Mr. President Read Free

continuity, placed a new pair of monarchs on the throne, William and Mary, even as it constrained royal authority with a Bill of Rights. Henceforth, Britain would be governed by Parliament and the Crown simultaneously. By distributing power rather than concentrating it, the revolutionaries of 1688 had inoculated the British polity against tyranny.
    At least that was the plan. Over the next eighty-eight years, while the American colonies remained within the British realm, two emergent political parties—Whigs and Tories—squabbled over the meaning and operation of this mixed system. Broadly speaking, Whigs viewed themselves as the upholders of the Glorious Revolution, trumpeting individual liberties and pushing back against any hint of monarchical abuse, while Tories favored the stability that comes with established hierarchies, often siding with the Crown in its inevitable tugs-of-war with Parliament.
    That’s the simplistic picture, comprehensible to us today, but the men who gathered at the Pennsylvania State House in the summer of 1787 to establish a new set of rules for the fledgling United States, having been raised within this political matrix, had a much richer understanding of the complexities of Whiggism and Toryism. Although their ideas might differ on how to weight the elements, they all believed in the superiority of a mixed governmental system. Had they been asked to devise a constitution in 1760, before their quarrels with the mother country, they would no doubt have come up with a plan closely resembling the British model, which all agreed was the best in the world. Wilson’s motion for a single executive would have passed by acclamation in a moment, and they would have haggled only over the particulars. They all would have wanted to fashion their government around both a monarch—whether selected by birth, appointment, or election—and a body representing the people, something akin to Parliament.
    Much had happened between 1760 and 1787, however. When Charles Pinckney, the first speaker on the subject of establishing an executive office, warned against endowing that office with powers over “peace & war &c.,” all he needed to do was utter the
m
-word—“monarchy.” The term that had once inspired such reverence was now the kiss of death.
    The tectonic shift in political philosophy did not come easily. In fact, the Revolutionary generation—the “rebels” of the 1760s and 1770s—were so deeply imbued with the notion of monarchy that theyrefused to renounce their allegiance to the British Crown until the bitter end, long after empirical evidence had proved the king an adversary. For more than a decade, colonists blamed all their troubles on Parliament, the king’s ministers, and their “Tory” allies in America, while excusing the king himself.
    On August 14, 1765, when a Boston crowd hung a straw man and a giant boot from an elm tree at the south end of town, they identified the figure with the initials “A.O.,” signifying Andrew Oliver, the local official who would be collecting money for the stamps that Parliament required on all colonial court documents, contracts, licenses, newspapers, almanacs, and even playing cards. The boot needed no explanation; everyone knew it represented the Earl of Bute, nicknamed Jack Boot, the former tutor to King George III who had now become his chief adviser. The sole of the boot was painted green, an oblique reference to the British prime minister George Grenville, author of the infamous bill. Even in the most provocative street theater, the king was excused. In the minds of the protesters, the Stamp Act was thrust upon colonial Americans by his advisers and by Parliament, and it was to be executed by appointed officials, but King George III, who presumably had been duped into supporting the measure, lay blameless. Indeed, when the act was repealed the following year, colonial protesters sang his praises for releasing them from the burden imposed by