A long uneasy silence had followed

From Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood.  It is a story well known but still with the power to thrill these two and a half centuries later.  

The Anti-Federalists may have been concerned with rights, but most Federalists had believed that power was what was most needed in the new government. And power to the eighteenth-century American Revolutionaries essentially meant monarchy. If there were to be a good dose of monarchical power injected into the body politic, as many Federalists expected in 1787, the energetic center of that power would be the presidency. For that reason it was the office of the president that made many Americans most suspicious of the new government.

The presidency was a new office for Americans. The Confederation had had a Congress, but it had never possessed a single strong national executive. Article II of the Constitution is very vague about the president’s powers. All it says is that the executive power shall be vested in the president and that the president shall be the commander-in-chief of the army and the navy and the militia, when called into service of the United States.

Such an office was bound to remind Americans of the king they had just cast off. When James Wilson in the Philadelphia Convention had moved that the executive “consist of a single person,” a long uneasy silence had followed. The delegates knew only too well what such an office implied. John Rutledge complained that “the people will think we are leaning too much towards Monarchy.” But the Convention had resisted these warnings and had gone on to make the new chief executive so strong, so king-like, only because the delegates expected George Washington to be the first president. The authority of the presidency would never “have been so great,” privately admitted Pierce Butler of South Carolina, “had not many members cast their eyes towards General Washington as President; and shaped their Ideas of the Powers to a President, by their opinion of his Virtue.”

Washington’s unanimous election as president was preordained. He was the only person in the country who automatically commanded the allegiance of all the people. He was probably the only American who possessed the dignity, patience, restraint, and reputation for republican virtue that the untried but potentially powerful office of the presidency needed at the outset.

Washington, with his tall, imposing figure, Roman nose, and stern, thin-lipped face, was already at age fifty-eight an internationally famous hero—not so much for his military exploits during the Revolutionary War as for his character. At one point during the war he could probably have become a king or dictator, as some wanted, but he had resisted these blandishments. Washington always respected civilian superiority over the army, and at the moment of military victory in 1783 he had unconditionally surrendered his sword to the Congress. He promised not to take “any share in public business hereafter” and, like the Roman conqueror Cincinnatus, had returned to his farm. This self-conscious retirement from public life had electrified the world. All previous victorious generals in modern times—Cromwell, William of Orange, Marlborough—had sought political rewards commensurate with their military achievements. But not Washington. He seemed to epitomize public virtue and the proper character of a republican leader.