Mr. President (31 page)

Washington’s contemporaries understood that by “combinations and associations” he meant the Democratic-Republican Societies and similar political clubs that dissented from the policies of his administration. These groups promoted “the spirit of party” with all its “baneful effects,” and this sort of factionalism, the outgoing president declared, “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” All blame for disorder and disunity thus fell upon the Federalists’ political foes.
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Did that mean Washington failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of dissent? Not exactly. In fact, he had always sought divergent viewpoints before making decisions. On numerous occasions during the Revolutionary War he had allowed his Council of War to talk him out of undertaking brash attacks. Before authorizing a national bank and before placing his signature on Jay’s Treaty, he had solicited advice from advocates and opponents alike. When Jefferson fell out with Hamilton and threatened to resign his cabinet post, Washington had tried to persuade him to stay on, hoping to preserve diverse counsel. In all such instances Washington had acted as a leader among leaders, an exemplar of republican governance who listened to all sides of an argument before determining the optimum course.

Yet for Washington organized politics out of doors, practiced by private
citizens who had been neither elected nor appointed to any office, was a different matter altogether. Today, we see extra-governmental venues for public debate as natural and perhaps even necessary components of political life, but Washington and others who held to a model of wise and disinterested leadership believed that groups with political agendas interfered with legitimate government, and in his Farewell Address, with Hamilton’s help, the first president of the United States warned the nation of the dangers they presented.

His warnings were of little avail. To Republicans, Washington’s farewell was more a call to battle than a unifying message. They did not feel like enemies of the Union, as Washington and Hamilton made them appear. They opposed policies of the Federalist-dominated government, actions that in their view undermined the core principles upon which the nation was founded. While many (but not all) had opposed the Constitution during ratification debates, they had agreed to abide by it and submitted proposals for alterations they thought would make the new rules more consistent with republican values. They organized in “combinations” because without organization, changes would be difficult to effect.

Republicans took particular offense at the president’s extensive justification of his foreign policy. Following Hamilton’s draft in the final substantive section of his address, Washington devoted some twelve hundred words to explaining why the United States should “stay clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” This section of the address has resonated with isolationists in subsequent times, who, with Washington, have asked: “Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?” This call for neutrality, though, was not so well received by his political opponents at the time, who saw quite clearly that “permanent alliances” referred to one specific alliance that was supposed to be permanent, the 1778 treaty with France that Washington, with Jay’s Treaty, had broken. For Republicans, Washington’s alleged neutrality actually reflected Federalist policy, pro-British and anti-French, and this was more an invitation to battle than a peace offering. Even Fisher Ames, a die-hard Massachusetts Federalist, read Washington’s farewell that way. “It will serve as a signal, like dropping a hat, for the party racers to start,” he wrote upon reading the address.
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In short, while we read the Farewell Address today as Washingtonian, the final appeal of a beloved father to avoid quarreling at home and entanglements abroad, Republican adversaries read it as Hamiltonian, a justification of Federalist policies and a call to continue them. Yet Hamilton was out of office, and soon Washington would be too. Now at last the dissenting Republicans had a chance to redirect the nation along lines they deemed more suitable, but to do so, they believed they would need to capture the presidency.

Bracing for this Republican assault, Federalists doubled down on the presidency as well, and without Washington to lead the defense, they appeared as desperate as their opposition. The nation, already torn, would nearly fracture as the two emerging parties competed for the post Washington had solidified. In the framers’ minds, and in Washington’s as well, the presidency was supposed to counteract partisan politics; now the prospect of capturing that expanding office encouraged Americans in both camps to become more partisan than ever.

On January 25, 1789—ten days before electors were to assemble in their respective state capitals to cast their votes for the first president and vice president under the new Constitution—Alexander Hamilton had written nervously to his colleague from the Federal Convention James Wilson: “Every body is aware of that defect in the constitution which renders it possible that the man intended for Vice President may in fact turn up President.” Washington would be almost everyone’s choice for the top spot, but each elector was to vote for
two
men, without distinguishing between president and vice president. This created a potential problem that Hamilton foresaw and wished to prevent. Might John Adams, who provided regional balance and whom Washington had informally endorsed, actually receive
more
votes than Washington himself? “Every body sees that unanimity in Adams as Vice President and a few votes insidiously held from Washington might substitute the former for the latter,” Hamilton warned. “And every body must perceive that there is something to fear from the machinations of Anti-foederal malignity.”
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“What in this situation is wise?” he asked, and then he posited an answer. Federalists should arrange for sympathetic electors to “throw away a few votes” for Adams to ensure he would not overtake Washington. They couldn’t throw away too many for fear an Anti-Federalist
might capture the number two spot, but in the ten days before electors were to cast their votes, they should get just the right number of electors—“7 or 8,” Hamilton suggested—to vote for someone other than Adams so Washington would be president and Adams vice president.

Although Hamilton’s fears in this case were not well-founded (Adams received only 36 votes compared with Washington’s 69), they caused him to make a remarkable admission: the Constitution, which he had done so much to promote, could be gamed, and to prevent his foes from doing so, he would game it preemptively. To do this, though, he tried to influence presidential electors behind closed doors. In the parlance of the times, he engaged in “intrigue.”

This was not what the framers of the Constitution had intended. When the Committee of Eleven reported its elector scheme on September 4, Gouverneur Morris rose immediately to “give the reasons of the Committee and his own,” as Madison wrote. “The 1st was the danger of intrigue & faction” if the president were selected by Congress. “As the Electors would vote at the same time throughout the U.S. and at so great a distance from each other, the great evil of cabal was avoided,” he explained. Under such conditions, it would be “impossible” for any cabal to “corrupt” the electors.
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Hamilton, in
The Federalist
68, had elaborated on this theme. “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption,” he stated. “The convention have guarded against all danger of this sort with the most provident and judicious attention.” Voting separately and independently, “under circumstances favorable to deliberation,” electors would “enter upon the task free from any sinister bias.” Each would exercise his best judgment, free from any influence.

That men as practical and tough-minded as Morris and Hamilton could believe they had devised a system that “guarded against all danger” from influence is difficult to explain. Clearly, the system invited intrigue. It practically summoned men with political motivations to take advantage of the lack of distinction between votes for president and votes for vice president, as Hamilton feared Anti-Federalists would do and he did do at the very first opportunity. Also, because electors were chosen long before they cast their votes, they were open prey for those who wanted to affect their decisions. Further, because men who chose electors (that could be either state legislators or the voting public)
cared more about who would
be
president than who would
vote
for president, they might well demand some sort of promise or pledge from a would-be elector before giving him their votes. With all these opportunities, why
wouldn’t
men with common interests join together (that is, form cabals) and plot privately (engage in intrigue) to influence the choice of president?

Voting through electors was only the first of a two-step process. If a group with common interests believed it could muster a majority in the House of Representatives, it could lobby electors to vote for diverse candidates so there would be no clear majority; then the election would be settled in the House, where that group would prevail. Conversely, if a group were poorly represented in the House, they could lean on electors who preferred other candidates to cast second votes for theirs; if just over half the electors agreed on a vice president, and preferences for president varied, the alleged vice president would become president without congressional involvement. Finally, whenever an election was thrown into the House, backers of the top five candidates would be foolish
not
to engage in intrigue, trying to attract support in return for promises or favors. This was exactly the scenario Gouverneur Morris and others had tried to prevent by instituting electors, but there it was, a major component of the system.

So again, how did members of the Committee of Eleven, who devised the method of presidential selection, and those on the convention floor who approved it, and Federalists who gave it rave reviews, miss all this? Partly, as mentioned, by the time the plan came to the floor, delegates were too tired to ask the hard questions. But that is not the full reason, for the central question—whether the plan was really intrigue-proof—could have been answered in the negative with hardly a second thought.

At least three other contributing explanations come to mind. First, the framers wished too hard. After struggling for three months to create an independent presidency and coming up empty, delegates to the convention simply willed that an unacceptable answer be acceptable. Putting on blinders had become their only option. From a human perspective, this is understandable; the framers were giving birth to a new form of government, and like any parents they entertained the highest hopes for their offspring. Envisioning the best, they embraced an idealistic fantasy of republican virtue and attributed nothing but the
purest of motives to presidential electors. Since the notion was new and untested, there was no evidence to contradict their strange hypothesis: electors could be immunized from influence because they served only for a moment. Somehow, the electors’ temporary status would remove them from all political context.

Electors would also meet simultaneously at thirteen different locations, and this “detached and divided situation” (Hamilton’s words) allegedly removed them further yet from political heat. Gouverneur Morris, in his persuasive speech at the Federal Convention on July 19, proclaimed that a nationwide election “throughout so great an extent of country could not be influenced, by those little combinations and those momentary lies which often decide popular elections within a narrow sphere.” This wishful argument suggests another reason for their miscalculations: because they associated cabal and intrigue with the goings-on in European national cities like London and Paris, they assumed that decentralizing the election process would prevent small groups from meeting in secret and exerting undue influence. This narrow definition of cabal and intrigue led them to underestimate the extent and depth of the influence wielded by small, private groups in political life at any level or location. Intrigue could not be prevented by simple geographic manipulation. Almost any delegate to the Federal Convention, had he looked over the list of political figures with whom he corresponded, could have determined as much. Hamilton, for instance, discussed his plan to influence electors with friends in at least six of the eleven states voting in the first federal election. Was that not intrigue, simply because communications were by mail? Was this group, which hoped to determine who would be the president and the vice president of the United States, not a faction or even a cabal? Participants did not view themselves in that manner, partly because they were not whispering in the halls of some European court, and partly because intrigue ran counter to republican ideology and they could not bear to view their own activities as contradicting what had become a national credo.
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Finally, men who devised and approved the electoral system failed to fully comprehend many factors that could foster intrigue and cabal. They believed that “greediness for office,” to use Jefferson’s term, led to European-style political divisions, which were characterized in the American mind by intrigue and cabal, but this definition was too limited;
even in Europe, motivations were more varied than that limited model would suggest. They understood, too, that local and regional interests in the United States would lead men to divide into factions, engage in intrigue to influence governmental policies, and in worst-case scenarios form cabals that tried to seize power, whether by legitimate means or otherwise; indeed, that’s why they sought a method of electing the president that would not fall prey to this tendency. As Madison famously wrote in
The Federalist
10, since “the causes of faction cannot be removed, … relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its
effects
,” and among those anti-faction safeguards was the decentralization of electors. The framers, though, failed to grasp the depth of feeling and commitment that would emerge as competing groups grappled for the soul of a nation that was still being defined, nor did they foresee that cross-regional alliances among emerging factions would tie constituencies together into national parties. Further, they did not predict that in the new order public concern over governmental matters would highlight these naturally occurring divisions, thereby adding to the dangers posed by partisan politics. In sum, although we might forgive them this oversight, they did not predict that multiple factions would lead in the end to a two-party system, and that in order for either of these two parties to capture the highest office in the land, political agents would
necessarily
try to influence the selection of presidential electors, and after electors were chosen, each party would seek to secure commitments to vote for particular candidates. In the end, polarized parties would defeat the basic premise of electors, which was to remove the choice of the president from “any sinister bias.”