Table Of ContentPresidents Above Party
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W R A L PH K E T C H A MW
Presidents
Above Party
The First American Presidency, 1789—1829
Published for the
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Williamsburg, Virginia
by The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
The Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Culture
is sponsored jointly by
The College ofWilliam and Mary
and The Colonial WiUiamsbuiy Foundation.
© 1984 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
04 03 02 01 oo 8 7 6 54
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ketcham, Ralph Louis, 1927—
Presidents above party.
(Institute bicentennial studies on the Constitution
and Early American law and government)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
i. Presidents—United States—History. 2. Executive
power—United States—History. 3. Political science—
United States—History. 4. United States—Politics and
government—1789-1815. 5. United States—Politics and
government—1815—1861. I. Institute of Early American
History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) II. Title.
III. Series.
JK5II.K47 1984 353.03'l'o9 83-12517
ISBN 978-0-8078-1582-3
ISBN 978-0-8078-4179-2 (pbk.)
THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.
FOR
Paul Knights
Marvin Wachman
Philip M. Williams
William T. Hutchinson
Joseph Tussman
Martin Diamond
and, especially,
Stuart Gerry Brown
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Preface
Prhaps the most commonplace theme in eighteenth-century po-
litical discourse was the condemnation of faction or party. Lord
alifax's "Maxim" in 1693 was that "parties in a State generally,
Freebooters, hang out False Colours: the pretence is the Pub-
lick Good; the real business is, to catch Prizes; like the Tartars, where-ever
they succeed, instead of improving their Victory, they presently fall upon
the Baggage." A century later, Madison's definition of faction was any
group, minority or majority, "who are united and actuated by some com-
mon impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse ... to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the community." Similarly, Washington warned in
his Farewell Address (1796) against the peril of "party spirit" in free gov-
ernments: where it prevailed, "the alternate domination of one faction
over the other . . . has perpetuated the most horrid enormities, [and] is
itself a frightful despotism."
The contrary idea, that factional dispute, party advocacy, and accom-
modation of diverse interests might be useful, even indispensable, in a free
government, was stated only occasionally and never gained wide accep-
tance. In consequence, the establishment of American government follow-
ing the Declaration of Independence, and especially the fashioning of a
novel executive office in 1787 and afterward, took place in the presence of
assumptions about leadership and party radically different from those ac-
cepted as axiomatic in the era of Jackson and Peel, Lincoln and Gladstone,
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, or Lyndon Johnson and
Harold Wilson.
Yet, the hostility of the early presidents to party and their earnest inten-
tion to be nonpartisan executives have seemed perverse, naive, and even
disingenuous in a scholarly context in which it is generally assumed that
discord and party are both inevitable and valuable. Joseph Charles, for ex-
ample, in The Origins of the American Party System (1956), noted that
Washington tried to prevent the growth of parties and saw no place for
them in American government. "Had he been successful in this," Charles
added, "it is most doubtful that representative government in this country
would have outlived him for long." That is, Charles assumed that represen-
tative government could not survive without political parties, a view exactly
the opposite of Washington's. Or, note Richard Hofstadter's more direct
viii Preface
statement at the beginning of The Idea of a Party System, 1780-1840
(1969): "I do believe that the full development of the liberal democratic
state in the West required that political criticism and opposition be incar-
nated in one or more opposition parties, free ... to form permanent. . .
recognized oppositional structures." That is, political parties were the very
incarnation, the flesh and blood, the body, of the otherwise presumably
unreal, ephemeral spirit and principle of self-government. In the eigh-
teenth century, of course, commentary on political parties would as un-
selfconsciously have used images and metaphors of exactly opposite con-
notation: political parties were considered to be poisonous, corroding,
cancerous, and parasitic. But with assumptions like Charles's it is not sur-
prising that he sees only gain in the growth in the 1790s of what he argues
was the first flowering of a sustained party system in the United States.
Nor is it surprising that Hofstadter sees "the gradual acceptance of parties
and of the system of a recognized partisan opposition" as "a net gain in the
sophistication of political thought and practice over the antiparty thought
... of the eighteenth century and earlier."
More recently James MacGregor Burns (Leadership, 1978) has empha-
sized the difference between a "negative liberty," important in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries when the need in religion, politics, and
economics was for freedom from "the authority of establishments," and a
"positive liberty," crucial since the industrial revolution, when the people
need to "expand their liberties through the use of governmental power,
... to gain education, nutrition, health, employment." The eighteenth-
century drafters of the American Constitution provided admirable defenses
against arbitrary power, but they failed to envision a positive use of power
to improve human life. "The American Presidency," according to Burns,
"was not designed to be the center of leadership." Rather, the framers
hoped and assumed "that the President would be 'above' political conflict,
... [a] high-minded chief magistrate somewhat removed from the tur-
bulence of factional strife" and, apparently, removed also from the impor-
tant political concerns of the nation. Burns thinks it fortunate that circum-
stances soon corrected this "vain hope" and that the office moved toward
more political engagement. Good leadership, he adds, is "dissensual" and,
far from seeking to be consensual or above party, should seek "to expand
the field of combat, to reach out for more followers, to search for allies."
"The dynamo of political action," Burns assumes, is "meaningful conflict,
. . . [which] produces engaged leaders who in turn generate more conflict
among the people." In order for a president to become such a "key democ-
ratizer of leadership," he must, even while in office, be an active, avowed,
effective head of party. Washington, Jefferson, and J. Q. Adams, however,
would have been appalled at the assignment of such a role to the presidency.
Remembering that praise of party and of conflict are by now entirely
Preface ix
conventional among both British and American students of politics only
increases the difficulty of taking quite seriously the scorn Washington,
Jefferson, and the Adamses felt for faction and party. And because their
idea of executive leadership was linked closely to their view of party, the
difficulty is transferred to our effort to understand and appreciate what
they sought to be as presidents. But without such an understanding we are
unlikely to grasp what the presidential office was in its first conception, and
we may even be unnecessarily restricted in contemplating what it might be
in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Suppose, for example, that it is
not entirely correct to assume that active, systematic partisanship every-
where is "good for the health" of democratic government, or that "or-
ganizing conflict" is not always the best style for democratic leadership.
Might it be useful, possibly, to look once more at the views of the founders
and to consider whether an effort at greater nonpartisanship by the execu-
tive could improve the public life of the nation? Must the president func-
tion openly, unashamedly, and enthusiastically as "the leader of his party"?
Should the common judgment that it is impractical for an effective presi-
dent to be, even in the Oval Office, anything other than a zealous party
leader, go unchallenged? Do we need to accept it as natural and proper, as
happened in 1978, that wealthy people with obvious special interests
would be invited to lunch at the White House and have the president's
closest advisers freely admit that it was hoped the luncheon would encour-
age the guests to help fill party campaign coffers? (Everything was all right
legally, it was explained, as long as no direct request for political contribu-
tions was made "on government property.") Or must we accept it as
proper that, as happened in 1982, those who had contributed more than
one thousand dollars to the president's campaign were, because of that
support, "given access to the president's ear"? (In the opinion of White
House aides this arrangement neither conferred privilege on wealth nor
exerted undue influence on the president.) In any case, assumptions of the
sort made by Charles, Hofstadter, and Burns, however useful or even ur-
gent in improving current understanding of party and leadership, are best
set aside during any search for the ideas and models of executive leadership
that guided the first presidents. Not to do this is to infect the public phi-
losophy of one era with the biases of another.
The search for the assumptions, preconceptions, and models of leader-
ship the early presidents took into office with them can take many direc-
tions, of course. Some scholars have examined the institutional and consti-
tutional precedents of the presidency in Great Britain and its colonies and
have studied the political ideas influential in eighteenth-century America.
Others have analyzed the growth of political parties, the early administra-
tive history of the United States, and the career and public philosophy of
each of the first six presidents. Indeed, the growth of the presidency into
