Mr. President (6 page)

A new Continental Congress did in fact convene on May 10, 1775. The “redress of grievances” had not been “obtained”; instead, British soldiers had marched on Lexington and Concord, and blood had flowed. Delegates to the Congress in Philadelphia, like those in Massachusetts, found themselves with a war on their hands. Upon the request of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, the Continental Congress assumed “the regulation and general direction” of the army gathering around Boston.
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Now in the business of managing an army, the Second Continental Congress had no choice but to assume executive functions, and like their fellow patriots in Massachusetts members insisted on performing all these by themselves. They formed new committees, a host of them, almost daily. Anytime delegates faced a problem, they appointed an ad hoc committee to address it. On one day alone, June 3, Congress created seven new committees: one to prepare a response to Massachusetts, one to borrow £6,000 for the purchase of gunpowder, one to provide an estimate of further sums that needed to be raised, one to write a petition to the king, and three distinct committees to write separate letters to the people of Great Britain, Ireland, and Jamaica. Once each committee had performed its isolate task, it automatically dissolved.
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Congress had a new president this time, John Hancock, the wealthy Boston merchant who had funded many of the revolutionary activities there. On May 10, delegates had reelected Peyton Randolph, but two weeks later President Randolph left once again to head the House of Burgesses. Hancock, his ambitious substitute, became attached to his prestigious position, and when Randolph returned to Congress in September, Hancock refused to step down. Yet despite the new president’s ambitions, Congress gave him no more powers than it had given Randolph. He couldn’t issue orders of any sort, make purchases, borrow money, or even contact foreign emissaries without the express consent of Congress. When not presiding on the floor, he sent, received, and transmitted countless communications. While the president inscribed his fabled “John Hancock” on letter after letter, regular delegates, in their floating committees, ground out the work of coordinating and supplying a fledgling army.

Slowly, the hodgepodge array of ad hoc committees evolved into a lesser and more manageable number of standing committees, each one dealing with all matters within its specified field: the Maritime Committee, Treasury Committee, Board of War and Ordnance (actually
a committee), Medical Committee, Committee of Secret Correspondence, and the Secret Committee of Commerce, charged with keeping the supply train flowing. The surfeit of committees reflected Congress’s continuing rebellion against the abuses made possible by the concentration of executive authority. For a century and more, British officials, often holding multiple offices, had profited at the colonists’ expense. Now the people themselves vowed to control their own government, and this meant distributing executive tasks as widely as possible.

That was the idea, at any rate. In reality, a few men did more than their share, and these ardent delegates emerged with disproportionate power. Most prominent was a merchant-prince from Philadelphia, Robert Morris, who had amassed a fortune during the French and Indian War by supplying military wares to the army, profiting from wartime shortages of consumer goods, and privateering. As chairman of the Secret Committee of Commerce, he issued contracts for the procurement of supplies, often to his own firm. Other contracts went to his trading partners. If this sounds corrupt, it was not universally treated that way at the time. Morris chaired the Secret Committee of Commerce precisely because he possessed the contacts, credit, ships, and merchandise to keep the Continental Army in the field. He could access the goods, and that’s what counted.

With Benjamin Franklin, Morris also anchored the Committee of Secret Correspondence, which communicated, sometimes using invisible ink, with foreign merchants and diplomats. He served too on the Marine Committee, charged with creating an American navy and distributing the goods obtained by American privateers. This committee dovetailed with both secret committees, for all three had as their primary goal the procurement of necessary goods from abroad. The entire matrix centered on Robert Morris. In October 1776, when members of Congress wondered why they were not better informed about certain business of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the committee, in the persons of Franklin and Morris, replied: “We are … of opinion that it is
unnecessary
to inform Congress of this intelligence at present because Mr. Morris belongs to all the committees that can properly be employed in receiving & importing the expected supplys.”
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When Congress fled to Baltimore on December 12, 1776, fearing that advancing British forces might soon invade the city, three members
stayed behind to carry on critical transactions: George Clymer, George Walton, and Robert Morris. When Clymer and Walton vanished into their private lives, Morris was left on his own to perform all the tasks required to keep an army in the field and the nation solvent: requisitioning supplies and paying bills, keeping the books, dispatching vessels, arranging deliveries, and so on. To Silas Deane he wrote: “It is well I staid as I am obliged to set many things right that would otherways be in the greatest confusion. Indeed I find my presence so very necessary that I shall remain here untill the enemy drive me away.” Morris kept wagons loaded with his valuable possessions, ready for an emergency escape in the event of a surprise attack.
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Morris’s work did not go unappreciated by Congress, which on December 21 formally approved the “care of the public business as signified in Mr. Morris’s letters.” On one day alone, Congress read on the floor twenty-three of his letters. More significantly, it transformed the team of Morris, Clymer, and Walton into an emergency committee with the broad and unprecedented power “to execute such continental business as may be proper and necessary to be done at Philadelphia,” and it gave this committee immediate access to $200,000, along with the authority to borrow as much “as the continental use there may demand.” Since Clymer and Walton disappeared from public service during this time, one man, Robert Morris, now possessed the power to run the fledgling nation by himself. He could (and did) order salt to be removed into the country, purchase clothes for soldiers, rig boats with guns, commandeer wagons to evacuate the city, and make myriad on-the-ground decisions with no oversight, no check on his deeds.
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Previously, Congress had guarded its powers jealously, fearing that a grant of executive authority to one or a few individuals might start the new nation on the road to tyranny. With the new nation struggling for survival, however, delegates relented by forming an ad hoc executive branch that was empowered to take independent action. If the exigencies of war demanded a distinct executive, so be it, republican principles be damned—at least for the time being, in this state of emergency.

The immediate crisis ended when Washington’s army crossed the Delaware and forced a British retreat. Then, when Congress returned to Philadelphia, it resumed business as usual, which meant government by committees, but there was no template for this, no rules or codes. Without a constitution or firm precedents, the confederation
of thirteen states that had declared independence from Great Britain remained under interim management.

The embryonic nation could not go on forever like that, ruled by Congress’s seat-of-the-pants committees. To be accepted by the world as a legitimate state and, more pointedly, to attract foreign assistance in its fight against Great Britain, former colonists required a governing body that a nation such as France could reasonably do business with. This, in turn, required a more formal definition of the relationship between Congress and its component parts, thirteen diverse states that still considered themselves sovereign.

The resultant Articles of Confederation turned out to be just what its name implied, a confederation, not a government per se. The states, as sovereign entities, allocated few tasks to Congress beyond those required for coordinating the war effort and engaging with foreign countries. Yes, there would be a federal post office, but no, Congress could not raise its own funds. Even to fight the war, it would have to appeal to the states for money. Yet Congress was still expected to support and administer an army, and this required it to function in an executive capacity.

The closest thing to an executive body in the Articles was a “Committee of the States,” composed of one delegate from each state, to carry on business “in the recess of Congress.” That committee could only deal with matters that Congress, in advance, had specified, and it could “never”—a key word—tackle a wide range of the most important matters of state:

The confederation’s only executive body, in short, was instructed in no uncertain terms not to take action on any matter of policy or great consequence.

Although the Articles of Confederation did not formally take effect until they were ratified by the last of the thirteen states, Maryland, on March 1, 1781, Congress used the document as a guide as it fought off the British imperial army and navy, but the Articles were of no great help. Waging a war required a host of on-the-ground executive actions that Congress and its committees, with no funds of their own and little authority over the states, were in a poor position to take.

The states, unlike Congress, had access to money through the power to levy taxes. They also had clearly defined authority and powers and were therefore in a better position to provide for executive administration. Still, with the excesses from colonial times still fresh in their minds, the state constitution makers used various mechanisms to curtail executive power. Massachusetts, the first to cast off British rule and therefore the first to need a new governmental arrangement, addressed the problem by eliminating the governorship entirely. In 1775, in the immediate aftermath of Lexington and Concord, it decided to resume its old charter in all respects—minus a separate and distinct executive. All functions formally performed by the royal governor were assumed by a council elected by members of the assembly.

New Hampshire, likewise, abolished the office of governor in the provisional new government it created early in 1776, and it made no alternative arrangement for executive functioning. Although it established a council with an elected president, it defined that body only as a “separate branch of the legislature” and assigned it no specific executive duties.

South Carolina’s provisional new government did provide for a chief executive, but it did not call him a “governor,” one who governs or rules. Instead, like New Hampshire, South Carolina called its most prominent leader a “president,” one who presides, a lesser term carried over from its Provincial Congress. Two other states, Pennsylvania and Delaware, also adopted the title “president” over “governor.”

The states devised various mechanisms for holding executive officers closely accountable. Six of the ten states that formed new constitutions within a year of independence elected their governors or presidents annually. Two states had biennial elections, the remaining two triennial. Five of the annual-election states permitted no more than three successive years in office, and only three states failed to require rotation in office, as they said at the time, or term limits, as we call it today. “A long continuance in the first executive departments of power or trust is
dangerous to liberty,” the Maryland Constitution of 1776 declared. “A rotation, therefore, in those departments is one of the best securities of permanent freedom.”
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Executive officers were not granted authority to “prorogue, adjourn, or dissolve” the legislatures. In some states this prohibition was made specific; in others the power was simply absent. One state, New York, allowed its governor to prorogue (suspend) the legislature for no more than sixty days within the period of a year, but he still could not adjourn or dissolve it. All Revolutionary-era Americans could recall, or had heard about, the many times royal governors had seized power from the people by preventing elected representatives from gathering, and they wanted none of this in their new governments.

Eight of the ten states established executive or privy councils to lessen the authority of their chief executives. Although colonists had suffered much grief at the hands of His Majesty’s Privy Council, these junior versions would help diffuse the concentration of power in the new state governments. No single executive should be empowered to act on his own will alone, they believed. An elected council, not personally beholden to a chief executive officer, would keep him from using patronage for political or economic gain.
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Finally, and most definitively, all but two of the new constitutions denied their governors or presidents the power of the veto. Recalling how royal governors once ran roughshod over colonial assemblies, most Americans opposed giving executive officers any influence in legislative matters. The two exceptions, New York and Massachusetts, had extenuating circumstances. Governors in these states, unlike in the others, were popularly elected, so their veto was viewed as the people’s check on the legislature, and the veto was not absolute, as in colonial times. In both states, the legislature could override a gubernatorial veto with a two-thirds vote.
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New York (1777) and Massachusetts (1780) were the last two states to adopt constitutions, and the fact that both provided for the popular election of governors and then granted these officers a limited veto power signaled an evolution in public attitudes. Couldn’t the myriad difficulties of a prolonged war be lessened by the efficient administration of a stronger governor? Particularly in states torn by fighting, proponents of executive power, once a distinct minority, finally gained some traction.