A History of the Presidency

Presidents: A Reference History, (2002) by Henry F. Graff

A History of the Presidency

Henry F. Graff

THE creation of the presidency was one of the grand achievements of the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787. Although the controversy between the large and small states regarding their representation in Congress was the first order of business, the delegates did not delay long in taking up the subject of the executive. Without hesitation they referred to the executive they were establishing as the president. The Constitution names as president the presiding officer of the Senate, but the appellation is understood today to belong alone to the chief executive of the United States. The word presidency to describe the office of president was already current in 1800.

Earliest Presidents

The designation president had long been familiar to Americans; it was used in the colonies and then in the states to denote the chief executive, or chief magistrate, as he was often called. By 1800, though, in all the states the title of president had given way in popular usage to governor. It had not seemed remarkable that from the First Continental Congress in 1774 to the last session of the Second Congress in 1789, the chairman was "President of the Congress" and under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 on, "President of the United States in Congress Assembled." In those fifteen years, fourteen men had held the title, because the term of service was fixed at one year. Perhaps the best remembered of these original presidents is John Hancock, whose famous signature is an ornament of the Declaration of Independence. Still, all of them were mere instruments of the congresses that chose them. Although they took on administrative duties of various kinds because there was no other agency to fulfill them, their powers were not defined; as delegates to the Congress they simply were first among equals. The idea of a separation of power between the executive and the legislature was not yet on the American political horizon.

Fashioning the New Office

As the work of the Convention proceeded, one of the most influential in shaping the executive was James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a Scotsman who had emigrated to America as a young man and had ardently supported the break with the Mother Country; in 1776 he had signed the Declaration of Independence. Wilson had no fear that a new monarchy was in the making, for he was confident, he said, that republican instincts were too well rooted in the public mind. He was convinced that there must be a single magistrate who would give "most energy, dispatch, and responsibility to the office." Wilson keenly favored also the direct popular election of the president, another idea that the Convention was not willing to accept. George Mason, a Virginian, was adamant: allowing the people to choose the president, he insisted, would be "as unnatural as it would be to refer a trial of colors to a blind person."

A second shaper of the emerging presidency was James Madison of Virginia, who, holding the view that Congress could become as oppressive as George III had been, also argued for a strong executive. Such an officer would serve as a counterweight to the legislature which, experience had shown, did not shrink from exerting its power. Madison supported a single seven-year term for the president—yet another idea that was rejected.

Early in September, a Committee on Unfinished Business, chaired by David Brearley of New Jersey, added precise touches to the specifications for the new executive. The proposals were honed in a vigorous but not prolonged series of discussion. The term of office would be four years. The president would be required to be a "natural-born citizen" and at least thirty-five years of age. An electoral college—with the number of each state's electors equaling the number of its congressional representatives plus its two senators—was devised for the election of the president, both to make election indirect and to balance the interests of the large and the small states. The electors chosen by the state legislatures in a manner determined by each state, would vote for two persons, not inhabitants of the same state. While this design gave the advantage to the large states it was assumed, as one delegate said, that "nineteen times in twenty" no individual would win a majority of the votes. The decision would then devolve upon the House of Representatives, where each state, regardless of the size of its delegation, would have one vote.

Electoral College

The electoral college has long been a contentious feature of the presidential elections. The opposition to it was especially clamorous after disputed canvasses, as those of 1824 and 1876 were, and that of 1888 when Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893) won in the electoral college despite receiving 100,000 fewer popular votes than Grover Cleveland (1885–1889; 1893–1897), his chief opponent, and that of 2000, when the Republican, George W. Bush (2001–), defeated Albert Gore although the Democrat received 540,000 more popular votes. In his inaugural address, Bush made no mention of how narrow his victory had been, but later conceded sardonically: "I wasn't exactly a landslide winner." Andrew Jackson (1829–1837), when he was finally in the White House after being bested in the electoral college in the election of 1824, proposed the direct election of presidents by the people in each of his Annual Messages to Congress. (He also wished to restrict presidents to one term of four or six years.)