annals, 10:49, 51 (February 20 and 24).

  28. Ibid., 126–46 (March 28). Note that the supremacy of the states in determining the manner of selecting electors would be severely modified by the Fourteenth Amendment, but at the time, according to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, states held exclusive power in the matter.

  29. Ibid., 146 (March 28).

  30. Larson, Magnificent Catastrophe, 80–83; Aurora, February 19, 1800.

  31. Hamilton, Papers, 24:444–52; Larson, Magnificent Catastrophe, 62–65; McCormick, Presidential Game, 60–62.

  32. Hamilton to Jay, May 7, 1800, in Hamilton, Papers, 24:464–67.

  33. Ames to Christopher Gore, M
arch 5, 1800, and Sedgwick to Rufus King, December 12, 1799, cited in Larson, Magnificent Catastrophe, 84.

  34. Hamilton, Papers, 25:169–234.

  35. Jedediah Morse to Oliver Wolcott Jr., October 27, 1800, quoted in Hamilton, Papers, 25:178.

  36. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 741–43.

  37. Hamilton to Oliver Wolcott Jr., December 16, 1800, and Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick, December 20, 1800, in Hamilton, Papers, 25:257, 270.

  38. Sedgwick to Hamilton, January 10, 1801, in ibid., 311.

  39. Jefferson to Monroe, February 15, 1801, in Jefferson, Papers, 32:594.

  40. McKean to Jefferson, March 19, 1801, quoted in Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, 269. This is McKean’s re-creation of a letter he wrote to Jefferson during the heat of the crisis. Monroe’s role is also discussed in ibid., 268–71. Bayard to John Adams, February 19, 1801, in Larson, Magnificent Catastrophe, 266.

  41. For a listing of presidential vetoes in the first century under the Constitution, see Edward Campbell Mason, The Veto Power: Its Origin, Development, and Function in the Government of the United States (Boston: Ginn, 1890). Although the threat of the veto was present from the start, the first three presidents shied from its use; Washington vetoed only two bills, Adams and Jefferson none.

  CHAPTER TEN: JEFFERSON STRETCHES THE LIMITS

  1. Hamilton to James Bayard, January 16, 1801, in Hamilton, Papers, 25:319–20.

  2. Jefferson, Papers, 1:21 (Summary View), 415–32 (Declaration of Independence), and 359–60 (draft for Virginia Constitution).

  3. Jefferson to Marquis de Lafayette and Jefferson to Baron von Steuben, March 10, 1781, in ibid., 5:113, 120; Jefferson to House of Delegates, May 28, 1781, in ibid., 6:28–29; Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 410–11, 462–65. Notes on the State of Virginia, in Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Willey, 1944), 132, 137.