Plain, Honest Men by Richard Beeman

Author:Richard Beeman [Beeman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-726-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE DELEGATES HAD MADE so little progress in clarifying aspects of the American presidency up to that point that they specifically excluded the matter from the charge of the Committee of Detail. In the hope that they might reach agreement on at least some features of the executive branch before they adjourned at the end of the day on July 26, they continued their debates on that vexed subject. On July 24, the Convention considered again the proposal that the president be elected by the Congress. At this point there was nothing that anyone in the Convention could say about the advantages and disadvantages of this method of selection that had not already been said, yet that did not stop many delegates from going over the same ground. Elbridge Gerry, who had opposed election by the legislature from the beginning, noted that should the delegates decide to grant Congress the power to elect the president, it should also vote to bar the president from serving more than one term in order that the president not be placed in a position of trying to please the legislature.18

Hugh Williamson of North Carolina seemed to be making the same point, proposing that the Convention return “to the original ground” of the Virginia Plan—election by the national legislature for one seven-year term. Yet, in virtually the same breath, he proposed a radically different alternative. He confessed that his true preference was to have “Executive power to be lodged in three men taken from three districts into which the States should be divided.” Pointing to the differing interests of the Northern and Southern states, he thought the best way to prevent one section's interests from being sacrificed to those of another would be to create a three-person executive as a broker among the various sections of the country. Williamson's other objection to a single executive was similar to that expressed so often by Edmund Randolph and others, namely that the president would become an “elective King, and feel the spirit of one.” In a powerful testimony to the way in which the very idea of monarchy invoked both fear and resignation among Americans, Williamson predicted that “it was pretty certain… that we should at some time or other have a King, but he wished no precaution to be omitted that might postpone the event as long as possible.”19

Hugh Williamson was not given to paranoia. Extraordinarily able and thoughtful, he had graduated first in his class from the College of Philadelphia. His early career was vigorous and varied. He studied theology and earned a license to preach in Connecticut, taught college-level math for a few years, studied medicine in Edinburgh and Utrecht, practiced medicine in Philadelphia for four years, and then traveled around Europe for another three. At the age of forty-one, with his impressive education and wealth of worldly experience, Williamson moved to North Carolina to begin a career as a merchant. During the Revolution he served as surgeon general of the North Carolina army,

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