The First Presidential Campaign—George Washington, 1788-89

The following essay was first published in Constituting America.

George Washington won the first presidency under the newly established Constitution. He ran unopposed, professed not to want the job, and remained for the most part at Mount Vernon, yet won unanimously. Many believe he never campaigned, but instead acquiesced to a call to duty from his countrymen. Perhaps it was not so simple.

People think of Washington as a man of honor who won a war through strength of character and perseverance, and as a president who didn’t cling to power. From our perspective in time, he appears etched-in-marble and stiff as a board. Washington was tall, stately, reserved, and preoccupied with his reputation, but he also loved to dance, play cards, socialize over meals, and attend the theater. He was a superb horseman, ran his plantation with a sharp eye for profit, and attended church regularly. Washington was a vibrant, athletic man who wanted most of all to be loved by his countrymen.

Washington was the preeminent politician of his age and maintained good relationships with all the significant people in the country. To say he didn’t campaign for the presidency is to ignore decades of relentless politicking. (When Dwight Eisenhower was told he was not a politician, he replied that no one could become General of the Army without being a politician.) Washington bragged he never ate alone, made sure he was a central figure in all the founding events, collected a cadre of bright and capable people, and understood branding well before Madison Avenue had a clue.

Power To The Regulators!

The Founders believed that consolidating executive, legislative, and judicial powers would threaten liberty, so to avoid this tragedy, they built our constitutional framework with checks and balances. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist 47 that “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Whew! Thank goodness we avoided that kind of government.

On second thought, we didn’t. Despite the Founders best efforts, Congress has concentrated executive, legislative, and judicial powers into regulatory agencies. Lazy legislators pass vague laws and then permit regulators to fill in the devilish details. Many of these regulatory agencies employ their own adjudication panels with internal appeal boards that judge the rightness or wrongness of their own actions. (A final appeal may be made to outside courts, but usually not until all of the agency’s protocols have run their course.) Lastly, regulatory agencies execute their own interpretation of laws, with—if White House responses to regulatory scandals are to be believed—no oversight by the top executive.

Surely, this can’t be right. It would violate every precept of the Founders.

Unfortunately, it’s true. In fact, amassing vast powers in regulatory agencies has become so commonplace, few take notice anymore. At least, few took notice until the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau raised this liberty-sapping drift to a brand new level.

Lincoln at Cooper Union

Lincoln photo from day of speech

In early 1860, Abraham Lincoln was a little known regional politician from Springfield, Illinois. The Republican Party was new, and had failed running national hero John C. Frémont for president in 1856. Lincoln's chances of ascending to the presidency under the Republican banner were slight. All that changed in New York City on February 27, 1860. That afternoon, Lincoln had his photograph taken by Mathew Brady, and in the evening, he gave a historic speech at the Cooper Union. Lincoln often claimed that Brady’s photograph and his Cooper Union address propelled him to the presidency.

Below is a highly abridged version of Lincoln’s speech.

Would Divided Government Have Surprised the Founders?

Recent events in Washington make you wonder if anyone can get along inside the Beltway. It’s not just Democrats versus Republicans—now Democrats war with Democrats and Republicans war with Republicans. And all of them seem at odds with those of us in the hinterlands. Washington is getting like the Middle East without the beheadings.

Are the Founders’ at fault for government dysfunction? Garrett Epps thinks so. In an illogical piece in The Atlantic, Epps claims the Founders never anticipated a divided government. He wrote:

I’m trying to illustrate a dangerous weakness of our system, one that the Framers clearly did not foresee. Many of them believed there would not be political parties in the new system. Others no doubt thought that the government they had designed would consist of a Congress that met for a month or so every December and a president who would supervise a slumbering bureaucracy the rest of the year. Some of them assumed the president would be a passive figure, administering directions from Congress; others imagined a chief executive with some of the majesty of the king of England. I don’t think any of them anticipated that the two branches would ever clash over which represented "the will of the voters."

Epps teaches constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, but it seems he never got beyond grade school American history. (Actually, he probably knows better but hopes the rest of us have a cherry tree understanding of American history.)

First of all, none of the Founders owned a pair of rose colored glasses. These were hard core realists. Their entire design is based on placing guardrails around partisan combatants and tempering human frailty. Claiming the Founders never anticipated divided government is ignorant or disingenuous.

Historians estimate that about one third of the colonists supported a break with England, one third opposed it, and the remaining third kept their head down to avoid musket balls.  That’s pretty partisan. Jolly old Ben Franklin even became estranged from his son because they found themselves on opposite sides of the cause. Estranged is probably too light of a word since Franklin stopped G. Washington from setting his son free in a prisoner swap. Franklin and his son never forgave or forgot. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention knew ratification would be a ferocious battle, and before the convention was even over, took several actions to tilt the debate in their favor. And these men never anticipated partisanship and a divided government?