Mr. President (8 page)

That’s where matters stood on Friday, June 1, when Secretary Jackson read to them Randolph’s seventh resolution:

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 Wilson 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.
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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:

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.

On the other hand, delegates were not ready to cede to Randolph and opt for multiple executives, an unconventional and unproven construct that lacked definition. What might a plural executive look like? Would it comprise the heads of separate departments, like the secretaries of finance, war, and marine in the early 1780s, each administering his own realm? That system had not received rave reviews, and the office of finance, which was key to all the rest, had been abandoned. Or would it be more like an executive council, some group of three or five or a dozen men deciding matters in concert? That system was currently in effect in Pennsylvania, where a popularly elected twelve-man council was charged with all executive functions, but this had little appeal for Pennsylvania delegates James Wilson, Robert Morris, and Gouverneur Morris, who had been trying for years to overturn it. Before even considering
Randolph’s preference for a multiple-executive office, delegates would have to figure out what that meant, and even if they devised a scheme that appeared to work on paper, they would be on uncharted territory. Better just to move on and leave this thorny issue for later. Madison’s concise notes convey the tone: “Mr. Wilson’s motion for a single magistrate was postponed by common consent, the Committee [of the Whole] seeming unprepared for any decision on it.”

Seizing the moment to start anew, James Madison examined the broader picture, as he would often do over the following weeks and months. Wouldn’t it be “proper,” he asked, “before a choice should be made between a unity and plurality in the Executive, to fix the extent of the Executive authority”? What the executive was empowered to
do
might shed important light on this and related matters, such as who should select him/them and how long he/they should serve. Madison then proposed to imbue the executive with powers “to carry into execution the national laws” and “to appoint offices in cases not otherwise provided for.” With little dissent, the delegations agreed. Executive powers were to be derived from the legislature, save only for some unnamed appointments “not otherwise provided for.”