AT ELEVEN THIRTY in the morning on August 22, 1789, a large cream-colored coach pulled up to the front door of Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street in New York City. Six matching, perfectly groomed horses pulled the elegant carriage with sparkling gold trim. The coachman, outfitted in crisp white- and red-trimmed livery, jumped down from the back of the carriage and opened the door. An elegantly dressed man with powdered hair stepped down with a portfolio of papers under his arm. He towered over his companion, Henry Knox, the acting secretary of war, and his slaves tending to his horses. His ornate coach and his imposing presence drew curious stares from strangers passing by on the street. He walked up to the front door of Federal Hall and was immediately announced to the Senate. George Washington, the first president of the United States, had arrived for his first visit to the United States Senate.
This was no ordinary meeting. Two years earlier, the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had agreed that the Senate would “advise and consent” on treaties and other questions of foreign policy. But in practice, how the president and the Senate would interact remained for the first officeholders to work out.
Washington’s relationship with the Senate was just one of countless governing details that he had to establish as the first president. Establishing precedent for every presidential action consumed his thoughts in the first few years of his administration.1 Not only would the American public and an international audience judge his every action, but his successors would be guided by his choices. The stakes could not have been higher; the future of the Republic rested on Washington making the right decisions. He approached every new situation with caution and took action only after consulting with his advisors. His first visit to the Senate was no different.
The tense relationship between Native American nations and the United States posed an immediate challenge after Washington’s inauguration on April 30, 1789. Most Native American nations had sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, recognizing the threat that American settlers posed to native land.2 On September 15, 1789, representatives from the national government, North and South Carolina, the Creeks, and the Cherokees planned to meet to discuss the controversial treaties signed between 1783 and 1789, and to negotiate a new treaty. Washington had to select the representatives to send on behalf of the federal government—another important first for the new president.
At his August 22 meeting with the Senate, Washington planned to seek advice about what instructions he should give to the commissioners. Because he considered Native American relations to fall under the heading of “foreign policy,” he followed the constitutional guidelines calling for him to meet with the Senate. On May 25, 1789, less than one month after his inauguration, Washington sent to the Senate all of the United States’ previous treaties with Indian nations, along with a number of supporting documents.3 After a brief discussion, the Senate postponed its consideration of these papers. At the beginning of August, the Senate created a committee to meet with Washington. The committee planned the minute details of the upcoming meeting, down to where Washington would sit and how he would enter the chamber. On August 20 and 21, Washington nominated commissioners to negotiate with the “Southern Indians.” On August 21, he sent an official note to the Senate announcing his visit the next day to discuss the terms of the proposed treaty.4
When Washington and Knox arrived at Federal Hall at 11:30 A.M., the doorkeeper announced their arrival. Washington sat at the front of the chamber, and Knox took the chair to his right. Washington handed his remarks to Knox, who in turn handed them to Vice President John Adams. Adams read the statement, but as Senator William Maclay from Pennsylvania recalled, the senators could “not master … one Sentence of it.”5 Adams wasn’t known for his public speaking skills, but the senators’ struggles weren’t entirely his fault. The Senate gathered for their work in the large chamber that occupied the first floor of Federal Hall. Because of the August heat in New York City, the doorkeeper had opened the windows in search of a cooling breeze. But along with fresh air, noise from Wall Street’s pedestrians, carriages, peddlers, and horses flowed into the Senate chamber. The clamor overpowered Adams’s voice, so few senators could make out the words that Washington had carefully crafted. After a few complaints, Adams repeated the speech from the beginning. Washington’s remarks offered a brief synopsis of the current diplomatic state between the United States and the Southern Indians, and posed seven questions for the Senate to answer with an aye or a no.6
Adams finished his recitation and sat. The seconds ticked by as the senators remained in awkward silence. A few shuffled papers or cleared their throats. Maclay speculated in his diary that his colleagues were so intimidated by Washington’s presence in the Senate chamber that they cowered in shameful silence. Eager to show that they could be active participants in the creation of foreign policy, Maclay stood up and suggested referring Washington’s seven questions to committee for discussion in detail. Washington lost his temper, stood up, and shouted, “This defeats every purpose of my coming here!” The senators fell into a stunned hush before Washington acquiesced to Maclay’s suggestion and offered to return to the Senate a few days later.7 Although he did return the following Monday, his first visit to the Senate was an inauspicious start to the executive-legislative relationship. As he returned to his carriage, Washington muttered under his breath that he would never return for advice. He kept his word—August 22, 1789, was the first and last time he visited the Senate to request guidance on foreign affairs.8 Unfortunately, the diplomatic challenges facing the United States during the Washington presidency were just beginning.
More than two years later, on November 26, 1791, Washington invited the department secretaries and the attorney general to the first cabinet meeting. Secretary of War Henry Knox, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph convened in Washington’s private study on the second floor of the President’s House in Philadelphia.9 The cabinet met a handful of times in 1791 and 1792 before the threat of international war with France and Great Britain forced the cabinet to meet fifty-one times in 1793. By mid-1793, the cabinet served as a visible, central part of the executive branch.
Despite the important role that the cabinet would come to play, the United States Constitution actually does not mention a cabinet at all. Article II permits the president to request advice from the department secretaries, but specifies that the secretaries must provide their opinions in writing. Nor did Congress pass any legislation to authorize the cabinet or regulate its meetings. On the contrary, in 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention rejected several proposals for an executive council, including a proposal by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney that would have established a cabinet almost identical to the one that Washington eventually created.
So where did the cabinet come from? Washington designed the cabinet to provide advice and support during crucial diplomatic crises and constitutional conundrums. He did not enter the presidency intending to create the cabinet, and he explored many alternatives before establishing this new institution. In fact, Washington did not convene the first cabinet meeting until November 26, 1791—more than two and a half years into his administration. Yet as he grappled with the threat of international invasion, domestic insurrection, and challenges to presidential authority, Washington became convinced that the options outlined in the Constitution were insufficient to get the job done. The first cabinet developed organically in response to these governing challenges.
Washington selected experienced politicians and diplomats for his department secretary positions. But he also chose individuals whose advice he trusted: he intended to listen to their opinions, at first individually and then collectively in the cabinet. Washington selected Edmund Randolph as the first attorney general based on his lengthy legal career, his extensive state experience in Virginia, and their decades-long friendship. Washington chose Alexander Hamilton for secretary of the treasury and Henry Knox for secretary of war because of their loyal service to him in the Continental Army. He also valued Hamilton’s state service and the expertise Knox acquired as secretary of war under the Confederation Congress. Washington picked Thomas Jefferson as the first secretary of state thanks to Jefferson’s stint as the American minister to France and his expansive diplomatic knowledge. Washington placed great weight on his secretaries’ opinions.
Washington and his secretaries were shaped by war, politics, cultural exchange, and foreign sojourns in the eighteenth century. They were products of an intertwined Atlantic world, just like the new nation they represented. As they created institutions and customs from scratch, they relied on their previous experiences to inform their decisions.
Washington did not design the cabinet in a vacuum. Once he determined that he needed a cabinet to govern the new nation, he drew on several existing institutions to shape his interactions with the department secretaries. As commander in chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, Washington had summoned councils of war with his officers and aides-de-camp. He relied on councils before entering major military engagements, selecting locations for winter quarters, or undertaking controversial retreats. As president of the United States, Washington used cabinet meetings for similar purposes. He called a cabinet meeting before establishing constitutional precedent, responding to a domestic rebellion, or signing a potentially unpopular treaty. Washington also employed many of the same strategies in both councils and cabinets. He often sent questions to the participants in advance and then used those questions as the meeting’s agenda. If the attendees disagreed with each other, Washington requested written opinions after the end of the discussion. These opinions allowed him to consider everyone’s position and make a final decision at his own pace.
Washington’s secretaries also left their own stamp on the creation of the cabinet. The secretaries were well-regarded, elite, prideful gentlemen. They expected to be treated with respect and to have their advice considered by the president. They were also stubborn and opinionated. In short, they would not have engaged in frequent cabinet discussions unless they were willing to participate. Once gathered in Washington’s private study, their outsized personalities shaped the cabinet and its goals. While they all agreed that Washington had the final say, the secretaries brought their own unique perspectives to each cabinet debate.
Although Washington remained the unquestioned leader of the administration, his relationship with the cabinet developed in a symbiotic way. If the cabinet unanimously opposed an approach he wished to take, he would not adopt it. At the same time, the secretaries did not pursue initiatives without his consent. As Washington and the secretaries toiled in the cabinet, they pursued two shared goals. First, they strove to protect and assert executive jurisdiction over both foreign and domestic issues. To preserve and expand presidential authority, they sidelined Congress and the state governments. Even Jefferson, who later criticized Washington’s expansion of executive power, initially opposed congressional attempts to interfere in diplomacy. Second, the president and the secretaries viewed the cabinet as a tool to bolster and defend executive power, not to limit or compete with the president. In the summer of 1794, when violence erupted in western Pennsylvania over excise taxes on whiskey, the secretaries persuaded, berated, and threatened state officials to ensure that Washington and the executive branch would lead the federal response against the rebellion. The department secretaries promoted the powers of the executive, but they did not seek to expand their own authority at the expense of the president.
Washington and the secretaries were committed to ensuring that the president had sufficient power to lead the nation, but they never expected the cabinet to serve as the giant administrative institution that we see in the twenty-first century. Instead, they expected cabinet meetings to provide private support and guidance for the president. The secretaries maintained their bureaucratic roles and consulted individually with the president on most department matters. When they gathered for a cabinet meeting, they provided Washington with support and guidance on larger, more complicated issues that defied categorization in one department. As a result, the cabinet was inherently idiosyncratic. Washington convened frequent meetings when it suited him and ignored the cabinet in favor of one-on-one consultations when he felt that approach would provide better advice.
Many of these characters and moments will be familiar to both historians and those reading about the Early Republic for the first time. Scholars have rightly covered Washington’s inauguration, the feud between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the Neutrality Crisis, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Jay Treaty debates as defining moments in the Early Republic and the formation of the nation.10 But these stories have all been told assuming that the cabinet existed from the very beginning of Washington’s presidency and that it occupied an immutable position in the executive branch. It didn’t. The institution’s beginnings remain obscure and its relationship to the larger executive branch unexplored. Henry Barrett Learned wrote in 1912 about the legislative origins of the nine executive departments then in existence; amazingly, this was the last work published on the creation of the cabinet.11
I have built on the excellent scholarship exploring the political institutions and social life in the Early Republic. Scholars have examined the political culture of the Early Republic, emphasizing how honor and reputation provided strict guidelines for discourse and public behavior. With such high stakes for personal reputation and the future of the new nation, anxiety pervaded every social interaction.12 Others have done innovative work on the Republican Court—the semi-private gatherings hosted by women to provide space for informal discourse on theater, culture, and above all politics.13 Recent scholarship has also analyzed the formation of state institutions, including the custom houses under Treasury Department supervision and the fiscal-military complex that enabled the growth of the government and the nation during the Early Republic.14
I bring together these discussions of political culture and institutions to offer the first comprehensive study of the executive branch. The growing state institutions and the broader cultural themes in the Early Republic depended on a small group of people showing up to the office every day and engaging in social rituals. While the larger social and political developments are critical to understanding society in the Early Republic, so too are the personal stories that led the institutions and crafted the sociopolitical trends. The emergence of the cabinet is the story of a few individuals who operated under unique social pressures to build the beginnings of an influential new institution.
Many historians believe that federal governance took an “executive turn” late in the nineteenth century. Contrary to that narrative, the origins of the president’s cabinet in Washington’s administration demonstrate that the executive had developed significant authority long before the nineteenth century.15 While the federal government and all of its bureaucracies certainly expanded after the Civil War and up through the New Deal, this book shows how George Washington and his cabinet asserted presidential prerogative, claimed authority over diplomatic and domestic issues, and rejected challenges from the states and Congress that aimed to diminish executive authority. The president was no mere figurehead during the Early Republic.
We will begin our story in the Revolutionary War, following the wartime experiences of Washington’s cabinet members as patriots, reformers, state representatives, and finally federal officials. The chronological development of the cabinet is critical for three reasons. First, exploring the 1780s shows what Washington, the secretaries, and the nation faced during the Revolutionary War. Second, by tracing the gradual evolution of the presidency, we can see how events in the Early Republic shaped the national government’s interpretation of its own power and Washington’s creation of the cabinet within the new federal framework. The cabinet, the presidency, and the rest of the government emerged reactively in response to the challenges faced by the new nation. Finally, working our way through the first few years of Washington’s presidency emphasizes how the cabinet emerged slowly in response to the pressures of governing, and only near the end of Washington’s first term. Most people incorrectly assume that the cabinet existed from day one of Washington’s presidency or that its development was inevitable—especially since the original cabinet members occupied their offices starting in the fall of 1789. On the contrary, Washington created the cabinet only after he had tried other options.
The book opens with Washington’s experience as commander in chief of the Continental Army. Washington convened councils of war with his officers and aides-de-camp, where he learned how to manage the outsized personalities in his officer corps. He also established a social life in camp to boost morale for his soldiers, host visiting dignitaries, and foster relationships with civilian authorities. He drew on all these experiences as president.
The wartime experiences of the future department secretaries were equally important. All of Washington’s appointees served in the military, in the state governments, or in the Confederation Congress. Their frustrations directly shaped their contributions to the president’s cabinet a few years later.
We then explore the political culture in the 1780s leading up to the Constitutional Convention, including Americans’ efforts to grapple with their Anglo-American heritage. The new nation struggled to define its character, especially in relation to the British Empire. We will consider how the delegates at the convention tried to respond to these concerns in the Constitution by providing elected advisors for the president, and will examine the expectations for the new executive leading up to Washington’s inauguration on April 30, 1789.
Drawing on his previous military experience, Washington spent the first two years of his administration establishing a working atmosphere that befitted a virtuous republic and negotiating interactions with the other branches of government. In tracking the cabinet’s eventual emergence as the president’s advisory body, we will see Washington’s preferred cabinet practices, how the secretaries interacted, and how the public responded to the emerging institution.
In the Neutrality Crisis of 1793, we will trace the cabinet’s efforts to keep the new nation out of a dangerous international war. The cabinet fought to establish the president’s control over the diplomatic process and ensure that foreign nations respected the president’s authority. Faced with its first major diplomatic crisis, the cabinet gathered fifty-one times—the high-water mark for cabinet activity in Washington’s presidency. In another moment of crisis, the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 underlined the cabinet’s central role in formulating the military response to the insurrection and ensuring that state and federal authorities complied with the president’s orders. Finally, we will examine the debates over the Jay Treaty in 1795 and 1796, and the cabinet’s further development, including the first major cabinet scandal and Washington’s return to individual conferences with trusted advisors.
The book concludes with a consideration of the short- and long-term consequences of Washington’s cabinet precedents. He intended for the cabinet to serve as a personal advisory body and for each president to craft his or her own relationships with their advisors. Washington’s successor, John Adams, struggled with that flexibility, while Jefferson, the nation’s third president, thrived with the opportunity to create his own cabinet practices. We will also explore how the power of Washington’s precedents and the cabinet tradition continues to guide modern presidents.
By centering our exploration of Washington’s administration on his cabinet, we will better understand several pivotal moments in the early years of the new nation. By 1793, Hamilton and Jefferson hated each other. Yet as fellow members of Washington’s cabinet, they found themselves confined in a small room for hours on end, several days a week, stifling in the Philadelphia summer heat. Their participation in the cabinet exacerbated partisan tensions and accelerated the development of the first party system. The cabinet supported the growth of executive power and greatly expanded the role of the president in both domestic and diplomatic issues. Cabinet machinations also ensured that Congress and the state governments were kept out of these critical moments. Finally, Washington’s relationship with the cabinet sheds new light on the precedents established by the first president. Washington tinkered with cabinet practices throughout his administration, summoning regular meetings at certain times and preferring written advice and individual conferences at others.
The cabinet stood at the center of almost every major development in the 1790s and reveals the power and importance of the executive branch in the Early Republic. It was the product of the first officeholders and reflected their backgrounds and governing experience. It emerged in response to the international challenges, domestic pressures, and pervasive anxieties about the future of the Republic. The formation of the cabinet thus embodies the emergence of the United States. And—like the United States—it might not have survived at all.