It is no accident that George Washington has gone down in history as “the Father of His Country.” It is not merely that he had been commander in chief during the colonies’ most perilous hour, in the American War for Independence, or that he reluctantly came out of retirement to serve as president of the Convention that brought the Constitution into being. His active presence may have been indispensable on each of those occasions, but his role as America’s first president was of even greater importance. He knew that in spite of the words written on the parchment pages of the Constitution, the new federal government and the union it was intended to achieve were held together by tenuous threads. He knew that every action he took as the nation’s first chief executive would be critically important in adding substance to the bare superstructure created by the Constitution, and that those actions would serve as precedent for subsequent generations.
President Washington took his oath of office in the Senate Chamber of Federal Hall in New York on April 30, 1789. The Constitution prescribes the precise words of the presidential oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will . . . to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” As he took that first oath of office, Washington set a precedent that, down to the present day, most presidents would follow: he added to the end of the oath the phrase “so help me God,” thereby injecting the deity into a government that was, by the terms of the Constitution itself, entirely separate from matters of religion or the church. His inaugural address—itself a precedent-setting event—was quintessential Washington: it combined an outward humility about his abilities to carry out the enormous responsibilities of the office with a dignified and self-confident manner that left no one in the audience with any doubt about his ability to shoulder those responsibilities.
As Washington was assuming the responsibilities of the presidency, the First Federal Congress, which had been in session since early March, was already hard at work fulfilling the most important promise made by the Federalists during the ratification debates: the promise that a bill of rights would be added to the Constitution. James Madison took the lead in steering a draft of a bill of rights through the Congress. On May 4, 1789, he announced his intention of introducing into the House of Representatives a set of amendments designed to “make the Constitution better in the opinion of those who are opposed to it.” The content of what came to be known as the Bill of Rights was strongly influenced by similar bills of rights incorporated into the revolutionary state constitutions and, in particular, by the Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason and adopted in June 1776. Congress approved a revised set of twelve amendments on September 25, and sent them to the states for ratification. Two of the amendments—one dealing with the apportionment of representation in the House of Representatives and the other prohibiting Congress from granting pay raises to its members before another election had been held—were not ratified by the states, but by December 15, 1791, the necessary number of states had ratified the other ten, and the Bill of Rights became a part of the United States Constitution.
The president’s cabinet, consisting of the most senior officers of the executive branch below the president himself, is only hinted at in the Constitution. Article II, Section 2, gives the president the power to appoint, with the consent of a majority of the members of the Senate, “Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for.” But the Constitution is silent on how the “other Officers” of the executive branch are to be appointed. In the absence of specific wording on the subject, the First Congress took the lead in creating a system of administrative departments that would work with the president in carrying out the duties of the executive branch. The Congress began steps to create three departments during its first months of operation: the Department of Foreign Affairs (which in revised form became the Department of State), whose first secretary would be Thomas Jefferson; the Department of the Treasury, headed up by Washington’s brilliant and loyal Revolutionary War aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton; and the Department of War, whose first secretary was another military compatriot of Washington’s, General Henry Knox.
The debate over the creation of the Department of Foreign Affairs led to some disagreement over whether Congress or the president had the power to remove a cabinet officer; the decision arrived at on that occasion was that the power belonged to the president. In fact, the matter remained a subject of contention between Congress and the president for more than a century, although the sole authority of the president to remove cabinet officials seems now very well established.
Congress was even more aggressive about asserting a role that was equal to that of the executive branch with respect to the Department of the Treasury. Since the power over the purse was considered to be the most important that Congress possessed, the members of the First Congress, in creating the office of secretary of the treasury, required that the secretary “give information to either branch of the legislature, in person or in writing . . . respecting all matters referred to him.” Although the secretary of the treasury has proven to be primarily an agent of executive power, Congress has always wished to keep close watch over the Treasury Department’s activities.
Congress’s other significant action during its first session was to fill in some of the Constitution’s missing pieces with respect to the federal judiciary. The sections in the Constitution on the structure and powers of the judiciary are exceptionally vague. Article III states simply that “the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” The courts’ powers were similarly vague: they would have authority in “all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made,” but where that authority began and ended was anyone’s guess. Almost immediately after the First Congress convened, a special judiciary committee, chaired by Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth, a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and a future chief justice of the Supreme Court, began meeting. In September 1789, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789. It created a federal court structure that has remained largely unchanged up to the present day, with three levels of federal courts: in the bottom tier, a set of district trial courts that empanel juries and hear cases; circuit courts that hear serious crimes involving sums of money over five hundred dollars, as well as hearing appeals from the district courts; and finally, the Supreme Court, which stands at the top of the hierarchy and in certain instances hears cases brought to it from the circuit courts of appeals.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 stipulated that the Supreme Court would consist of six justices, a number expanded by Congress to seven in 1807, then to nine in 1837 (Congress expanded the number to ten in 1863, but in 1869 it was reduced once again to nine, where it has remained up to the present day). The act defined the authority of the court narrowly, although it did grant the Supreme Court jurisdiction over appeals from state courts on matters touching on federal law. Over time the Supreme Court has asserted its power to hear appeals from state courts more aggressively, but in 1789 the precise jurisdiction of the Supreme Court with respect to state court cases was anything but clear. Initially, judges of the circuit courts were drawn from both the district courts and the Supreme Court, with the result being that Supreme Court justices had the arduous duty not only of doing their designated jobs but also of riding circuit in various regions of the country hearing cases on appeal from the district courts. Although the Judiciary Act of 1789 went part of the way toward putting flesh on the bare-bones structure of the federal judiciary as defined in the Constitution, the development of the judicial branch as a powerful component of the triad of executive, legislative, and judicial power remained unrealized in 1789.
Finally, the Judiciary Act of 1789 took one other important step in helping to shape the president’s cabinet by creating the office of attorney general, a position that President Washington immediately filled with the appointment of his friend and former Virginia governor Edmund Randolph.
The question of whether and under what circumstances the president should exercise a veto over congressional legislation was a subject of considerable disagreement in the Constitutional Convention. The final language of Article I, Section 7, stipulates that the president can veto a law passed by Congress, but Congress retains the right to override the veto if two-thirds of the members of both houses choose to do so. In 1792 Washington received a bill from Congress that would have given some districts more than the one member of the House of Representatives for every thirty thousand inhabitants spelled out in the Constitution. Accordingly, Washington vetoed the bill on the grounds that it was in violation of the language of the Constitution. His veto did not provoke significant opposition in the Congress, but it would be his only veto of a congressional bill. Indeed, neither of his immediate successors, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, would make use of the veto power, and it would not be until the presidency of Andrew Jackson that a chief executive would veto a bill, not on constitutional grounds, but rather because he disagreed with the policies proposed by the bill.
President Washington was the most influential in setting constitutional precedents that would determine the way the government would operate in subsequent generations, but the policies proposed by his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, would play a hugely important role in enhancing the powers of the new federal government and, in the process, precipitate the first important constitutional debate in the young nation’s history.
During the years 1790-91, Hamilton put forward ambitious proposals to put the young nation’s finances and economy on a stronger footing. Hamilton proposed not only to pay off the debts incurred by the Continental government during the Revolutionary War but also to assume responsibility for the debts of the individual state governments. He hoped to establish the precedent that the federal government, and not the state governments, was the entity responsible for overseeing the financial well-being of the nation’s economy. There was heated opposition to Hamilton’s plan from those who feared that his proposal to pay off the state debts amounted to usurpation of state power, but Hamilton’s proposals passed Congress and were signed into law by President Washington. Next, Hamilton proposed the creation of a national bank: the Bank of the United States. In one sense Hamilton’s proposed bank was to operate like a private corporation, with a board of directors composed largely of private citizens and with a responsibility to return a profit to its shareholders. But it was also intended to function as a public entity, with the authority to handle many of the government’s financial policies and transactions.
Congress passed the bank bill in February 1791 and transmitted it to President Washington for his approval. Mindful that many in Congress had strong objections to yet another Hamiltonian attempt to centralize power in the hands of the federal government, Washington sought opinions on the bill’s constitutionality from both Hamilton and the secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson objected to the bill on two grounds. First, he argued that nowhere in the Constitution was the Congress empowered to charter a bank and that the Tenth Amendment, which reserves all powers not specifically enumerated in the Constitution to the states, rendered the bank bill unconstitutional. Jefferson then laid down the doctrine of what would come to be called “strict construction,” arguing that the final paragraph of Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, giving Congress the power to pass laws “necessary and proper” for carrying into effect the enumerated powers, needed to be interpreted narrowly. In Jefferson’s reading of that clause, the so-called unenumerated powers of Congress needed to be “indispensable” or of an “invincible necessity.” He could see no such necessity in Hamilton’s bank bill. Hamilton, arguing for a broad construction of the “necessary and proper” clause, defined the clause as sanctioning actions by Congress that would be “useful,” “needful,” or “conducive” and defended his bill. President Washington, after considering the two arguments, sided with Hamilton and signed the bill into law, but the constitutional line of division between “strict constructionists” and “broad constructionists” would remain an important part of the debate on how to interpret the Constitution from that time right up to the present day.
The constitutional division articulated during the debate over the Bank of the United States, along with important differences of opinion over the proper conduct of American foreign policy, led to an entirely unexpected development in American life: the development of organized political parties. These divisions were initially only loosely formed coalitions in the United States Congress, but they were gradually transformed into self-conscious entities founded on a large popular base throughout the country as a whole. These nascent political parties began to appear during the second term of President Washington’s administration, and then increased in importance and intensity during the administration of Washington’s successor, John Adams. Those favoring a strict construction of the Constitution also tended to be wary of the Washington and Adams administrations’ foreign policies. They believed those policies to be overly friendly to the monarchical government of Great Britain and insufficiently supportive of America’s revolutionary ally France, which in 1789 had undergone its own revolution inspired in part by the principles of the American Revolution. James Madison, one of the architects of the Constitution and one of the leading Federalists supporting it during the ratification debates, joined with Thomas Jefferson as a leader of what would come to be called the Jeffersonian Republican Party. Although Alexander Hamilton was responsible for many of the policies that would define the agenda of what came to be known as the Federalist Party, President Washington and President Adams were chiefly responsible for implementing those policies.