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Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive - Softcover

Raphael, Ray

 
9780307742384: Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307742385 ISBN 13: 9780307742384
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The dramatic and penetrating story of the political maneuverings and personalities behind the creation of the office of the president, with ramifications that continue to this day.

For the first time, by focusing closely on the dynamic give-and-take at the Constitutional Convention, Ray Raphael reveals how politics and personalities cobbled together a lasting, but flawed, executive office. Remarkably, the hero of this saga is Gouverneur Morris, a flamboyant, peg-legged delegate who pushed through his agenda with amazing political savvy, and not a little deceit. Without Morris’s perseverance, a much weaker American president would be appointed by Congress, serve for seven years, could not be reelected, and have his powers tightly constrained.

Charting the presidency as it evolved during the administrations of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, Raphael shows how, given the Constitution’s broad outlines, the president’s powers could easily be augmented but rarely diminished. Today we see the result—an office that has become more sweeping, more powerful, and more inherently partisan than the framers ever intended. And the issues of 1787—whether the Electoral College, the president’s war powers, or the extent of executive authority—continue to stir our political debates.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ray Raphael’s fifteen books include A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (2001) and Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past (2004). He is also coeditor of Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (2011). Having taught at Humboldt State University and College of the Redwoods and all subjects in a one-room public high school, he is now a full-time researcher and writer. He lives in Northern California.

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Part I

Precedents

(for better and mostly worse)

Chapter One

“Little Gods on Earth”: Monarchs and Their Governors

Most of the men who pondered James Wilson’s motion in silence had been raised to honor and love their king. Benjamin Franklin spent his early years under a female monarch, Queen Anne, but for the rest the protector and benefactor whom they were taught to include in their prayers had been either King George I, who ascended to the throne in 1714, or his son, King George II, who succeeded him in 1727.

All but a handful of delegates were old enough to remember the death of King George II and the ascension of his twenty-­two-­year-­old grandson, King George III. The date was October 25, 1760, shortly before the first hints of colonial unrest. The youngest, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, had been born just a week and two days before, while Benjamin Franklin, by far the oldest, was fifty-­four years old. Respected internationally for his scientific achievements, Franklin was then in England, politicking on behalf of Pennsylvanians who were trying to limit the special privileges and power of the Penn family, the colony’s proprietors. The British Crown was a likely ally in this endeavor, he reasoned. If Pennsylvania could be changed from a proprietorship to a royal colony, it would be freed from the Penns’ grip. Thus, for the most practical of reasons, Benjamin Franklin on the eve of the Revolution was a Royalist. He broke off from vacationing with his son William to attend King George III’s coronation.

George Washington, aged twenty-­eight in 1760, and his neighbor George Mason, then thirty-­four, had reasons of their own to seek the Crown’s good graces. Mason held shares in the Ohio Company of Virginia, which needed the approval of the British king to stake claims in the North American interior. Washington, while serving as the company’s surveyor back in 1753, had explored its alleged holdings west of the Appalachian Mountains, and the following year he led an assault on a small party of French scouts at Jumonville Glen, a minor skirmish that by 1760 had turned into a global war. Had the king’s army not come to their aid, Virginia militiamen under Colonel Washington would have been no match for their French and Indian opponents. To acquire land and defend it, Washington, Mason, and all other colonial speculators were beholden to both the legal authority and the military might wielded by King George II or King George III or whoever else might sit on the British throne.

Robert Morris, aged twenty-­six at the ascension of King George III, had spent the first half of his life in Liverpool, England. As a teenager he settled in Philadelphia, where he rose quickly to a partnership in a prominent mercantile firm, and by the time of George III’s ascension the French and Indian War was treating this merchant prince well. By selling scarce and strategic goods, and also through state-­sponsored piracy known as privateering, Morris was setting himself on a trajectory that would make him the richest man in America, but he could not possibly ply his trade across the high seas without the protection of HMS Vanguard, HMS Sutherland, HMS Nightingale, and all the rest of His Majesty’s ships in the king’s navy. Robert Morris had every reason to bless the power of the British monarch.

So it went, down the line.

In 1760, James Wilson, the delegate who offered the motion for a single executive, was an eighteen-­year-­old student living in Scotland. Five years later, when he immigrated to America, Wilson would not have to alter his allegiance to the British Crown, for he would still be living safely within the king’s realm.

James Madison, aged nine, was being raised to believe that the British monarch was not only the head of state but also the embodiment of religious authority, the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” Perhaps the lad was still too young to realize how closely his family’s tobacco-­producing plantation depended on the Crown’s ability to hold the British Empire together, but that would come with time.

Gouverneur Morris, aged eight, had no reason to question his privileged position in the British social order. His father was in fact a titled aristocrat, the Lord of Morrisania, which comprised much of the present-­day Bronx in New York City. Although Gouverneur was not the firstborn son and would never himself become a lord, he was still greatly privileged, thanks to the traditional British hierarchy, with a monarch at the top.

Of all the delegates other than Franklin, only Alexander Hamilton, aged three or five at the time (the record is unclear), was not imbued in his earliest years with reverence for King George I or II. An illegitimate child in the West Indies, Hamilton was tutored at home by his French Huguenot mother and by a local Sephardic Jewess, neither of whom were likely to have encouraged adoration of the British monarch. For all the rest, however, professing gratitude and pledging allegiance were taught early and renewed often, at every stage of their political education.

To our modern sensibilities, the hierarchical relationship between British subjects and their monarch in 1760 might appear overly submissive, but as people viewed the matter then, subjects received as much as they gave. Sir William Blackstone, the mid-­eighteenth-­century jurist who defined the British polity in his authoritative Commentaries on the Laws of England, explained that allegiance was “the tie, or ligamen, which binds the subject to the king, in return for that protection which the king affords the subject.” The bond was symbiotic.

Protection took two forms. Most obviously, as commander of armies and navies, the monarch was expected to shield subjects from any and all external enemies. This was particularly apparent for British colonials in 1760, who felt they had been “freed from the invasions of a savage foe” when the king’s forces defeated the French in Canada.

Equally important, however, was the guarantee against lawlessness or tyranny within the monarch’s realm. The Crown was legally present in all courts; any violation of the law was an offense to his power and authority, to be punished accordingly. Further, the Crown was charged with guaranteeing the people’s liberties. George II, in his first speech to Parliament in 1727, proclaimed that it was his special duty “to secure to all my subjects, the full enjoyment of their religious and civil rights.”

To protect the people from foreign foes and domestic disorders, a British monarch needed to possess formidable, across-­the-­board powers. The monarch was the commander in chief of the armed forces, the head of state, the pinnacle of the titled hierarchy, the wealthiest individual, and the largest landowner. When new lands were added to the empire, they immediately became the king’s property, to be dispensed at his pleasure.

The monarch also headed the official state religion, the Church of England, and even with respect to the affairs of state he or she was said to govern by the divine grace of God. When King George II died in 1760, the governor, council, and house of representatives from Massachusetts welcomed his successor by “beseeching god (by whom Kings do Reign) to bless the Royal King George the Third with long and happy years to reign over us.”

But with power such as this, couldn’t the Crown also deprive the people of their liberties?

Of course it could, and it had. King James I, who succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603, described kings as “little Gods on Earth.” Parliament at that point in time held no...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307742385
ISBN 13 
9780307742384
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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