The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  In the final vote, Trumbull and six other Republican senators destroyed their careers rather than give Congress this ultimate power, which a majority was eager to grasp. The vote, thirty-five for conviction, nineteen against, was one short of the needed two-thirds majority.7

  Although Johnson was acquitted, he emerged from the ordeal a shattered president, who barely ventured out of the White House for the rest of his term. Thaddeus Stevens’s dictum that Congress and the people were identical became the virtual law of the land. “The executive department of a republic like ours should be subordinate to the legislative department,” Ohio Senator John Sherman remarked a few years later, as if he were discussing something as obvious as the changing of the seasons.

  Forty years of weak presidents and an ever more powerful Congress began. Of thirteen pieces of major legislation passed between 1873 and 1897, presidential initiative was responsible for only one. Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts remarked that most senators of this era would have considered a message from the White House, asking their vote on a bill, a “personal affront.” If a senator visited the White House, it was “to give, not to receive advice.” Thomas Jefferson would have loved every year of this era. George Washington would have been appalled.8

  With this lofty attitude came a paradoxical hallmark of congressional government—rampant corruption. Credit Mobilier, a holding company that was organized to build the Union Pacific Railroad, purchased congressmen and senators in wholesale lots. The Russian ambassador sold Alaska to the United States with similar tactics. With power the only test of legitimacy, the Senate became the headquarters of political bosses such as Roscoe Conkling of New York, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan. Presiding over state and city machines fueled by immense amounts of graft, they inspired Henry Adams to remark in his novel, Democracy, that the United States “had a government of the people, by the people, for the senators.” Only half in jest, Mark Twain wrote: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.”9

  Viewing this scene with high-minded dismay in 1884, a college professor named Woodrow Wilson put an astute finger on the fundamental flaw of congressional government: it was impossible to fix responsibility for decisions emanating from a body composed of hundreds of politicians. “Nobody stands sponsor the policy of the government,” Wilson wrote. “A dozen men originate it; a dozen compromises twist and alter it; a dozen officers whose names are scarcely known outside Washington put it into execution.”10 Wilson decided the only answer to congressional government was a strong presidency. “The president is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can,” he concluded. Wilson might have realistically added: “As big as President George Washington.” But he, too, had lost touch with the reality of Washington’s presidency.11

  For almost twenty years after Wilson declared the need for a strong president, his words remained in the realm of prophecy. The presidents of the late nineteenth century fought an essentially defensive battle against congressional attempts to further erode their office. In these struggles, it became increasingly clear that public opinion tended to favor the president, who was elected by all the people and could, with considerable effectiveness, claim to be their spokesman.

  In 1901, the assassination of William McKinley brought Theodore Roosevelt into the White House and a new assertion of presidential power began. Roosevelt’s initiatives in foreign policy, such as the creation of the Panama Canal, his dispatch of the Great White Fleet on a world tour, his challenges to the country’s “malefactors of great wealth,” left Congress gasping in his wake. Executive orders created national forests from public lands, initiated anti-trust prosecutions, and settled a coal strike by threatening to seize the mines.

  Roosevelt identified himself with the “Jackson-Lincoln theory of the presidency,” maintaining it was “not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded, unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or the laws.” How ironic—and sad—that even this gifted man, who wrote as well as read serious history books, did not realize he was walking in George Washington’s footsteps. It is one more proof of the devastating way Thomas Jefferson wrote Washington’s presidency out of America’s meaningful past.12

  The argument between presidents and Congress by no means ended with Theodore Roosevelt. His successor in a larger-than-life-size presidency was his cousin Franklin Roosevelt, who seized command of Congress and the nation from the moment he took office in the Depression-wracked America of 1933. He had obviously absorbed the example of his cousin Theodore. In an interview with the New York Times on November 13, 1932, a week after his election, FDR said: “The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That is the least of it…It is preeminently a place of moral leadership….Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are all bogged up or lose our way.” George Washington would have applauded these words.

  Along with moral leadership and a tidal wave of legislative proposals, Roosevelt added a new ingredient to the president’s relationship with Congress—the merciless use of the veto. He rejected 631 measures of Congress—more than all 31 of his predecessors together. Presidential leadership, as Roosevelt practiced it, was by no means synonymous with harmony. It was often accompanied by the sound of gnashing congressional teeth.13 During World War II, Roosevelt expanded the powers of the presidency to global proportions, creating dozens of federal agencies spending billions of dollars with blank checks supplied by a passive Congress. As the war wound down, there were signs that many senators and representatives in both parties were unhappy with the endless stream of diktats from the White House. If FDR had lived, he would have faced a Congress as surly and hungry for power as the one Andrew Johnson had confronted.

  The lawmakers lost no time trying to intimidate Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S Truman, ignoring virtually all his legislative proposals. When the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in 1946, Senator William Fulbright suggested Truman should appoint a Republican as secretary of state and resign. With no vice president, this putative leader of the opposition would become president. This was congressional government beyond even Thomas Jefferson’s dreams. Compounding the irony, it was also an attempt to transform the American presidency into a British model.

  This fantasy of congressional supremacy was aborted by a snort of contempt from Truman—and by a new historical phenomenon: the Cold War. The confrontation with Communism institutionalized the president’s role as a world leader who towered above Congress. Over the next two decades, the executive branch expanded exponentially. The presidential budget rose from $10 million to $38 billion. By the late 1950s, it was eight hundred times larger than Congress’s budget.14

  By 1964, Congress was considered an almost superfluous department of the American government. Senator Joseph A. Clark of Pennsylvania pointed this out in plaintive detail in his 1964 book, Congress, The Sapless Branch. George Washington would have been deeply troubled by this imbalance. He never tried to deny the importance of Congress’s role in our government.

  Under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, executive power reached a new zenith. While waging war in Vietnam with the thinnest of congressional mandates, Johnson was the first chief executive who chose not to spend huge amounts of money voted by Congress for pet projects such as federal highway and housing programs—in 1967, a staggering $10.6 billion, 6.7% of the federal budget. The policy, called impoundment, was continued by Richard Nixon with even more ruthless regularity. By 1973, Nixon had impounded funds for over one hundred federal programs, arguing that it was within his constitutional power as the guardian of the nation’s fiscal stability.15

  Nixon’s overwhelming electoral victory in 1972 over Senator George McGovern, a leading congressional spokesman against the war in Vietnam, seemed to zoom his presidency into the very empyrean of political power—until a seemingly insignificant burglary
and the White House’s fumbling attempt to cover it up produced the political earthquake called Watergate.

  Once more, Congress laid the presidency low and our second era of congressional government began. In quick succession, after abandoning South Vietnam, the lawmakers asserted jurisdiction over the CIA, and in the War Powers Act, put the president on a sixty-day leash if he sent troops into a conflict without their approval. In the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, they arrogated unto themselves total power to decide how much to spend and spend and spend.16

  In 1976, when the voters sent a Democrat to the White House, Congress made it clear that far more than a clash of political parties was behind their revolt against Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford. The Democratic chairman of the House International Affairs Committee, Clement Zablocki, announced: “We are not going to roll over and play dead just because Jimmy Carter is president.” Before his first year in office was over, Carter was complaining vehemently about Congressional interference and usurpation.

  This central issue of the Great Divide—the relationship between the president and Congress—continues to trouble voters and candidates and incumbents. Some historians, virtually echoing Thomas Jefferson, warn against an imperial president. But there are equally strong reasons to worry about an imperial congress. There is no final answer to this problem. President Washington confronted several attempts to assert congressional power in foreign policy, most of them led by his former partner in the creation of the presidency, James Madison. Washington refused to yield an iota of his authority in this crucial realm. He simultaneously remained respectful of Congress’s rights and powers, and never attempted to interfere with them, even when they were investigating one of his most valued cabinet members, Alexander Hamilton.

  A history of Washington’s presidency should become required reading for every man and woman in America. Equally important is the history of our first unWashington president, Thomas Jefferson. A knowledge of the alternatives they offered the nation will be an invaluable resource as America faces a future in which the Great Divide will undoubtedly create new problems. Ultimately, our ability to resolve these challenges can and should rest on George Washington’s visionary conviction of the importance—even the necessity—of the president’s role as the nation’s elected leader. Thomas Jefferson’s fear of excessive presidential power and his passionate belief in the importance of individual freedom can also play a part in the eternally fascinating pursuit of that elusive goal, the happiness of the United States of America.

  Acknowledgments

  I have long been a believer in the adage that every historian stands on the shoulders of previous historians. That is especially true for this book. It was inspired by a unique historical treasure trove created by a great scholar of the American past—James Morton Smith, director emeritus of Delaware’s Henry Francis du Pont Museum. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Dr. Smith collected and edited The Republic of Letters, The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Along with chapters of his wise commentary, these three green covered volumes contain copies of the 1,250 letters that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison exchanged between 1776 and 1826. Dr. Smith gave me a set of these books when I invited him to speak at the New York American Revolution Round Table twenty years ago. Nothing can approach the revelations I discovered while reading and rereading their pages.

  The Great Divide is also a culmination of many years of research for earlier books such as 1776: Year of Illusions, Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge, and The Perils of Peace, America’s Struggle for Survival After Yorktown. In these books, George Washington grew steadily in my mind as a figure not merely of symbolic importance, but as a leader who deserves to be consulted and pondered by anyone who seeks to understand the American presidency.

  In 1970, President Harry S Truman awoke me to the centrality of this office when he told me one night in Independence, Missouri, that he considered the presidency the greatest political achievement of the mind of man—and George Washington was responsible for its creation. Without the man from Mount Vernon’s insistence on the need for the president to be coequal with Congress, Mr. Truman declared, the office’s other progenitors, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, could never have persuaded the Americans of 1787 to risk giving so much power to a single individual.

  My research on Thomas Jefferson began a long time ago, when I decided to write an “intimate” biography that would focus largely on his personal relationships with his wife, his daughters, and his grandchildren. The inspiration for this book came from The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson by his granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph. That book had an extraordinary impact on its readers. It revived Jefferson’s reputation, which was in tatters after the Civil War. Both sides had found grave fault with his views on secession and slavery. Rather than attempt to deal with these complexities, the book portrayed the private Jefferson, a man who unquestionably had enormous charm.

  For The Great Divide, I am in more immediate debt to my wife, Alice, a gifted writer in her own right, who has been the same source of advice and encouragement that she has been in my previous books. Also important has been my youngest son, Richard Fleming, whose computer skills and readiness to explore the digital history available on the Internet have once more been a great resource. Similar gratitude goes to another researcher—now also a well-praised historian—Steven Bernstein. He has helped me, with the same dependability and intelligence he displayed in earlier books.

  Four librarians deserve my special thanks. First is Mary Thompson, Research Historian of the Fred W. Smith National Library at Mount Vernon. Few scholars in the nation can match her knowledge of George Washington’s life—or her readiness to share the documentation for it. Next is Mark Bartlett (and his entire staff) at the New York Society Library, a unique repository of books and tradition that numbers George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay among its early borrowers. Next is Lewis Daniels, head of the Westbrook, CT public library, who combines the high tradition of American libraries with his combination of courtesy and enthusiasm for the nation’s history. Finally, Gregory Gallagher, chief librarian at the Century Association in New York, who has helped me find obscure books with remarkable skill and rapidity.

  I also want to thank my editor at Da Capo Press, Robert Pigeon, whose advice and insights have often added depth to these pages. Similar gratitude goes to my agent, Deborah Grosvenor. There are many others who have my thanks—particularly fellow historians with whom I have discussed aspects of this narrative. All these people and books have been part of what I hope is a new synthesis of events and ideas that will help us better understand the presidency and the conflicts that this crucial office has stirred in the emergence of the United States of America.

  Notes

  FRONTISPIECE QUOTATIONS

  1. The Papers of George Washington, Digital Edition (Hereafter PGW Digital), ed Theodore J. Crackel, Charlottesville, Va 2008. Letter to Henry Knox, February 25, 1787.

  2. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Digital Edition (hereafter PTJ Digital), ed Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney, Charlottesville, Va 2008-2014. Jefferson to William Short, January 3, 1793.

  3. The Papers of James Madison, Digital Edition (hereafter PJM Digital), ed J.C.A. Stagg. Charlottesville, Va 2010. Speech at the Constitutional Convention, June 26. 1787.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler. Life, Journal and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler (2 vols, Cincinnati 1888), 2: 56-57.

  2. Stuart Leibiger, Founding Friendship, George Washington, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, (Charlottesville, Va: 1999), 1-9

  3. George Washington to John Jay, Aug. 15, 1786, PGW Digital.

  4. Peter H. Henriques, Realistic Visionary, A Portrait of George Washington, (Charlottesville:, 2006).

  5. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, Dec. 28, 1796, PTJ Digital.

  CHAPTER 1


  1. Joseph Manca, George Washington’s Eye, Landscape, Architecture and Design at Mount Vernon, (Baltimore, Md 2012), 31. This book is an extraordinarily good way of seeing Washington through the house he designed to suit his own needs, with a constant emphasis on “republican simplicity.”

  2. John C. Fitzpatrick, editor. The Writings of George Washington, (Washington, DC 1937, Vol. 26), 232.

  3. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington, (New York: 1948-57), Vol. 3 Planter and Patriot, 520, GW to RH Lee Aug. 29, 1775. Letter to Lund Washington, Aug. 20, 1775. Letter to Joseph Reed, WGW IV, 165, 240-41.

  4. Freeman, Vol. IV, 194, note 118.

  5. Dave R. Palmer, George Washington’s Military Genius, (Washington DC: 2012, 126. Lt. General Palmer is a former superintendent of West Point.

  6. GW to Major General Wm Heath, Dec. 18, 1776, PGW Digital.

  7. Letters of Delegates to Congress (hereafter, LDC) Vol. 8, Lovell to Samuel Adams, Jan. 20, 1778 (Library of Congress, 1976-2000), 618-19.

  8. Philip Pappas, Renegade Revolutionary, The Life of General Charles Lee (New York: 2014), 256-273

  9. Speech to the Officers of the Army, Mar 15, 1783, George Washington Writings, The Library of America, 1997, 10-11.

  10. GW to Joseph Jones, May 31, 1780. WGW, Vol 18, 443-4. Also see GW to Madison, Nov. 5, 1786. “Thirteen sovereignties pitted against each other and all tugging at the federal head will soon bring ruin on the whole.”

  11. Henry Knox to George Washington, Oct. 23, 1786, PGW Digital.

  12. Washington to Henry Lee, Oct. 31, 1786, Writings of Washington, Vol. 29, 34.

  13. GW to JM, Nov. 5, 1786, WGW, Vol. 29, 51.

  14. Leibiger, Founding Friendship, 61.

  15. Walter Stahr, John Jay, Founding Father (New York: 2010), 215-217.

  16. Papers of James Madison, PJM Digital.