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The Grand Convention - An Elective King · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Season sixteen of American Political History The Grand Convention An Elective King.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: On Friday, june first, seventeen eighty seven, the Committee of the Whole reached the seventh of Governor Randolph's resolutions, and the Secretary read it out loud.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let the national executive be instituted to be chosen by the National Legislature for a term of blank years, to be ineligible thereafter, to possess the executive powers of Congress.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: A national executive.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: The plan did not say one man, it did not say three men, or twelve.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: It did not say what the office could do beyond a blank inheritance of powers, or how long it lasted, beyond a blank number of years.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Of all the resolutions Virginia had laid on the table, this was the emptiest, because this was the one nobody wanted to write down.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Charles Pickany opened carefully.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: He was for a vigorous executive, he said, but he was afraid.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: If the executive powers of the old Congress passed whole into the office, they might extend to war and peace.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Which would render the executive a monarchy of the worst kind to wit an elective one.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Every man in the room had lived under a king, fought a war to be rid of him, and spent eleven years watching state government build so that no governor could ever become one.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the science of the age agreed with them.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: A king you elect is worse than a king you inherit, because every succession becomes a contest.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Poland elected its kings, and all Europe knew what Polish elections were auctions, intrigues, and foreign armies.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: That was the fear sitting at the table when James Wilson rose and moved.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: That the executive consists of a single person.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Pikiny seconded him.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then nothing.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Madison notes preserved the moment.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: A considerable pause ensuing, and the chairman asking if he should put the question.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin observed that it was a point of great importance and wished that the gentlemen would deliver their sentiments on it before the question was put.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The men who had voted a national government into existence in one morning, who had argued sovereignty and suffrage for days without drawing breath, sat silent on the question of a single executive, silent long enough that the chairman moved to put the question undebated, and the oldest man in the room had to coax the convention into speaking at all.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: The reason for the silence was sitting on the dais in front of the room, presiding, saying nothing, hearing everything.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Every man present understood that they were not debating in abstraction.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: They were measuring an office for George Washington, describing in his presence, in the third person to him, the powers they were or were not willing to place in his hands.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: To argue for a strong single executive was to flatter him to his face.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: To argue against one was to tell the most trusted man in America, sitting ten feet away, that he could not be trusted.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: It looked, Mr.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Rutledge said, as if they supposed that having frankly disclosed their opinions, they could never afterwards change them, which he did not take to be the case at all.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he set the example.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: He was for vesting the executive power in a single person, though not the power of war and peace.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: A single man would feel the greatest responsibility and administer the public affairs best.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman answered with the smallest executive anyone proposed all summer.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Consider the Executive Majesty as nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the legislature into effect.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: The person or persons ought to be appointed by and accountable to the legislature only, which is the depository of supreme will of society.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not a branch of government, a clerk.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let the legislature appoint one man or three or five as experience should dictate and let it dismiss them at its pleasure.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: In Judge Sherman's Connecticut, that was roughly what a governor was, and Connecticut had been happy for one hundred and fifty years.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The room knew the models on offer because the room was full of men who ran them.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph's Virginia executive was a creature of the assembly, elected by it, hemmed by a council, nearly powerless by design.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Pennsylvania had abolished the governor outright, and vested its executive in a council, a dozen men, whose president at the moment was Dr.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin, seated in the room.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: New York had gone the other way.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: A governor elected by the people, armed with real power, serving three year terms without limit, Governor Clinton's chair, the strongest executive in America, and over all of them stood the memory of the model nobody would name as a model.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Wilson made the case for a single magistrate because it gave the office the most energy, dispatch, and responsibility.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Major Pierce, taking his own notes at the Georgia table, caught the same speech in different words.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: In executive, Mr Wilson argued, ought to possess the powers of secrecy, vigor, and dispatch, and be so constituted as to be responsible.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Energy, the capacity to act, dispatch, the capacity to act quickly, responsibility, one name attached to every act, one man to praise, one man to blame, nowhere to hide inside a committee.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And Mr Wilson drew the office's limits in the same breath.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: The prerogatives of the British monarch were no proper guide.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Some of those were legislative in nature, among them war and peace.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: The only powers strictly executive were executing the laws and appointing officers.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Madison agreed with the definition, the office they were sketching would not hold the sword of war by right, only the execution of what the legislature willed.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then Governor Randolph rose, the mover of the whole plan against his own resolution's most natural reading.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: He strenuously opposed a unity in the executive magistry.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: He regarded it as the fetus of monarchy.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: The fetus of monarchy, a kingship in embryo waiting only to be fed.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: The people of America, the governor argued, had a fixed genius that required a different form.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted the executive vested in three men drawn from different parts of the country.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Wilson answered him with the argument turned exactly around.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Unity in the executive, instead of being the fetus of monarchy, will be the best safeguard against tyranny.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: One man could be watched, one man could be blamed, one man could be impeached.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Divide the office among three and the responsibility dissolves.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing but uncontrolled, continued and violent animosities, each member with his region and his faction, a standing civil war seated at one desk.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: The question was left unsettled that Friday.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: The committee filled in the blank terms instead and adjourned.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, june second, before the debate resumed, doctor Franklin asked leave for a paper to be read.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Being very sensible, he said, the effects of age on his memory, he had reduced his thoughts to writing rather than trusted, and the paper was read for him.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: His subject was the executive salary, and his proposal was that there be none.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: The expense of the office paid, and beyond that no salary, no stipend, no fee, no reward whatsoever.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: His written speech laid out why.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: These are ambition and avarice, the love of power and the love of money.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: But when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Place before the eyes of such men a post of honor that shall at the same time be a place of profit, and they will move heaven and earth to obtain it.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of men, he asked, would strive for such a post?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not the wise and moderate, not the lovers of peace and good order, not the men fittest for the trust, but the bold and violent, the men of strong passions and unrelenting activity in their selfish pursuits.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Make the office profitable, and you have designed a magnet for exactly the men who should never hold it.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the men it drew will not stop with one office.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: The vast number of profitable places, he argued, was what rendered the British government so tempetuous.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: The struggles of men were the true sources of the fractions perpetually dividing that nation.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was not, he insisted, a utopian idea.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: He had an example, and he used it in the room with the example presiding over him.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Have we not seen the greatest and most important of our offices, that of general of our armies executed for eight years together without the smallest salary by a patriot whom I will not now offend by any other praise?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: doctor Franklin, arguing that virtue could be had for free pointed at the chair, and the man in the chair, who had indeed refused a salary for eight years of war, sat and was pointed at.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hamilton seconded the motion, with the stated view, Madison noted, merely of bringing so respectable a position before the committee, and then nobody voted on it.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was treated with great respect, but rather for the author than for the apparent conviction of its expediency or practicability.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: That same Saturday, settled Moore of the Office's skeleton.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: The executive would be chosen by the national legislature, agreed.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: For a term of seven years, agreed, eight states to two.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Ineligible ever to serve again, agreed, seven states to two, one divided.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: One man, if Wilson's motion carried, chosen by Congress, serving seven years and then done forever.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: A magistrate designed never to spend a day of his term campaigning for the next one.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And John Dickinson opened the question of how such a man could be removed.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: His motion, the executive should be removable by the national legislature on the request of a majority of the legislature of the individual states.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: The states as the tribunal.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the debate he said the thing he had been circling since May.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: A limited monarchy he considered one of the best governments in the world.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was not certain that the same blessings were derivable from any other form.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: But a limited monarchy was out of the question in America.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: The spirit of the times, the state of their affairs, forbid the experiment if it were desirable.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: His motion failed nine states to one.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: What survived instead was a single clause agreed the same day, the executive would be removable on impeachment and conviction of malpractice or neglect of duty.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Impeachment.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature as the prosecutor and judge malpractice as the crime.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: The clause was barely debated.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Gunning Bedford had already put his finger on its limits when the seven year term was moved.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: An impeachment would be no cure, he warned, for the evil he feared most, it would reach malfeasance only, wrongdoing, not incapability.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: A magistrate could be removed for crimes, he could not be removed for failing.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: On Monday, june fourth, Wilson's motion could wait no longer.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Judge Sherman would agree to a single person, he said, provided the office carried a council of advice, as every state executive did.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: In some states the governor could do nothing without one.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And Elbridge Jerry, who had himself favored a council on the first days, disposed of the plural executive with the practical man's argument.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was at a loss to discover the policy of three members for the executive.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a general with three heads.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: In military matters, especially a divided executive would be mischievous, three commanders, three regions, three minds at one moment demanding action.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: The question was put up at last.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Shall the national executive consist of a single person?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: The states answered seven eyes, three no's, New York, Delaware, Maryland holding out.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: The executive would be one man.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: doctor Franklin had told the room before the vote, where he believed the road went regardless.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: The first man will be put at the helm will be a good one.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows what sort may come after.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: The executive will always increase here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: He voted with the losing side, and the single executive carried anyways.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So one man alone, no council of advice was attached to the office that day.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not Sherman's condition, not the Virginia's plan, council revision, nothing.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Every governor in America governed besides a constitutional council, the magistrate sketched on june fourth, stood by himself.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason had risen against the draft of the thing before the vote and named the office the way Pickany had.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: We are not indeed constituating a British government, but a more dangerous monarchy, an elective one.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do gentlemen mean to pave the way to hereditary monarchy?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do they flatter themselves that the people will ever consent to such an innovation?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Notwithstanding the oppressions and injustice experienced among us from democracy, the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the genius of the people must be consulted.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: The same phrase mister Pickany had used on june first to argue for fencing the office, George Mason used now to say the fences were falling, and his last clause was that argument no theory could answer.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever government the philosophers preferred, the genius of the people was Republican, and the genius of the people must be consulted.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Council of Revision, Virginia's plan to pair the executive with judges in reviewing every law was set aside, and Elbridge Jerry moved instead that the executive alone hold a veto on legislation, a veto which two thirds of each branch could override.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Wilson and Hamilton moved to strike the override entirely, an absolute veto, a veto no Congress could ever overturn.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: There was no danger, they thought, of such a power being too much exercised.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Hamilton offered the proof from the very model everyone feared.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: The King of Great Britain has not exerted his veto since the Revolution.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: The king's veto was absolute, and, as Hamilton told it, precisely because it was absolute, no king had dared touch it in a lifetime.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: The power's silent existence did all the work.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Wilson pressed the same logic.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature, knowing the power existed, would refrain from the laws it would defeat.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Its silent operation would preserve harmony.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin answered from experience, his own.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: He had, he said, some experience of this check in the executive under the old proprietary government of Pennsylvania, and the memory was not of harmony.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: The veto of the governor was constantly made use of to extort money.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: No good law whatever could be passed without a private bargain with him.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: In Pennsylvania, it had been a toll gate.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Increase of salary or some donation was always made a condition till the legislature had to buy back its own laws.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Give this executive the same weapon he feared and more power and more money would be demanded, till at last enough was gotten to bribe the legislature into complete subjection to the will of the executive.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: The first man put at the helm will be a good one.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: The question was put on for the absolute veto, and the convention gave its answer with a unanimity it achieved on almost nothing else all summer, ten states to zero.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not one state would give the executive an uncheckable veto, not even with George Washington in the room.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Butler tried the fallback, a power merely to suspend laws for a fixed term.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin seconded it, and it died the same death, ten states to none.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: They would instead vote on the qualified veto, eight states to two.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: The executive could strike at a law, and two thirds of each house could overrule it.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: By the close of Monday, june fourth, the office existed.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: A single person, chosen by the legislature for seven years once, paid.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Removable by impeachment for malpractice, armed with a veto that two thirds of Congress could override, commanding, of nothing yet, a pointer of offices, executor of laws.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Nearly every clause of it was provisional, and the most provisional was the first, how this magistrate would be chosen.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: The committee had answered in one line by the national legislature, and the answer lasted a week before the first motion to reopen it.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: The convention voted on the manner of choosing its executive again and again through the whole summer, unable to leave the question closed.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: What never changed was the number.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Patterson's plan offered the Convention a plural executive eleven days later, and it went down with the rest of the plan.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It would remain one man as executive from June fourth to the finished document.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: The office's working clauses filled in across the summer, most of them without battle.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: The president shall be the commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of several states, but only on Roger Sherman's August Amendment, who called into actual service of the United States.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: The state's swords stayed home swords until the Union summoned them.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Commander of the forces, and not the man who could commit them.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Pierce Butler proposed exactly that in August, vest the power of war in the president, who would have all the requisite qualities and would not make war but when the nation would support it.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: The room refused, and wrote the power to declare war into the legislature instead, leaving the president what a commander needs and no more, the authority to fight a war the Congress declares, and to repel an attack that arrives without warning.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: He holds the sword.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: He does not decide when it comes out of the sheath.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was the same August day the Convention argued over whether the new government could put down a rebellion inside a state without waiting to be asked.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Governor Morris, who wanted the power given plainly, objected to the whole instinct of restriction.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: We are acting at very strange pot.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: We first form a strong man to protect us and at the same time wish to tie his hands behind him.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: He shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, the King's mercy, handed to a Republican magistrate and fenced only against its use with impeachments.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin moved in August to confine to its pardons after conviction, and James Wilson talked him out of it with a prosecutor's point.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Pardon before conviction might be necessary to obtain the testimony of accomplices.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin withdrew the motion.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And on the convention's last working Saturday, Edmund Randolph tried to carve treason out of the power entirely.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: The president may himself be guilty, he warned, the traitors may be his own instruments.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason seconded him.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Wilson answered that the pardon should reach all offenses.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: A president party to the guilt could be impeached, and then prosecuted like any other man.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Rufus King floated the Senate's concurrence.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Randolph wanted no more connections between the President and Senate, and George Mason thought the Senate too powerful already.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: The exception failed.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: The pardoned power would stand whole with the executive.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the third section of Article II wrote the President's job description in a series of sentences.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: He shall from time to time give the Congress information on the State of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: He may convene both houses on extraordinary occasions, he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers, he shall commission all the officers of the United States, and he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, not make laws, not suspend them, as the Stuarts had.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Take care that they are executed faithfully.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Of all the councils proposed and rejected across the summer, Mason's, Franklin's, Morris's Council of State, the Privy Councilors, the Revisionary Boards, exactly one clause survived into the finished text.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: The president may require the opinion in writing of the principal officer in each of the executive departments upon any subject relating to the duties of the offices.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: He cannot be made to take their advice.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: He can demand it on paper signed where responsibility lives.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And his salary.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, it shall neither be increased nor diminished during his term and shall not receive within that period any other annulment of the United States or any of the states.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: The last clause added by Rutledge and Franklin together on September 15th carried seven states to four.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Leave a five star rating and share the show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.