Mr. President (5 page)

All this was basic history, long since internalized by each of the learned delegates gathered in the Pennsylvania State House in the summer of 1787. There must be no more Dunmores, no more Hutchinsons or Cornburys or any of the rest, just as there would be no more monarchs like King George III. For every bit of authority they wished to place at the executive’s command, they would have to demonstrate they were not raising these ghosts from the dead. Just as the new executive office must include no features reminiscent of royal prerogatives, it must also be distanced from the unpopular royal governorships. The executive or executives must not be able to exert undue influence through patronage, nor should he or they possess the power to dissolve assemblies. If the executive office was given authority to negate particular acts of the legislature, that too would certainly arouse some suspicion and possibly serious resistance. The office should not provide an avenue for aggrandizement or facilitate personal ambition. Above all, any executive must in some manner remain responsible to the people, the only true source of governmental authority.

This was a tall order, to create an effective executive office that did not repeat past excesses. Was it even possible?

In the beginning there were committees. When rebellious colonists first exchanged British rule for homegrown governance, they entrusted executive tasks to nobody but themselves.

Nascent patriots started to use committees as agents of executive authority in the late 1760s. Hoping to force the repeal of taxes on paper, glass, lead, paint, and tea, merchants in several seaports mutually pledged not to import any nonessential items from Britain, and to enforce these agreements, they formed committees. In Philadelphia, for example, a special Committee of Merchants was charged with determining who had violated the nonimportation agreement of March 10, 1769. Miscreants were to be dragged to the London Coffee House, where they had to confess their sins and promise to mend their ways.

In Charleston, patriots gathering under the city’s Liberty Tree elected thirteen merchants, thirteen planters, and thirteen mechanics (whom we today call artisans) to a committee with similar enforcement powers.

In Boston, the enforcement committee morphed from a merchants-only affair, the Boston Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce, into the Body of the Trade, known simply as the Body, which welcomed virtually every citizen in town. Since “the Town itself subsists by trade,” explained
The Boston Gazette
, “every inhabitant may be considered as
connected with it.” The people themselves, all of them, would enforce the nonimportation agreement in an orderly but forceful manner. In numbers sometimes upwards of one thousand, they visited merchants accused of selling banned items and frightened them into compliance. These Bostonians raised the concept of “committee of the whole” to a new level.

Starting in 1774, in the wake of the Boston Tea Party and in response to the punishing Coercive Acts, committees not only challenged British authority but also replaced it. The committees varied in name and function—Committees of Correspondence, Committees of Observation and Inspection, Committees of Safety—but they all assumed some sort of executive function.

Tracking the various committees requires a scorecard. In 1774, Philadelphia patriots formed the Committee of Nineteen. A few months later, to deal with the heightening tensions created by the closing of Boston’s harbor, a mass meeting of several thousand citizens selected the Committee of Forty-Three, and that in turn led to the Committee of Sixty-Six, charged with local enforcement of a pan-colonial nonimportation agreement called the Continental Association. Continuing in numerical ascension, the Sixty-Six evolved into the First Committee of One Hundred, formed in response to the bloodbath at Lexington and Concord, and finally the Second Committee of One Hundred, which pushed for independence. All these committees, created by popular elections, were instructed to execute the will of the people, as determined at mass open-air meetings in the State House Yard.

The Continental Association, the supreme achievement of the First Continental Congress, called for enforcement committees not just in the major cities but in communities throughout the colonies:

These local committees, the voice and force of Revolutionary America, exerted their authority in an ancient manner—community ostracism—that combined judicial and executive functions. Without this committee structure, the Association would have been no more than an idle plea, lacking any enforcement procedures.

The First Continental Congress, which initiated the Association, was itself an outgrowth of local committees and conventions. In eight of the twelve colonies that sent delegates, congressmen were selected by special conventions of delegates chosen at the county level. Massachusetts was one of only four colonies to select its representatives in the legislature, but that body had just been officially dissolved by the governor, and the real authority in the province resided in the town committees of correspondence, the county conventions they created, and eventually the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The entire edifice, particularly in Massachusetts but also elsewhere, was heavily weighted at the bottom. Local committees came together in county conventions, which organized province-wide conventions and congresses, and these, in turn, created the Continental Congress, conceived at the time not as a governing body per se but as “a meeting of Committees from the several Colonies on this Continent” or as a “congress, or convention of commissioners or committees of the several colonies.”
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When delegates from twelve colonies convened in Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall in early September 1774, one of their first tasks was to select a presiding officer. The choice was not in the least contentious:

There followed a brief discussion as to “what shoud be the stile [title] of Mr. Randolph & it was agreed that he should be called the President.”
There was no debate, nor even any talk, concerning Randolph’s job description, for it did not differ from that of hundreds upon hundreds of presiding officers—called variously presidents, chairmen, or moderators—of myriad meetings, conventions, and congresses held throughout the colonies during the previous decade. His tasks, like theirs, were to keep order, facilitate the flow of deliberations, and funnel communications. Letters to Congress were addressed to him, and letters from Congress bore his name. Beyond these basic functions, he had no power or authority. He was to initiate no program, favor no position, and indeed not even speak his mind. When debates heated up, he was to mediate between rival factions. In today’s parlance, we might call him a facilitator.

Peyton Randolph was well suited to perform his circumscribed role. His personal aspect, like Washington’s, commanded respect. John Adams described him as “a large, well looking man.” Silas Deane, another delegate, wrote, “Mr. Randolph our worthy President may be rising of sixty, of noble appearance, & presides with dignity.” (He would in fact turn fifty-three on his fifth day in office.) Politically, the first president was a moderate. Back in 1765, he had opposed the most radical measures in Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act Resolutions. In his personal communications, but not on the floor of Congress, he favored “the gentlest methods” in enforcing the Continental Association. When patriots mobilized for a military assault on Williamsburg the following spring, he warned that “violent measures may produce effects, which God only know the consequences of.” Yet he was certainly a resolute patriot. In both 1769 and 1774, when the royal governor dissolved the House of Burgesses, Randolph, the Speaker of that body, presided over an extralegal convention that met in its stead. Virginia, the largest of the colonies, was the most vociferous opponent of British imperial policies south of New England—“These Gentlemen from Virginia appear to be the most spirited and consistent of any,” John Adams wrote in his diary—and Randolph, a former attorney general, agent for the colony in London, and twenty-five-year veteran of the House of Burgesses, was that colony’s most esteemed elder statesman. He was the natural choice, the only one considered.
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Most significantly, Peyton Randolph understood when to hold his tongue, even though he might favor this side or that. For all the respect he enjoyed from other delegates, Randolph did nothing in his capacity as president to affect the outcome of any debate, and that’s exactly
what the delegates wanted from him. While Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Christopher Gadsden, John Adams, and Samuel Adams pushed Congress toward radical actions, and Joseph Galloway, John Jay, and James Duane argued for more conciliatory measures, Randolph played no special card. As delegates debated the several hot topics before them—the question of representation, what items to include and exclude in the Continental Association, Joseph Galloway’s controversial plan for reconciliation (he wanted two Parliaments, one in London and the other in America), whether to recompense the East India Company for the tea destroyed in Boston Harbor, and whether to urge the colonies to prepare for a military conflict with the mother country—they did not want an advocate of any particular position to sit in the chair. That’s why they liked Randolph: their honored leader knew his place, which was not to “lead” in the sense we think of today but to serve as a steadying influence, lest the debates get out of hand.

Given the rhetorical training and large egos of the men who spent the better part of two months in Carpenters’ Hall wagging their tongues, this in itself was no easy task. As John Adams noted famously to his wife, Abigail, on October 9:

It might be argued, perhaps, that President Randolph should have been more aggressive in moving the debates along, but delegates would no doubt have balked if he had applied too heavy a hand. To cut off debate was not within his authority. He could convene the body or adjourn it, that was all.

On October 24, as Congress was wrapping up its business so delegates
could return home for the winter, Randolph suddenly left his post to preside over Virginia’s House of Burgesses, which had been called back into session. Nobody doubted that the House of Burgesses, an official governing body, took precedence over this ad hoc convention, which had run its course in any case. Two days later Congress dissolved itself. Although it resolved that another Congress should convene the following May “unless the redress of grievances, which we have desired, be obtained before that time,” it did not provide for a central executive body to deal with the crises over the ensuing six months. The First Continental Congress was not a government but just a convention, and its job was over.
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By contrast, the First Provincial Congress in Massachusetts, meeting simultaneously in October 1774, did attempt to establish executive authority. It had to. Unlike the convention in Philadelphia, this body was facing an imminent military invasion from British regulars. In the previous two months, patriots from all of Massachusetts outside Boston had overthrown British authority, both politically and militarily. In the “shiretown” of Worcester, for instance, 4,622 militiamen from thirty-seven townships—half the adult male population of the entire county—had lined both sides of Main Street on September 6 and forced two dozen British-appointed officials, hats in hand, to walk the gauntlet, reciting their recantations thirty times apiece so all the militiamen could hear. Everyone knew that British leaders, sooner or later, would send an army into the countryside to reassert control, so the Provincial Congress needed to raise, train, arm, and supply a military force of its own. That was a far tougher task than passing resolutions and writing letters. It required
execution
.

Fearful of ceding any authority, however, delegates formed themselves into committee after committee to perform these executive functions; they even formed committees to appoint other committees. Only one job required a single individual to serve in an executive capacity, and that’s how Receiver General Henry Gardiner, tax collector for the Province of Massachusetts, became the first executive officer in the future United States to be empowered separately from, and in opposition to, British authority. Whereas President Randolph, like the moderators of countless town meetings, county conventions, and provincial congresses, possessed no powers beyond the meetings he led, Henry Gardiner was instructed to solicit and receive tax moneys from every town in Massachusetts, a delegated executive task.