Mr. President

They had been meeting together in the east chamber of the Pennsylvania State House for a week, and their time had not been wasted. The delegates were almost at full strength—forty-three men from eleven states—and they were working their way down the list of proposals suggested by Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia. Having dwelled at some length on the first six items, which focused on the structure and purpose of a new national legislature, they set out to tackle the seventh. James Madison, who would chronicle this and every other moment for more than three months, recorded in his copious notes what happened next:

The first speaker to the resolution, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, said he favored a “vigorous Executive,” but not with powers that extended “to peace & war &c.” That, he feared, “would render the
Executive a monarchy, of the worst kind, to wit an elective one.” Other delegates no doubt shared this concern, yet before addressing what executive powers might be, they took up one essential question that was on all their minds. From Madison’s notes: “
MR
.
WILSON
moved that the Executive consist of a single person.” Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Charles’s cousin, seconded and clarified the motion—“
National
Executive,” he said.

Then there was silence. For the first and only time during the Federal Convention of 1787, not one eminent statesman ventured even a passing comment, much less a reasoned position.

Not Gouverneur Morris, the flamboyant, peg-legged orator who spoke more than anyone else at the convention and had a particular fascination with the executive office. Morris was never at a loss for words—except this once.

Nor James Wilson, perhaps the sharpest legal mind in the room, who gave more speeches than anyone but Morris. Wilson undoubtedly hoped someone else would step forth to support his motion, but nobody did.

James Madison, the third-most-talkative delegate over the course of the summer, had an excellent excuse for not coming forth: he was genuinely perplexed. Six weeks earlier, before the convention, he had outlined a broad plan of government to his friend George Washington. The national legislature should have supreme power over the states, Madison stated boldly, and it should be composed of two branches, organized much as they are today. A central judiciary department should also exercise “national supremacy.” On the other hand, “the national supremacy in the Executive departments is liable to some difficulty,” he admitted. “I have scarcely ventured as yet to form my opinion either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed.”
¹

The three delegates next in line for the honor of most loquacious, Roger Sherman, Elbridge Gerry, and George Mason, also passed. Sherman, a veteran of the drafting committees for both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, undoubtedly had some ideas on the matter, but he didn’t wish to share them just yet. Neither did Gerry, who voiced wildly unpredictable notions on almost every item discussed, nor Mason, Washington’s neighbor and intellectual mentor, who had co-authored the Virginia Constitution
in 1776 and who had preempted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence by declaring in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights that “all men are born equally free and independent.” All these great orators held their tongues.

Even Alexander Hamilton, who would soon hold the floor for an entire day and who would suggest at that time that a single executive serve for life, opted at this moment not to say what he really thought.

Two of the three superstars in the room, George Washington and Robert Morris, also remained silent. Washington, of course, was blessed with an excuse even better than Madison’s, for as the convention’s presiding officer, he was supposed to remain above the fray. Morris, the all-powerful “Financier” or “Great One,” possessed exclusive firsthand experience as a national executive, for he had run the affairs of the United States virtually on his own not once but twice, first for a few weeks during the winter of 1776–77, and later for three whole years at the end of the Revolutionary War, from 1781 to 1784—but Morris, like the others, said nothing.

It fell to the oldest and wisest among them, Benjamin Franklin, to end the eerie quiet. Madison’s notes continue:

“A point of great importance”—that was precisely the problem. Eleven years earlier, the United States of America had made a great to-do about rejecting the British monarch, in principle as well as in person. The new nation had buttressed its very existence with the cardinal principle that people can and must rule themselves, free and clear of any king or queen, so how could they now place one man above all the rest, in charge of executing the myriad affairs of government?

Yet most delegates believed their national government, which currently lacked an executive branch, had proved too weak. (Morris’s three-year “reign” had been a temporary aberration, born of necessity to bring the struggling government out of bankruptcy.) Americans should be more realistic, they felt, or the new nation might not survive.

To explore their dilemma and its full implications, let us transport ourselves to that time and place, June 1, 1787, the Assembly Room of the State House in Philadelphia, with James Wilson’s motion to create a one-man national executive suspended in the air, unsupported but also unchallenged, and as yet poorly defined. Stripping away our knowledge of what has transpired since, let us savor that moment of indecision. Would this really be such a good idea? Did the prospects for increased efficiency outweigh the manifold dangers?

Further, aside from theoretical concerns, how would Wilson’s proposal play politically? Would the people “out of doors”—the politicized populace that had pushed the Revolution forward—ever allow a single person to rule?

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.