Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 Page 12

  In the 1770s Adams had been at the forefront of the resistance movement and had acquired his reputation as a great patriot from his role in engineering the Continental Congress’s movement into revolution. He had been the principal draftsman of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, and at the end of the Revolutionary War he was the first minister sent to the former mother country. On his return from the Court of St. James’s in 1789, many thought he had borrowed some of its monarchical attitudes. The three volumes of his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States had recently appeared, and they raised doubts about Adams’s republicanism. England, for example, had become for Adams as much of a republic as America was, “a monarchical republic, it is true; but still a republic.” In the same way, he labeled the government of his home state of Massachusetts “a limited Monarchy.” So too, he said, was the new national government “a limited Monarchy” or “a monarchical republic,” like England.103

  Although Adams protested that he was “as much a republican as I was in 1775,” many of his ideas seemed out of place in the America of 1789.104 Since most of his fellow Americans had recently abandoned Adams’s traditional conception of a mixed republic with its balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, his talk of “monarchical republics” was bound to confuse people and raise suspicions. The Senate, over which he as vice-president presided, soon became aware of what a curious person their new leader was.105

  On April 30, 1789, the day of the president’s inauguration, Vice-President Adams described Washington’s address as “his most gracious Speech”—the words customarily applied to speeches of the British king. Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, the son of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigrants, thought himself to be the voice of simple republicanism. He saw Adams’s phrase as the first step in the ladder of ascent to royalty, and he objected strenuously. Adams replied that this was just a simple phrase borrowed from British governmental practices and that American colonials had after all enjoyed a great deal of happiness using those practices; all he wanted, he said, was a respectable government. He suggested that perhaps he had been abroad in the 1780s too long and the temper of the American people had changed. At any rate, he said, if he had known in 1775 that it would come to this, that the American people would not accept a dignified government, “he never would have drawn his Sword.”106

  Adams became even more agitated over what to call the president, an issue that occupied much of the Senate’s time during the first month of its existence. Even before coming to New York, Adams had discussed with colleagues in Massachusetts the proper title for the president. After all, the governor of the state carried the title of “His Excellency.” Should not the president have a superior title? “A royal or at least a princely title,” he told a friend, “will be found indispensably necessary to maintain the reputation, authority, and dignity of the President.” Only something like “His Highness, or, if you will, His Most Benign Highness” would do.107

  Others shared Adams’s concern for a proper title for the president. Washington himself was said to have initially favored “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.”108 After all, the Dutch leaders of the States-General of the United Provinces called themselves “Their High Mightinesses,” and they were supposedly citizens of a republic. Some of the senators actually expressed their attraction to monarchy—very aware that what they said remained within the Senate chamber. Senator Ellsworth of Connecticut pointed out that divine authority and the Bible sanctioned kingly government, and Senator Izard of South Carolina stressed the antiquity of monarchy. Finding value in kings was all too much for the zealous republican Senator Maclay. He was on his feet many times in opposition to what he saw as “the foolerries fopperies finerries and pomp of Royal etiquette.”109

  But under Vice-President Adams’s prodding, the senators continued to search for the proper title for Washington. “Excellency,” suggested Izard. “Highness,” said Lee. “Elective Highness,” said another. Anything but mere “President.” It seemed too common, said Ellsworth, and Adams agreed: there were after all “Presidents of Fire Companies and of a Cricket Club.” What will other governments think of a president whose titles are less than those of even our own diplomatic corps? asked Adams. “What will the Common People of Foreign Countries, what will the Sailors and Soldiers say [about] George Washington, President of the United States?” His answer: “They will despise him to all eternity.” Eventually, a Senate committee reported the title “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.” When Jefferson learned of Adams’s obsession with titles and the Senate’s action, he could only shake his head and recall Benjamin Franklin’s now-famous characterization of Adams as someone who was “always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.”110

  Madison in the House was troubled by all this senatorial talk of monarchy and majesty. He thought that this senatorial project of titles, if successful, would “give a deep wound to our infant government.”111 Madison, in fact, was emerging as the principal conscience of popular republicanism in the new government. Although in 1787 he had certainly wanted a stronger national government and had very much feared democracy in the state legislatures, he had never wavered in his commitment to republican simplicity and to the people’s ultimate sovereignty; and he certainly had not anticipated the monarch-like government that some Federalists were now promoting.

  With others in the House warning that a presidential title would be the first step down the road to “a crown and hereditary succession,” Madison had little difficulty in getting his fellow congressmen to vote for the simple republican title “President of the United States.”112 The Senate was forced to go along. By defeating the Senate’s royalist impulses, Madison hoped to “shew to the friends of Republicanism,” he told his friend Jefferson, “that our new Government was not meant to substitute either Monarchy or Aristocracy, and that the genius of the People is as yet adverse to both.”113 As much as anyone in the First Congress, Madison was responsible for whatever plain and unpretentious tone the new government acquired.

  Silly as this debate over titles may seem, there were important issues at stake. By creating a single strong president, the new federal Constitution had undoubtedly moved America back toward the abandoned English monarchy. But just how far back toward monarchy should Americans go? Just how royal and kingly should America become? How much of the English monarchical model should the new government adopt? Despite the defeat of the Senate’s proposal for royal-sounding titles, these questions would not go away and the tendencies toward monarchism remained.

  It was natural for some Americans to look to the British monarchy for guidance in putting together their new state, especially since many of them thought America, like any young state, was bound to mature socially, become more unequal and class-ridden, and thus become more like the former mother country. But the Revolution had been a republican rejection of the monarchism of Great Britain, and therefore it was just as natural for other Americans to resent having British customs and institutions, as one congressman said, “hung about our necks in all our public proceedings, and observations from their practice perpetually sounding in our ears.”114 It was as if the Revolution against Great Britain were still going on.

  WASHINGTON WAS RELIEVED that the controversy over his title had ended with the simple “President of the United States.” Yet he was still faced with making the institution of the presidency strong and energetic. In fact, the presidency is the powerful office it is in large part because of Washington’s initial behavior. Even in the simple matter of issuing a thanksgiving proclamation in the fall of 1789, Washington underlined the national character of the presidency. Some congressmen thought that their request to commemorate a day of thanksgiving would be sent to the governors of the separate states and carried out by them, as had been done under the Confederation. But Washington saw that issuing the proclamat
ion directly to the people would enhance the authority of the national government.115 He always understood power and how to use it. He had led an army and was running a plantation; indeed, he had more people working for him at Mount Vernon than he initially did in the federal government.

  From the outset, he knew what the new government had to do. As he said as early as January 1789, his goal as president would be “to extricate my country from the embarrassments in which it is entangled, through want of credit; and to establish a general system of policy, which if pursued will insure permanent felicity to the Commonwealth.”116 Although he surrounded himself with brilliant advisors, including Hamilton as secretary of the treasury and Jefferson as secretary of state, he was always his own man and was determined that the government would speak with a single voice. He gave a great deal of authority to his cabinet ministers but always remained in control. He passed on letters he received to the appropriate department heads, and they referred letters they received to him. “By this means,” Jefferson recalled in an 1801 memo to his own new cabinet, Washington was “always in accurate possession of all facts and proceedings in every part of the Union, and to whatsoever department they related; he formed a central point for the different branches; preserved a unity of object and action among them,” and assumed responsibility for everything that was done.117 Lacking the genius and intellectual confidence of the advisors, he consulted them often and moved slowly and cautiously to judgment; but when ready to act, he acted decisively, and in the case of controversial decisions he did not second-guess himself. He created an independent role for the president and made it the dominant figure in the government.

  During the spring and summer of 1789 Congress created three executive departments—for foreign affairs, war, and finance. It soon followed with legislation establishing the offices of attorney general, postmaster general, superintendent of the land office, and the governor of the Northwest Territory. Although Congress created the departments and their heads and the president appointed other officers with the advice and consent of the Senate, many understood that these officers were to be merely agents of the president, in whom complete executive authority was vested. In other words, the president resembled a king, and his ministers spoke in his name and with his authority.

  Others had different opinions of how the executive should be organized. Although the president appointed federal officials with the consent of the Senate, the Constitution said nothing about how they were to be removed, other than by impeachment. Some thought that all officers served during good behavior and could be removed only by impeachment. Others presumed that the president could remove his appointees but only with the Senate’s approval. Hamilton in Federalist No. 77 had stated that the consent of the Senate would be necessary to remove officials as well as appoint them and that this check would contribute to the stability of the government. Many in the First Congress agreed. “A new President,” warned Theodorick Bland of Virginia in May 1789, “might, by turning out the great officers, bring about a change of the ministry, and throw the affairs of the Union into disorder: would not this, in fact, make the President a monarch, and give him absolute power over all the great departments of Government?”118

  Madison saw at once that denying the president the sole power of removal would create “a two-headed monster” and would prevent the president from having effective control over his administration. Despite congressional talk about the president gaining kingly powers, Madison in the summer of 1789 was far less fearful of monarchy than of legislative encroachment on the executive. “In our government,” he said, it was “less necessary to guard against the abuse in the Executive Department . . . because it is not the stronger branch of the system, but the weaker.”119 Trusting Washington as he did, Madison fought strenuously for the right of the president and the president alone to remove from office all those appointed to executive positions. More than anyone else, he brought the members of the House around to accepting the idea of a strong and independent president, one who had full responsibility for seeing that the laws were faithfully executed.

  But the Senate was not so easily convinced of the president’s independence. It had a role in the appointing process and jealously guarded its prerogatives. Many senators simply assumed that because they consented to the appointment of executive officers they likewise had to consent to their removal. Other senators, however, were fearful that the Constitution would fail for lack of executive authority and thus were willing to concede the president’s sole responsibility for removing officers. They actually invoked the example of the king of England—arguing that the president should have at least the same powers as the English crown. The Senate was evenly divided on the issue; only after Vice-President Adams’s tie-breaking vote did it concede the right of the president to remove executive officials without its advice and consent.120

  The consequences of such a close vote were immense: on it turned the future nature of the presidency. Indeed, as Madison noted in the House, the Congress’s decisions on this issue of removal “will become the permanent exposition of the Constitution; and on a permanent exposition of the Constitution will depend the genius and character of the whole government.”121 If the Senate had been able to claim the right of approving the removal of presidential appointees, executive officials would have become dependent on the will of the Senate, and the United States would have created something similar to the English system of cabinet responsibility to Parliament.122

  No one was more keenly aware of the importance of precedents being set than Washington. “Many things which appear of little importance in themselves and at the beginning, may have great and durable consequences for their having been established at the commencement of a new general Government,” he warned. Better to get things right at the start, he said, than to try to alter them later “after they shall have been confirmed by habit.”123

  He was especially concerned with the relations between the president and the Senate. He envisioned the Senate’s role in advising and consenting to appointments and treaties as that of a council, similar to what he had been used to as commander-in-chief, and thus he assumed that much of the advice and consent would be oral. The Senate was more uncertain about dealing with the president in person, for fear of being overawed. President Washington was willing to concede that appointments might be handled in writing, but he believed that in matters of treaties oral communications between the Senate and the president were “indispensably necessary.”124

  In August 1789 the president went to the Senate to get its advice and consent to a treaty he was negotiating with Southern Indian tribes. Adams, who presided, hastily read each section of the treaty and then asked the senators for their opinion. Because of noise from the streets, some of the senators could not hear what was read, and they requested to have the treaty read again. Then the senators began debating each section of the treaty, with Washington impatiently glaring at them. Some of them felt intimidated. Finally one senator moved that the treaty and all the accompanying documents that the president had brought with him be submitted to a committee for study. Washington started up in what Senator Maclay called “a Violent fret.” In exasperation, the president cried, “This defeats every purpose of my coming here.” He calmed down, but when he finally left the Senate chamber, he was overheard to say he would “be damned if he ever went there again.” He did try two days later, but neither the president nor the Senate enjoyed this personal confrontation. The advice part of the Senate’s role in treaty making was dropped.125 When the president issued his Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793, he did not bother to ask for the consent of the Senate, and he thus further established the executive as the dominant authority in the conduct of foreign affairs.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT MINISTER in the new administration was the secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

  Hamilton, aged thirty-four in 1789, impressed everyone he met.126 Although he was only about five feet seven in height and slight in build, he had a
commanding air, and men and women alike were readily attracted to him. In many respects he was a natural republican: born in the West Indies as the illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant (“the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,” sneered John Adams), he had no interest in the monarchical claims of blood and family. He was rather more of a natural aristocrat than even Thomas Jefferson: at the beginning he had no estate or family to support him; his genius was all he had. And what genius it was! The worldly French politician and diplomat Talleyrand who knew kings and emperors ranked Hamilton as one of the two or three great men of the age.

  At age sixteen Hamilton was employed as a clerk in a merchant’s firm in St. Croix. But he yearned to escape from his “grov’ling” position—ideally by a war in which he could risk his life and win honor. Merchants and friends in St. Croix recognized the boy’s remarkable abilities and in 1772 sponsored his education in a preparatory school in New Jersey and then at King’s College (later Columbia). He wrote some brilliant Revolutionary pamphlets while still a college student and soon was in the midst of the war he had longed for. He took part in the retreat of Washington’s army across New Jersey and so impressed Washington that the commander-in-chief invited the young captain to join his staff as an aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He had what one of his West Indian sponsors called a “laudable Ambition to Excell,” and more than most young men of the age he wanted the glory and fame that came from military heroism.127 More than once he courted death on the battle-field and took risks that left other officers shaking their heads at his foolhardy valor. In 1781 he told Washington he would resign his commission unless he was given a command. Under this pressure, Washington yielded and made him a battalion and eventually a brigade commander at York-town in October 1781. Hamilton talked his way into leading a major bayonet assault on the British redoubts, and he made the most of his opportunity for gallantry, being first over the redoubt. The attack was successful, and though seven French and American soldiers were killed and fifteen wounded, Hamilton emerged unscathed.128