9

Collective Leadership: Remaking the Constitution

The most momentous aspect of the American Revolution was what did not happen. Revolutions before and since in Europe and Latin America would erupt in ferocious conflict as a victorious faction of insurrectionists seized power and crushed the opposition. That is what did not happen under the leadership of George Washington.

Why the exception? In part because Washington shifted creatively from role to role—from Virginia planter to revolutionary generalissimo to remaker of the founding Constitution as he led the new government; with no rival who could dent his awesome reputation, he avoided the rigidity that invites extreme opposition. In even greater part because he not only adapted to the ever-changing political environment but altered that environment as he shifted from role to role. Thus he shed his military command before his critics could accuse him of lusting for power. He influenced the Constitutional Convention not by giving speeches but simply by being there—by offering a dominating presence, by expressing his views in off-hours chats with fellow delegates, by embodying a form of leadership that the convention could not ignore, and eventually by opening the power of the executive to vast expansion.

In the end, Washington’s presidency became a kind of continuing constitutional convention as he built almost unimpeded power into the executive branch. He not only occupied the office, he virtually conquered it: he became president before there was a presidency. His surefootedness failed him only toward the end, when the political environment changed once again and left him facing storms he could not dispel or even fully comprehend.

As chief executive, he exerted administrative leadership early in his presidency. He established in effect a cabinet that had no standing in the Constitution. He developed informal but explicit priorities and provided policy leadership to his top officers—Hamilton, Jefferson, and others. His rising authority spilled over into Congress, as the chief executive became in effect chief legislator. While he vetoed few congressional measures, he did not need to, for Congress was in no mood to impede the hero-president. Under the checks and balances system, he could thwart or ignore or follow Congress, in contrast to political leaders abroad who were at least nominally responsible to their parliaments. Typically, he did not so much ignore Congress as govern through it.

But his was by no means a one-man presidency. It would rank later as embodying a collective leadership never to be surpassed in American presidential history. Collegiality, of course, was relatively easy among a small team of men who had worked closely together through the revolutionary and founding eras. But his colleagues were leaders in their own right, with their own philosophies and policies passionately embraced.

In part, this collectivity was based on sheer need, as Washington turned for advice to the men of his cabinet—especially Hamilton—who had special expertise. Critics charged that he was unduly dependent on his cabinet members and others—that they even wrote many of his key letters and speeches. The critics were correct but shortsighted. Washington had such faith in his advisers’ competence and creativity that he could safely appropriate their best ideas and rhetoric. Besides, one could make the same defense of Washington’s “theft of words” that later biographers would offer of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches: Who, after all, had selected the wordsmiths?

The Washington administration’s collective leadership reflected a more pervasive force—the basic unity of the revolutionary and founding generations. “The core revolutionary principle in this view is collective rather than individualistic,” historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote, “for it sees the true spirit of ’76 as the virtuous surrender of personal, state, and sectional interests to the larger purposes of American nationhood, first embodied in the Continental Army and later in the newly established federal government.” And this collectivity characterized as well the internal relationships in the Washington presidency to a marked degree. Unity under Washington would have lasting implications—positive ones for national development but potentially negative ones for individual rights.1

Washington’s collective leadership also reflected the enormous respect, despite their sharp differences, that the teammates had for one another’s talents—the cabinet for Washington’s character and convictions, the cabinet members for one another, and Washington’s dependence on his colleagues’ intellectual power and creativity. The president could not forget that Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, among others, were highly educated men, while he had had to learn from experience and from reading on his own. So he would listen to them, debate with them, and often go along with them—but always he would subject their ideas and proposals to the demanding standard based on his own long immersion in the school of political hard knocks.

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During the shaping of the new government, all eyes fastened on the president—the chief executive and chief magistrate—but fewer on the politician-legislators in the first Congress. It was supremely ironic, two years after the Constitutional Convention that established Congress as the central authority of the new republic, that the national legislature seemed far less visible to the populace than the hero in the executive office. Twenty-six senators and several dozen congressmen were busy debating and legislating while the president—especially with the help of Hamilton’s economic proposals—dominated the policy-making process.

Also ironic was the posture of a young congressman from Virginia, James Madison, who had aspired to the Senate but had to settle for election to the “lower” chamber. The author of The Federalist Number 10, the most brilliant exposition of checks and balances ever written, Madison was hardly checking the president. He was advising Washington, and he even authored his first message to Congress. For a year or two Washington relied on him for information and advice about congressional doings. It can be argued that Madison was not betraying his own constitutional principles. On the contrary, his theory of the separation of powers was actually a theory of the separation of institutions that still required the intermingling of politicians who have different and conflicting constituencies. But few argued theory when they beheld the ambitious young Virginian busy in the executive councils.

Nothing more tellingly reflected Washington’s innovative leadership than Madison’s supportive role in Congress during the first year of the administration. Madison—the celebrated advocate of the separation of powers—now serving as “the President’s man” in the national legislature! One historian has called him a “virtual prime minister,” though others might nominate Hamilton for that imaginary post. Neither Washington nor Madison seemed to make much of the unlikely relationship. Indeed, it was probably the first example of what political scientist Fred I. Greenstein has called “hidden-hand leadership”—the ability to wield influence so discreetly through others as to minimize opposition.2

The Republican press, however, castigated a leadership that had apparently abandoned constitutional checks and balances. We can pause today to ask, What if the advocates of a radical separation of powers had had their way, leaving basic lawmaking and policy making exclusively in the hands of Congress? What if the Framers had established a plural executive or had otherwise weakened the office in 1787? Would not a rigid system of setting power against power have proved even more inadequate in confronting the dire crises of the 1790s than the Articles of Confederation had been in coping with the pressures of the 1780s?

If a weak national government had imploded, it probably would have been during a crisis over foreign or military policy, such as the Jay Treaty controversy had been, for the treaty polarized people ideologically and politically and triggered an outpouring of popular anger. When word leaked out about the treaty, it was “like an electric velocity to every part of the Union,” Madison said. Both he and Jefferson turned against what Jefferson called an infamous treaty. The fact that the moderate, soft-spoken Madison could bitterly blame passage of the treaty on “the exertions and influence of Aristocracy, Anglicism, and mercantilism” reveals the depth of the discord the treaty provoked. But the new republic was able to absorb and contain this conflict without imploding—thanks to Washington’s backing of the treaty buttressed by his political skill and enormous prestige. Conflict was defanged—if not eliminated.3

Still, a historical meditation on Washington’s use of presidential power cannot focus alone on what was necessary and expedient for his own political situation. The first chief executive was creating precedents that would be greedily seized on and invoked by future presidents, competing parties, and members of Congress for decades to come. His strategy of government would be imitated or assailed by political leaders of the future just as his idea of no “entangling alliances” would be exploited by isolationists in future crisis situations. The Constitution had been written for all time, not merely for the first occupant of the presidency. Should Washington have had posterity more in mind as he was taking on such a dominant role in foreign policy making?

Only if he believed he was violating the Constitution—but he most decidedly did not so believe. To him, the Constitution was more a grant of power than a curb on it. The presidential role must not only be to administer—it must be executive and even legislative. He wanted to work with Congress and not be separated from it. He even proposed a special chamber apart from both the executive offices and the halls of Congress as a place for senators and the president to agree on policy. Sketching out his ideas for government buildings in the new federal city, he wrote, “Whenever the Government shall have buildings of its own, an executive Chamber will no doubt be provided, where the Senate will generally attend the president.” The plan got nowhere.4

“His consensus style of leadership,” according to political scientist Glenn Phelps, “was evidence of his concern for energetic government. Like many of the ‘nationalists’ of the Revolutionary War, he remembered the fragmentation of congressional power into numerous boards and committees, each guarding its prerogatives jealously. Washington wanted the new constitutional government to speak and act as much as possible with one voice.… Whether deliberate or not, Washington’s grand plan bore a strong resemblance to the King-and-council form of the British parliamentary system.” No wonder good republicans were furious.5

So furious they threw back at him any ammunition they could find. If he wanted to interpret the general terms of the Constitution in his own way, they cried, what about The Federalist (which Washington had dutifully read) that established the separation of powers and checks and balances in authoritative detail. The president would have none of this. He saw The Federalist—written by Hamilton as well as by Madison—less as a restrictive argument than as a springboard for “energy in the executive.” Modern reinterpretations of The Federalist have given considerable credence to Washington’s view.6

That view would echo down through the chambers of American history—to Lincoln’s use of his war power and Theodore Roosevelt’s exploitation of his executive authority, to Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s extension of their foreign policy-making powers on the world scene, to Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Richard M. Nixon’s war making in Vietnam, to the intrusions of both Presidents Bush in the Middle East. George Washington might have disagreed with the specific policies and actions—but not with the “energy in the executive” supporting them.

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Washington viewed himself as president of all the people, as a leader rising above factional disputes and ideological divisions. Hence he was mystified as well as mortified by the conflicts that erupted as the election of 1792 neared. Even though he would be unopposed, he sensed grievances among the people. Had he not been evenhanded in his choice of cabinet members and other officials of the new government? In his appointments, hadn’t he carefully balanced friends of Jefferson and friends of Hamilton? Hadn’t he preached over and over again about the need for unity as the foundation of the new republic? But he heard the rumblings of discontent from a variety of sources, from within his own cabinet and especially from the dozen journals he subscribed to. During his second term, the rumblings turned into a cacophony of shrill attacks.

What caused the rifts in the united support for the president? Some contemporaries said Hamilton’s economic program, which stirred latent antipathy to the pro-mercantile, pro-capitalistic, urban, upper-class Americans who would gain most from it. Some said the Jay Treaty, which unleashed passionate opposition from Francophiles. Historically the split went further back—to the radical countrymen and cobblestone rebels who had fought most fiercely against the Tories, to the supporters of the Articles of Confederation who feared “monarchical rule” in America, to the vociferous critics of the “centralization” and “tyranny” inherent in the new Constitution. It was a rupture waiting to happen. But it would not happen under Washington. He would have been astonished—though he never would have admitted it—if any serious candidate had opposed him in 1792. Of course, none did—it was one thing to run against a Federalist, something quite different to take on an icon, a hero-president, already the Father of his Country.

Given the fact that electoral opposition to Washington was feeble, why did he react so angrily to the party and factional and individual criticism that assailed him? How could this self-confident, resolute, firmly established man erupt in fury against the “poisonous” critics and conspiratorial factions, as he envisaged them? It was in part a rational reaction. He suspected—rightly in some cases—that hostile nations sought to foster dissent and even separatism in his own nation. Less rationally, perhaps, the boundless adulation of his countrymen had inevitably given him the heady feeling that he did indeed speak for all the people, that he was not unlike a monarch who might make mistakes but who must be supported on the assumption that—for the sake of the security of the country—“the king can do no wrong.” All this related to Washington’s boundless concern for his reputation.

Still, Washington was no innocent about the inevitability of dissension in a new republic or any other country. He was long used to conflict among France and Britain and other powers, between American settlers and Indians, between rival politicians in Virginia, and between southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists in the slowly developing fissure over slavery. He had followed parliamentary battles in Britain that continued decade after decade and were taken for granted. With his own often uncontrollable temper, he knew that humankind was naturally contentious, as philosophers had long observed. But he transcended those day-to-day quarrels by adhering to a powerful, overriding conviction.

That conviction was a belief in unity that undergirded his ultimate value of order. It was the kind of unity that embodied more than everyday cooperation and harmony among people. It was the idea of a broad and deep consensus so grounded and so powerful that no divisive force could stand against it—indeed such a force would be swallowed up in it. In embracing this doctrine, Washington was anticipating, even prefacing, one of the most potent and persistent ideas in American presidential history—the notion of an adjournment of politics, the idea that a political leader can rise above party and create a plebiscitary presidency that would represent all the people by promoting consensus. Presidents after Washington, waging bitter combat and asking for a suspension of politics, did not have to argue their case—they could simply invoke memories of the first president who so transcended politics that no one ever ran against him or even voted against him. A suspension of politics would be especially popular in the face of real or perceived threats from abroad.

And the idea has persisted for two centuries after Washington’s presidency. In 2003, a candidate for the top job pledged that as chief executive he would raise the nation “above partisan politics” and “put the country first.” The more partisan a politician is in seeking office, it seems, the more he claims to rise above party politics. George Washington lives!7

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Open conflict is inevitable in a democracy; the question is what form it takes, how it is organized or disorganized. In the early American republic, conflict might have taken any one of diverse forms. It might have degenerated into a war between northern and southern states—as indeed it did sixty years later. The Articles of Confederation might have led to permanent conflict among states. Conflict might have taken the form of a centralized authoritarian dictatorship arrayed against most of the populace. Or it might have become a relatively benign and stable battle between parties—perhaps only two parties.

The Washington presidency, however, bequeathed an enduring conflict far more complex than a simple Federalist-Republican or conservative-liberal dichotomy; rather it spawned what can be called the Washingtonian/Hamiltonian, Madisonian, and Jeffersonian models of government under the Constitution. The Washingtonian/Hamiltonian model was one of vigorous executive leadership, a flexible and resourceful administration, presidential rather than party leadership—a model that overrode the checks and balances without blatantly violating the spirit of the Constitution but that threatened to pulverize the opposition. The Madisonian model was brilliantly articulated by the Virginia philosopher-politician, the author of The Federalist Number 10 and Number 51. Although Madison violated his own theory by aiding and advising Washington early in his presidency, he and his political allies exploited his checks and balances ideas in calling for minority rights, limited government, and severe restraints on presidential power. The Jeffersonian model was the product less of grand theory than of populist pressures generated by grassroots groups and by politicians hostile to Hamilton’s Federalist policies. If the Washingtonian/Hamiltonian model implied a federal government revolving around an energetic president, and if the Madisonian model implied a prudent, less daring and less active president, with powers balanced between the legislative and executive forces, the Jeffersonian model was of almost revolutionary potential, implying government by majority rule, under strong presidential leadership with a highly competitive two-party system and a more popular democratic and egalitarian impetus than either of the two other models.8

Hamilton, cut down by Aaron Burr’s bullet, would never have the opportunity to carry out his and Washington’s presidential strategy. Jefferson followed his own strategy in breaking with Washington, building an opposition party, taking it to victory in 1800, and governing as a party leader. Madison as president would try to shape his government in the true spirit of checks and balances, but his plans soon fell victim to centrifugal forces in his administration. He discovered that if he did not exert force through governmental channels, his opponents would exert force through those same circuits against him. He learned that political structures could never be neutral, and that even checks and balances, carefully designed for fairness to all, favored some policies and interests against others. The net effect for Madison was a weakened presidency.

What were the implications during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Washingtonian/Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Madisonian strategies of leadership and government? Each model was subject to distortion and caricature. The extremes of the Washingtonian/Hamiltonian model—opportunism, manipulation, presidential pressuring—raised formidable threats of excessive presidential power, as in the cases of Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush, and would arouse intense fears as the republic entered its third century. The Democratic Party’s use of patronage under Jackson and other presidents was Jeffersonian party government carried to extremes. The Madisonian model was easily caricatured by Senator John Calhoun’s theory of “concurrent majority rule,” proposed while the issue of slavery was intensifying. Calhoun, who would become a leading secessionist, favored not straight majority rule but a “supermajority rule” that granted any substantial region or interest the power to veto acts of Congress.9

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How strong a leader was George Washington? How effective was his model of presidential leadership? Did he produce substantial and lasting changes in the life of the nation and the liberty and happiness of its people? Some presidential scholars see Washington as essentially a symbolic leader who kept the nation united during perilous times. Others consider him mainly a “facilitator,” much constrained in a political context hostile to strong presidential leadership. Still others view Washington as actually living up to the classic picture of him as a great president, a strong leader, indeed, the Founder.10

The evaluation of Washington’s presidency depends in large part on whether we assess him as an individual leader or as the central figure in a collective leadership system, the presidency. As an individual leader dealing with his cabinet, with Congress, and with the public, Washington was at most a skillful transactional politician, a negotiator, a political broker, yes, a facilitator. Given his aloof bearing and his distaste for political brokerage, he was surprisingly adept at the give-and-take of presidential-congressional politics. Where his formal authority such as the veto power was inadequate, he marshaled authority in ways that would become customary for future presidents—using his patronage power to appoint good Federalists, pressuring the Senate, negotiating treaties with foreign powers, communicating in a variety of ways with individual members of Congress. These activities could produce needed changes but not dramatic transformations.

It was as head of a large collective leadership, the presidency, that Washington became a transforming leader. If Hamilton principally authored his economic program, he did so as Washington’s appointee and with the president’s strong support. If Washington converted the presidency from a mere array of officers and formal responsibilities laid out in the Constitution into a near monarchy, it was because of the teamwork Washington insisted on and the caliber of his team. His team had legs—that is, the members of the predominantly Federalist Congress and the hundreds of state and local politicians who embraced the president’s cause. Thus, his greatest act of governmental change was the enlargement of the presidency, bequeathing to future leaders a potentially powerful office. And he set high standards for the running of that office.

The first test of transforming leadership is the capacity to bring about comprehensive, intended, and lasting change. In his creation of a strong presidency, in his initiation of major economic and other measures, in his nationalistic foreign policy making, Washington brought about fundamental alterations in the structure as well as in the role of government. While his austere type of leadership would rarely be imitated by future presidents, his empowerment of the presidency through the fashioning of a collective leadership created precedents that would enable future presidents to forge continuing and lasting changes. Some of the political alterations he brought about were intentional, such as a strong Federalist presidency; wholly unintended, however, was the rise of a rival party that would disrupt the politics of unity and consensus that he prized so much. Of all these changes, his reshaping of the constitutional balance of powers—in effect, his remaking of the Constitution—would have the most impact on the developing republic.

But in the longer run, Washington’s transforming leadership would have to meet a test even more exacting than that of lasting change—the fundamental test of moral values.