The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XIII: War and Peace contd.

    Closer to home than the recent events which had taken place in the Netherlands – if also less neat as a parallel – the behavior of the “Duke of Marlbro” during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) also served as a potentially instructive example in the eyes of South Carolina delegate Pierce Butler of the kinds of executive behavior which he and his colleagues ought to have disqualified at all costs. The individual so named was none other than John Churchill (1650-1722), 1^st Duke of Marlborough, Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, and one of the most celebrated soldiers in the history of Great Britain. And the “artifices” in question, by which the duke sought to, “Prolong the war of which he had the management” represented exactly the kind of behavior which Mr. Butler most feared a prospective President might indulge in unless their authority was suitably checked. The relevant conflict, it was true, had been concluded by treaty some seven decades prior to Butler’s reference to the same. Among the men then assembled at the Philadelphia Convention, only a scant few – like Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706 – could claim the events in question as having occurred during their lifetime. All the same, Butler’s citation of the Duke of Marlborough would doubtless have struck a chord with his colleagues to an even greater extent than did his aforementioned reference to events in the contemporary Dutch Republic. But for the outcome of the Revolution, after all, the inhabitants of the United States would still have been British subjects. And as it stood, the lot of the delegates then in attendance had been raised and educated in a distinctly Anglocentric fashion. For Butler to name “Marlbro” was to thus invoke a common point of reference; a personage and a significance that scarcely warranted explanation. 

    For those of us who are less familiar with 18^th century British history than the average American statesmen of 1780s, of course, some degree of clarification would appear to be in order. John Churchill, for one thing, was at once a much-heralded and much-benighted figure in the history of Great Britain whose boundless ambition led him alternately to enjoy great successes in one moment and suffer great reverses in the next. The eldest surviving son of minor aristocrat and Member of Parliament Sir Winston Churchill (1620-1688), John had watched his father suffer as a result of the latter’s support of the Royalist cause during the English Civil War (1642-1651) and determined accordingly never to bind himself to any patron as a matter of principle. He developed, as a result, something of a mercenary outlook which served his desire for social advancement very well but also often led to those in power questioning his intentions. His elder sister’s affair with the Duke of York, for example – the man later to ascend the throne as King James II (1633-1701) – led to his appointment as one of the duke’s pages while still an adolescent, and then to his commission as an ensign in the prestigious Foot Guards. This first appointment then led to a series of military postings by which the young Churchill steadily gained favor and fame. By the end of the 1670s he had risen to the rank of Captain; in 1679 he was elected to sit in Parliament; and by 1682, in recognition of his continued support for his longstanding patron, the Duke of York – whose status as both an avowed Catholic and the heir apparent to the British throne had precipitated a major political crisis in the late 1670s – he had at last been elevated to the peerage as Lord Churchill of Eyemouth. As it thereafter became increasingly clear that the duke would indeed ascend the throne, Churchill’s star seemed set to rise yet further than it already had.

    The latter half of the 1680s, it turned out, was indeed to be an eventful period in the life of the future Duke of Marlborough, though not necessarily in the way he imagined. His service to the Duke of York initially continued to pay dividends. Upon the latter’s elevation to the throne as King James II in 1685, for example, Churchill served as one of his principal officers during the failed rebellion that resulted – led by Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth (1649-1685) – and was thereafter rewarded with military promotions and a second title, that of Baron Churchill of Sandridge. Notwithstanding these favors, however, Churchill soon found himself in an increasingly uncomfortable position. Though the king, as aforementioned, was a devout – one might even say fervent – Catholic, his trusted protégé remained a dedicated Protestant, and time and again made it clear that he intended to remain so until the day he died. But while, in the immediate, this sense of conviction did not prove to be much of an obstacle for Churchill’s tireless sense of ambition, other Protestants in positions of power in the realm soon arranged matters so as to force the general to revaluate his prospects. Upon the invitation of several prominent statesman belonging to both major factions represented in Parliament, along with the support of Henry Compton (1632-1713), the sitting Bishop of London, William III (1650-1702), Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and nephew of James II, invaded England in November of 1688 for the purpose of deposing his uncle and claiming the throne for himself.  As William was a Protestant, his arrival was viewed with relief by those who deeply distrusted their unapologetically Catholic monarch, and in very short order the king’s overthrow was all but accomplished.

    Churchill, at least on the surface, remained loyal to his long-term patron for far longer than many of his contemporaries. Indeed, it wasn’t until November 24^th, almost three weeks after William’s landing at Brixham, that he chose to depart the king’s camp with some four hundred men in tow. But while James took the desertion of among his most steadfast servants as a sure sign that his cause was well and finally lost, in actual fact Churchill had been contemplating an exchange of loyalties since before William’s arrival in England. Though not yet viewed by his contemporaries as being important enough to include in the initial invitation, the general nevertheless made it clear to certain well-placed English agents in the Stadtholder’s court that he would be quite willing to provide whatever assistance that William might require. In the end, Churchill’s desertion was about the extent of the service he rendered, but the new king was pleased enough that he determined to reward the general all the same. In consequence, upon the coronation of William III and his wife Mary II – who was also, incidentally, James’s daughter and eldest child – Churchill was granted a third peerage in the form of the Earldom of Marlborough, sworn in as a member of the Privy Council, and made one of the Gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber. The next several years were spent occupying a series of senior military posts – during which time he reorganized the army and commanded an English expeditionary force sent to the Low Countries during the Nine Years War (1688-1697) – at the end of which the young general had accrued substantial fame and success. Victories in Europe, and against a resurgent James II in Ireland, had done much to burnish his reputation, and by the beginning of the 1690s he was among the most prominent men in the kingdom. The only trouble, as it turned out, was that King William didn’t trust him.

    Marlborough, in fairness, had rather publicly betrayed his longstanding patron when first he came into William III’s service. And while the king neither doubted the wisdom of his choice nor his value as a solider and strategist, he did come to find it difficult to place very much faith in a man whose loyalty was evidently so flexible. The general’s close relationship with Queen Mary’s sister and heir, Princess Anne (1665-1714), did not help matters much at all, particularly as the royal couple persistently failed to produce a surviving child. The king, as a result, began to show Marlborough a degree of disfavor, passing him up for promotions and refusing him certain awards, which in turn provoked the general to sow discontent in the armed forces. As all this was going on, Marlborough also sought to contact the exiled James II so that he might communicate his regret and seek a pardon for his actions in deserting him some years prior. In part, it has since been concluded, this likely constituted something on the order of an insurance policy on the part of the general. It was not necessarily impossible that James might successfully retake the throne, and Marlborough doubtless believed it prudent to ensure that his position would not suffer, come what may. But it also made sense, if William was determined to drive the general to the sidelines, for word to eventually reach him that one of his most popular officers remained in contact with his predecessor. Marlborough’s desertion, after all, had helped convince James to abandon his throne; perhaps the general might play this role again if his new liege continued to malign him.

    There was no second revolution, of course, which replaced James on the throne and deposed William in turn. Rather, owing to the further deterioration of their relationship, the king had Marlborough completely exiled from royal service. First, in the middle of January in 1692, Marlborough was stripped of his positions, relived of his appointments, and forbidden from appearing at court. Then, pursuant to a letter which came into the possession of the queen that was seemingly signed by the general and purported to seek the deposition of William and the restoration of James, Marlborough found himself placed under arrest and imprisoned in the Tower of London for five weeks. When it was revealed, at length, that the letter was a forgery, the general was accordingly released. Several more incidents like this followed, though none with consequences quite so severe. Marlborough had not, in fact, plotted the overthrow of William III, but he had been in contact with the former James II for some time, leading to somewhat frequent accusations that he was passing information to his former patron. This occurred first in 1694 when the disastrous defeat of one of Marlborough’s rival officers during a naval assault on the French port of Brest led to accusations that the defending garrison had been warned as a result of Marlborough’s correspondence with the former king. Then, in 1696, the general was again implicated in a plot to overthrow King William and replace him with King James, this time in cooperation with certain militant Jacobites operating in England. Notwithstanding Marlborough’s continuing and avowed relationship with the deposed James, however, neither charge was ultimately substantiated, and by 1698, William and Marlborough had managed to reconcile. The general’s ranks and his position on the Privy Council were restored and he was appointed to the prestigious position of overseeing the education of Prince William (1689-1700), son of Princess Anne and thus heir to the heir apparent.

    All of this is to say, in case the reader was perhaps wondering why they’d just been made to sit through the partial biography of a man who died over fifty years before American independence was even declared, that by the time the War of the Spanish Succession broke out in 1701, John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was in many ways a man on the make. His career, previously defined by success upon success, had been sidelined for some years as a result of the suspicions of his royal benefactor, and his sense of ambition undoubtedly spurred him to try to make up for lost time. Another war with France provided the ideal opportunity, and Marlborough seized it with characteristic alacrity. The king of Spain, it seemed, had died without issue, and chose to name as his successor the grandson of King Louis XIV (1638-1715). As the ascension of a French prince to the Spanish throne would seem to have augured the eventual union of France and Spain – the latter of which, while increasingly enfeebled, was still possessed of a wide-ranging set of possessions in Europe, the Americas, and even in the Pacific – the great powers of the era were accordingly determined to intervene. The Hapsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire were particularly anxious to stymie the ambitions of their long-term rivals the Bourbons of France, and England, under William III, was eager to join them. This fact was altered not at all by the unexpected death of the king in a riding accident in the spring of 1702. His sister-in-law and successor, Anne, was no less staunch in her antipathy towards a formal union of the Catholic monarchies of Europe. What William’s demise did change, however, were Marlborough’s near-term propositions. The newly crowned Anne was one of his staunchest supporters. His latitude of action had accordingly became greater than it ever had been before.

    Queen Anne did not waste time in showing Marlborough to be her favorite. In short order, the man was made Master-General of the Ordinance – the most senior permanent military position in the realm – a Knight of the Garter, and Captain-General – or Commander-in-Chief – of her majesty’s armed forces. These grants of authority effectively placed Marlborough, notwithstanding his relative youth and inexperience, among the highest echelons of the allied command structure, notably above certain generals in Dutch and Austrian service who had served for far longer and had many more victories to their name. In spite of his relative greenness, however, the general took to his newfound role with great cunning, always paying heed to the concerns of his nominal subordinates so as to ensure their timely cooperation. By the end of 1702, with the assistance of his allies, Marlborough had accordingly managed to outmaneuver his French opponent, the Duc de Boufflers (1644-1711), and capture a series of towns and cities in the Spanish Netherlands. The primary result of this first flush of victory, beyond its strategic importance, was the elevation of the general’s title by Queen Anne. No longer simply an earl, John Churchill was now the Duke of Marlborough. And while it was true that shortly after his elevation the man suffered a personal loss in the death of his son – thus seemingly to stymie any ambitions of laying the groundwork for an enduring dynasty – the war nevertheless continued to prove itself a tremendous boon for the duke’s once-stalled career.

    Among the campaigns that followed over the course of the conflict now known to history as the War of the Spanish Succession, perhaps none are more famous – or more commonly associated with the supposed brilliance of a single commander – than that which led to the much-memorialized Battle of Blenheim in 1704. The duke, having endeavored for two years by way of tact and persuasion to hold together the increasingly fragile alliance of nations dedicated to preventing a Franco-Spanish union, found himself at the end of 1703 with something of a crisis in the making on his hands. With the Hapsburg domains threated in the south by both the forces of the Franco-Bavarian alliance and a full-scale revolt in Hungary, it was not at all certain, less than three years into the conflict, whether the Austrians would be forced to prematurely withdrawal. But while Marlborough was eager to prevent such an outcome by marching his forces to the relief of his Austrian allies, the Dutch forces under his command were categorically unwilling to allow for a weakening of their position in the occupied Spanish Netherlands. The duke’s solution to this impasse was ultimately to mislead the Dutch. First moving his forces to the Moselle – a river which forms the southern border between modern Luxembourg and Germany – with full Dutch permission, he then slipped away, journeying south towards the Danube where he caught up with the Franco-Bavarians at Donauwörth (July, 1704) before then crushing them at Blenheim (August, 1704). The Bavarians were thereafter knocked almost entirely out of the war, Louis XIV’s hopes of an early victory were dashed, and the so-called “Grand Alliance” of the Austrians, the English, and the Dutch was decisively saved from disintegration.

    More accolades followed, though further such victories did not. Marlborough was granted a lavish estate by the queen in recognition of his triumph at Blenheim, for one thing, and in 1706, following the Battle of Ramillies in the Spanish Netherlands, Parliament confirmed his titles and made them perpetual on his heirs, male or female. Anne even agreed to allow the Hapsburg sovereign to make Marlborough a Prince of the Empire in gratitude for his inestimable service. But by the dawning of 1707, things had perceptibly begun to turn. Military setbacks and diplomatic controversies had led certain members of the reigning Tory government to begin to question Marlborough’s management of the British war effort to that point. And while he was not removed from his office amidst the cabinet re-shuffle that resulted, his standing amongst both his friends in Parliament and with the queen had definitely started to slip. Further successes, like at Oudenarde (July, 1708), did something to arrest this process. So too did the ascension of the Whigs to a position of power, their leadership being in favor of continuing the war while the Tories were increasingly peace minded. By 1710, however, the tables had turned against, with the Tories back in power, peace talks in the offing, and Marlborough held in suspicion by those he ardently professed to serve. When preliminary talks at Geertruidenberg came to nothing, the duke was accused by his detractors of interference. Clearly, they crowed, the general was fearful of what would become of him if the conflict should end. He had gained so much from it already, and a final peace would gain him little.

    There was, in point of fact, some truth to this accusation, though how much, exactly, is rather a matter of perspective. There was no denying that Marlborough had gained a great deal over the course of the conflict in question. At its beginning, he was but an earl and a general who had only recently regained the favor of his sovereign and was little known or remarked upon in the sovereign courts of the Continent. By 1710, conversely, he was a duke, a Captain-General, one of the leading figures of the Grand Alliance, and one of the most famous and well-respected soldiers in all of Europe. He had won an estate for himself in battle, and secured his titles, and was even heralded as a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Clearly, whereas in peace he had nearly found himself sentenced to death for treason, war had once more given him the chance to prosper and flourish. In consequence, while it may not have been politic to say so publicly, Marlborough on some level surely view the perpetuation of the war with France as synonymous with his own good fortune. There was also, no doubt, some amount of the duke’s pride on the line when it came to the subject of the conflict and its conclusion. In nine years, Marlborough had achieved great victories, saved the Grand Alliance from potential collapse, earned the respect of princes, kings, and emperors, and brought the French very nearly to their knees. He was accordingly hesitant, in light of the faith which his allies had come to invest in him, to acquiesce to a peace which might have ended up favoring British interests over those of its supposed partners. This latter concern was made all the more relevant when it became clear that the Tories were willing to allow a Bourbon king on the Spanish throne if it would bring the conflict to a close. The prevention of this exact outcome was the why the Grand Alliance had been formed to begin with, and Marlborough personally felt it something of a betrayal of the agreement for any settlement to be agreed upon which aimed to give the House of Bourbon what they had claimed for themselves all along.

    Bearing in mind these various personal and professional considerations, the Duke of Marlborough proceeded through 1710 and into 1711 more or less as he had since the war began. Plans were made among the allies, battle lines were drawn, the season’s campaign was launched with particular objectives in mind – this time into northern France – and a series of victories were won which dazzled contemporary observers. Arrayed against the Duc de Villars (1653-1734), one of the greatest of Louis XIV’s generals, Marlborough deployed a series of feints and forced marches that caught his adversary completely off guard and led to the stunning capture of the fortress of Bouchain. Having thus breached the French line of defense in a manner previously considered unthinkable, the duke had all but ensured that his forces would march on Paris in 1712 and carry the war into its final phase. Unfortunately for Marlborough and his colleagues in the allied command structure, however, the reigning Tory ministry led by Robert Harley (1661-1724) had no intention of allowing the conflict to progress to such an extreme. Harley’s government had worked throughout 1711 to secure what they believed to be a reasonable agreement between the belligerents which would bring the war to a close. Allowing Marlborough to march on Paris, the supporters of this effort were convinced, would surely spoil the entire effort and drag the war out further still. The Whigs, to be sure, offered their resistance to the plan, forcing Harley to ask Queen Anne to name a dozen new peers to the House of Lords to secure the passage of the resulting treaty. But even once this was accomplished, the problem of Marlborough himself remained. Unless the queen consented to remove him – which she showed no signs of doing – the Captain-General of Her Majesty’s Forces would surely never consent to abandon his allies or give up the strategic advantage which his cunning and determination had won.

    The solution which Harley and his Tory allies ultimately alighted upon was to publicly disgrace the duke via charges of corruption so that Anne would have no choice but to release him from her service. In part, they accomplished this through an application to the House of Commons. Charges were brought against Marlborough on two counts having to do with the misappropriation of funds, though in both cases there was clear precedent for a commander receiving such additional pay. And at the same time, in terms of public opinion, Tory satirist and pamphleteer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) penned and published an excoriation of the Whigs, Marlborough, and Britain’s European partners entitled The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (1711) in which the duke was painted as a glory-seeking warmonger who cared little for the interests of the British people and far too much for his own. “Whether this War were prudently begun or not,” Swift accordingly observed therein, “It is plain, that the true Spring or Motive of it, was the aggrandising of a particular Family, and in short, a War of the General and the Ministry, and not of the Prince or People [.]” The work proved to be a fantastic success, selling over ten thousand copies by the end of 1712 and shifting popular and parliamentary opinion against Marlborough and in favor of peace. When Harley then approached the queen in December of 1711 to request that she dismiss her former favorite from his post, Anne felt she had no choice but to do as she was asked. Writing to Marlborough in her letter of dismissal, she accordingly made it quite clear that the nature of her decision was more political than personal. “I am sorry for your own sake [,]” she said, “The reasons are become so public which makes it necessary for me to let you know you have render'd it impracticable for you to continue yet longer in my service [.]”

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XII: War and Peace contd.

     The Patriottentijd, or “Time of the Patriots” – to begin a long but hopefully interesting explanation – was essentially the product of three interconnected factors or trends which happened to exert an increasingly profound collective effect upon the fortunes and the prospects of the Dutch Republic as the 1770s gave way to the 1780s. On the one hand, the Dutch economy had entered a period of stagnation at the beginning of the 18^th century following a sustained period of growth and financial dominance over the course of the 1600s. Industry declined, the banking sector became dominant, and while incomes remained statistically stable, the actual gap between the richest and the poorest citizens widened considerably. At the same time, as the economic influence of the Dutch Republic declined, the middle classes in particular began to lose faith in the efficacy of the nation’s political systems. Whereas merchants and artisans has formerly been able to exert considerable influence within the country’s hierarchy of local, provincial, and national councils, the monopolization of influence within a static upper class of bankers and patricians which accompanied the aforementioned period of economic stagnation essentially cut off the middle strata from any hope of social or political advancement. Finally, as these two trends combined over the course of the 1750s and 1760s to produce an acute sense of disenfranchisement and frustration among a significant portion of the Dutch population, the emergence of an organized rebellion in distant British America set in motion a series of events which would bring the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands to the brink of civil war and, arguably, beyond.

    While, at its outset, the American Revolutionary War and the publication of the Declaration of Independence elicited little more than dismissive scorn from the leadership of the contemporary Dutch Republic – with Stadtholder William V memorably referring to the document in question as a, “Parody of the proclamation issued by our forefathers against king Philip II” – the chief officials of a number of the nation’s major merchants cities soon enough become deeply interested in the prospect of securing trade ties with the newly-proclaimed United States. The Dutch West India Company and its shareholders had long been frustrated by British attempts to monopolize all commerce to and from the Thirteen Colonies, and the emergence – and continued existence – of an independent American republic appeared to them a prime opportunity to corner this previously inaccessible market. Trade talks soon began, often behind the backs of the Stadtholder and his ministers, which led to the arrival of American emissaries, the extension of loans, and eventually to formal Dutch recognition of American independence. But while this all seemed to promise, in the long term, a significant financial return, the immediate effect, naturally, was yet another war between Britain and the Netherlands.

    In this instance, however, unlike in the two previous Anglo-Dutch Wars which had taken place in the 17^th century, the Dutch fared very poorly notwithstanding the strength of their navy. Citing “unreadiness” as the general state of the fleet, Dutch naval commanders consistently declined to do much of anything besides maintain their vessels in port. Britain’s Royal Navy, as a result, was able to attack Dutch vessels seemingly at will, and at length succeeded in establishing a total blockade of Dutch waters. The only major engagement, fought at Dogger Bank off the east coast of England in August of 1781, marked a strategic victory for the British and brought the competence of the Dutch navy further into question. Later, when the States-General – the republic’s national legislature – negotiated an agreement with the French to participate in a joint naval action requiring the repositioning of Dutch warships to a naval port in northern France, the force’s reputation suffered a further decline when the admiral responsible refused to follow his orders, citing “unreadiness” once again and a general distaste for cooperating with French authorities. As he was formally his nation’s commander-in-chief, Stadtholder William V shouldered the blame for all of these setbacks, further undermining the reigning regime in the eyes of the Dutch population.

    As all of this was occurring, the Declaration of Independence which William V had so casually scorned gradually began to exert a very significant effect upon the popular imagination of the Dutch middle classes. Lawyers, merchants, publishers, and journalists began to drift towards the conclusion that the American Revolution was indeed a close echo of their own forebears’ struggle for independence against the Kingdom of Spain and that it accordingly constituted something of a moral duty for the people of the Dutch Republic to offer their assistance to those of its American counterpart. Not only did this shift in public opinion make it much easier for the likes of American envoy John Adams to obtain the diplomatic and financial support which Congress had sent him to procure, but it also began to affect how many Dutch people viewed their nation, its system of government, and the prospect of institutional reform. Previous attempts at re-enfranchising the nation’s middle strata had, for a number of reasons, met with failure and reactionary entrenchment, but the idealism that the American Revolution self-consciously embodied – and the efforts of people like Adams and his middle-class allies to promote a sense of Dutch/American collegiality – seemed to lend a new spark to the cause of political liberalization. Pamphlets endorsing reform began to be published in large numbers, the most influential of which was Aan het Volk van Nederland – “To the People of the Netherlands” – by the radical aristocrat Joan Derk, Baron van der Capellen, and the so-called “Patriot” movement began to take shape.         

    The thing that the reformist Patriots focused on in the immediate – as opposed to the reactionary “Orangists,” who broadly supported the continued domination of the Stadtholders of the House of Orange – was the rejuvenation of their republic’s system of local militias. These paramilitary formations, or schutterij, had played an integral role in the opening stages of the Dutch Revolt (1566-1648) by helping to fight off early attacks by troops loyal to the Spanish Crown, the result of which was that the schutterij became an integral element of the Dutch Republic’s founding mythology and a cornerstone of its political culture. And as these city militias were dominated by members of the middle strata of Dutch society – being those able to afford their own arms and supplies – and as their officers were customarily elected by the membership at large, the character of the schutterij tended to be less patrician than the municipal councils while still exerting significant influence upon municipal affairs. But while the image of the urban militia continued to occupy a special place in the popular imagination of the citizens of the Dutch Republic well into the 18^th century, their practical significance had steadily waned since some time in the middle of the 17^th century. At the hands of the regenten – being the pseudo-hereditary patrician class who came to dominate the administration of the republic’s major urban centers – the militias were brought under the direct control of the municipal councils, their elected officers were replaced with appointed local favorites, and what were once military organizations became little more than sporting clubs. In the eyes of the aforementioned Patriots, this process of decline was emblematic of the waning fortunes of the Dutch Republic itself, and they accordingly adopted the project of revivifying the local militias as emblematic of their desire to breath new life into the nation as a whole.

    Efforts to this end commenced in 1783, when various Patriot organizations began to form their own militias entirely independent of the much-reduced schutterij. Characterized as private organizations which were open – unlike the city militias – to members of any religious denomination, the vrijcorpsen, or “free corps,” resurrected the practice of electing their own officers and took to drilling themselves regularly and often very publicly. In some cases, the result was simply that certain municipalities now had two militia formations, one public and one private. In other cases, however, the vrijcorpsen were able to absorb the existing schutterij and effectively take their place within the local political hierarchy. Often enough, the regenten were pleased to allow this to happen, jealous as they were of the power which the Stadtholder had come to wield over the militias in the various cities. But in time it became clear, as the Patriot militias gained more and more influence, that the revitalization of the schutterij was only the beginning of what was to come. Having succeeded in inserting themselves into the political framework of a number of municipalities, the members of the vrijcorpsen accordingly started to agitate for further, more radical reform. Meetings were thus held, beginning in 1784, between representatives of the new militias drawn from across the Dutch Republic. And the end result of these gatherings, among other things, was the drafting of manifestos and compacts by which the gathered members pledged themselves to both the mutual defense of their constituent organizations and the restructuring of the nation’s political institutions.

    Publicized with the aid of Patriot-controlled newspapers, these declarations went on to form the core demands of a series of vrijcorpsen-led movements whose stated aim was to encourage the nation’s major centers of power to disregard much of the customary authority wielded by the Stadtholder and then to adopt new provincial charters based on democratic principles. In Utrecht in 1785, this took the form of a lengthy confrontation between the regenten-dominated city council and the Patriot-led vrijcorpsen whereby negotiations gave way to a series of armed demonstrations and threatened revolts, the final result of which – after more than a year of agitation – was the creation of an elected city government dominated by members of the local middle class. A similar series of events played out in Amsterdam the following spring, with Patriot and Orangist militias and magistrates trading threats of violence and attempting to negotiate with each other and the Stadtholder until finally the former group managed to rally sufficient popular support to have the conservative members of the city council removed. The governments of many other cities gradually followed suit, with the “liberation” of Delft in particular granting the Patriots access to the nation’s largest store of arms and gunpowder, and by 1787 there seemed to be no stopping their movement on its forward trajectory. One by one, the provinces were giving way. All that remained was to confront the Stadtholder himself.

    This confrontation finally occurred – not at all unlike the American Revolutionary War – at the end of a long and tense period of military maneuvering. Confrontations between groups of Orangist and Patriot civilians beginning in the summer of 1785 first led to calls for intervention on the part of the Stadtholder, which then led to a great deal of military repositioning on the part of both the Patriots and the Orangists. At length, when the Orangist-controlled assembly in the province of Gelderland asked the Stadtholder to dispatch troops in response to Patriot efforts to fortify the various municipalities that they controlled there, the force dispatched from Nijmegen proceeded to sack the cities of Hattem and Elburg. The Patriots, duly incensed, demanded that the government of the province of Holland remove William V from command of those portions of the republic’s mercenary States Army which they were then actively financing. When the members of the provincial assembly agreed to do so in July of 1786, the number of troops at the Stadtholder’s disposal was approximately cut in half. Uncomforted, the Patriots who controlled the city of Utrecht then began to fortify their own positions in fear of an attack by what remained of the States Army under William V, the result of which – following the deployment of government troops to a vital strategic location in the area – was the so-called Battle of Jutphaas (May 8^th, 1787), the first and arguably only major engagement between Patriot and Orangist military forces. The Patriots emerged from this skirmish victorious, the Stadtholder’s wife, Wilhelmina of Prussia (1751-1820) was then detained the following month while attempting to return from Guelders to the Hague, and William V was forced to acknowledge the fact that he could no longer hope to preserve his reign with the military forces at his disposal.

    The events that would follow in September and October of 1787, while collectively constituting the abrupt resolution of the Patriottentijd, are unfortunately outside the purview of this present examination. Pierce Butler, in referencing the late behavior of the Stadtholder in mid-September of 1787, could not have known what was to come in the days and weeks ahead. What he did know, however, assuming that the news he received was accurate, was that William V had already behaved quite alarmingly towards his own people. The Stadtholder, to be sure, was not what one might call a tyrant in the classical sense. By all accounts a diffident and indecisive leader, he often hesitated when challenged and could hardly have been described as a latter-day Julius Caesar. That being said, he did make at least one very fateful decision over the course of the events described above. As his authority as Stadtholder was steadily eroded by the successful efforts of the Patriots to reform the governments of the various provinces along broadly democratic lines, William V gradually seemed to arrive at the conclusion that the use of military force was going to be necessary if he were to preserve his position as the head of state of the Dutch Republic. The provinces themselves, under the Dutch federal model, were nominally free to govern themselves as they saw fit, to adopt new constitutions, and to form or to recognize whatever militia formations they deemed necessary. The Stadtholder’s authority in these areas was mostly customary. Indeed, one of the few organs of state over which William V could claim formal authority was the States Army, of which he was Captain-General. When the Orangists who controlled the government of Gelderland requested the Stadtholder’s assistance against what they perceived to be the mounting Patriot threat, William was accordingly within his legal rights to deploy the forces under his command to the affected cities. But while William’s authority over the States Army was not in question at the time, the wisdom of his response and of the behavior of the forces under his command were both severely lacking.

    Seemingly out of fear for what further vacillation might cost him, William V allowed the troops under his command which he ordered to the relief of the Orangists in Gelderland to effectively have their way with the cities of Hattem and Elburg. There was little physical violence involved, it bears mentioning, as the Patriots who initially held the cities offered little resistance when the States Army arrived. Nevertheless, both communities suffered significant looting as well as the purported desecration of their local places of worship. Then, when the Patriots who were at that time in control of the province of Holland succeeded in removing the forces which they were responsible for funding from the Stadtholder’s command, William’s response was to strike out once more with what remained of his forces. A detachment was sent to Vreeswijk in Utrecht to counter a gathering of Patriot militias there and in short order the two forces – some might say inevitably – came to blows. The resulting engagement – commonly known, as aforementioned, as the Battle of Jutphaas – while not a particularly large or costly one, did nonetheless result in its share of casualties. Men were killed, including two of the leaders of the Patriot militias, and all because the Stadtholder could not stand the thought of losing his position. The blame, of course, lay primarily with William himself. Legally justified though he may have been to command the States Army in whatever fashion he wished, nothing could have possibly excused his decision to turn the forces intended to protect the people of the Dutch Republic against some disagreeable contingent of the citizens of the same. That being said, if one were to accept the fact that men like the Stadtholder will essentially always exist – men who, once granted power, will do anything to keep it – the issue at hand becomes institutional rather than personal. The problem, in essence, was not that William acted selfishly, but that the government of the Dutch Republic had no formal checks in place to counter the emergence of a particularly selfish Captain-General.

    This, no doubt, is what Mr. Butler was hoping to communicate. The Dutch Republic and the American republic were very different in many ways. They shared a common origin, it was true, in rebellion against European imperialism, but their respective political cultures and institutions had very little in common. That being said, the two had arguably become bound together over the course of the preceding decades by a kind of reciprocal relationship of amity and inspiration. The Founders of the United States, for example, during the early stages of the American Revolution in the middle and late 1770 , often directly cited  the positive example which they felt the Dutch Republic embodied as the product of a successful republican revolt against an ostensibly overpowering European empire. Likewise, certain of the delegates who attended the Philadelphia Convention in the late 1780s argued in favor of a central government on the Dutch model, particularly in regard to the powers of the nation’s chief executive. And while, as aforementioned, certain authorities in the Dutch Republic looked upon these acclamations with disdain, American notions of liberty and justice nevertheless began to exert a power influence on the Dutch middle classes over the course of the 1780s. While it did still remain true at the time that Mr. Butler was speaking that the chief executive described in the text of the proposed constitution would not much resemble the Stadtholder – whose office, as of the late 1740s, had formally become hereditary – it would still accordingly have felt to many of those in attendance in Philadelphia that the fates of the two republics were somehow tied together. What happened in one of them, to that end, might have seemed prophetic upon the destiny of the other, with failures and successes serving as object lessons which it would not have been wise to ignore.

    Pierce Butler’s admonition, therefore, was that his colleagues pay due heed to the institutional failures recently witness by the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic. Under their system of government – which was historically strongly federal but which had become increasingly centralized under the House of Orange – the office of Stadtholder was mostly customary and ad hoc. Indeed, one of the only spheres over which its authority was grounded in something more than tradition was that of the nation’s combined military forces. And while it was true that previous struggles between the provinces and the House of Orange had taken on a military dimension, no substantial reforms had been made that might have placed limits upon the authority of the Stadtholder over the States Army. The result, as a spontaneous popular movement whose basic principles were antithetical to the concept of hereditary and deeply centralized executive authority gained increasing momentum over the course of the 1780s, was that while the provinces were legally entitled to undertake whatever internal reforms they desired, the Stadtholder remained in full control of the nation’s military apparatus. Under these kinds of circumstances, why should anyone have expected William V to do anything other than seek to preserve his authority? If the power to stymie the Patriot movement yet remained at his disposal, for what possible reason might he have chosen to stay his hand? The efforts of his forebears had placed great power in the Stadtholder’s hands, and he was not about to lose that power if there was something he could do to preserve it.

    This, to be sure, was what Mr. Butler was worried might occur if he and his fellow delegates did not attend to their responsibilities with care. Granted – and as Nathaniel Gorham noted explicitly – while the President of the United States would also fill the role of Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces, the power to declare war would rest solely with Congress, thus seeming to limit the amount of mischief in which the former might indulge. But was this an entirely sufficient check upon the American chief executive? Might not a given President be tempted, especially during a state of war, to make use of their military authority for the purpose of either augmenting or preserving their position? Imagine a scenario in which a war is declared by Congress, it proceeds very poorly, the sitting President takes most of the blame, and disgruntled citizens begin to agitate for his removal. As the Commander-in-Chief, the President in question might then come to the conclusion that said agitators represent a threat to his continuation in office and direct the military to quell the aforementioned dissent. And now imagine that the dissenters resist, take the President’s actions as cause for further agitation, and begin to organize themselves into paramilitary formations. To what extent ought the President be permitted to direct the military to make war upon these dissenters, and to what extent should his powers in this sphere be curtailed? As the supreme authority over the nation’s military forces, his ability to direct the deployment of troops as he sees fit would seem to be amply justified by the law. And during a state of war, when the integrity and security of the nation as a whole is theoretically at stake, shouldn’t the President be given even more leeway than usual?

    Mr. Butler, for his part, answered very much in the negative. As recent events in the Netherlands had very clearly shown, it was not wise to trust an executive with virtually limitless military power. Such a grant, to be sure, made sense in certain contexts. A single individual could doubtless respond to a sudden foreign invasion much faster than could an assembly of equals over whom no one person could claim supremacy. But it also stood to reason that a single individual was more likely to abuse their military authority than a collective body whose members each professed different intentions and ambitions. The Dutch Stadtholder had shown the wisdom of this latter axiom in a particularly dramatic fashion when he turned the authority which had been granted him in good faith against some portion of the people that he was otherwise bound to protect. His formal duty, as the Dutch Republic’s head of state, was not to preserve the integrity of his own position, but rather to see to the safety of the citizens thereof. And while it was true that the Stadtholder was an aristocrat to the core, and that the Dutch Republic as a whole was no stranger to authoritarian leadership, it would have been the height of foolishness to imagine an American chief executive to be immune to the same kinds of temptations to which William V fell prey. A President, thus empowered, might not necessarily abuse their authority. Chosen specifically for the signal virtues which they possessed, they might reasonably be trusted not to seek after opportunities to further strengthen their position. But what if they were not so virtuous? What if they only played at virtue so as to successfully ascend to the pinnacle of political power? What if they turned the military, which was theirs to command by law, against all those who would challenge the indefinite continuation of their reign? The United States, Pierce Butler reasoned, should not leave itself vulnerable to such an outcome, and it was the events of the Patriottentijd that helped to make this quite clear.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XI: War and Peace

     In addition to the subject of executive appointments, the attendees of the Philadelphia Convention also spent a goodly portion of the session of September 7^th, 1787 discussing the propriety of requiring the approval of the Senate for the final ratification of international treaties. Among the various responsibilities which had been provisionally granted to said body, treaty ratification was potentially among the thorniest, in no small part because it appeared to combine the prerogatives of the executive and legislative branches. Foreign policy, under the auspices of the proposed constitution, was to be the particular responsibility of the American republic’s chief executive, both in terms of the nomination of ambassadors or special envoys and in the context of actual diplomatic negotiations. But as treaties, of whatever type, were also described in the text of the proposed constitution as carrying the full force of law, it made a certain amount of sense for their terms to be subject to legislative approval. The President, after all, could not be permitted to alter or abridge the terms of domestic law on his own recognizance, particularly if his efforts were the product of close cooperation with a foreign power. But while looping Congress into the treaty-making process accordingly made a certain amount of both practical and philosophical sense, it was not necessarily clear – at least not at the outset of the relevant discussions – just how such an arrangement might best be accomplished. The Senate was an early favorite in terms of which branch of the national legislature was best suited to the responsibilities in question, owing, no doubt, to its intended status as the representative chamber of the wealthy and connected. But was this first impulse necessarily the right one? Were there drawbacks to allowing indirectly elected Senators to singlehandedly approve of legally binding treaties? Were there ways to ameliorate some of the drawbacks inherent to the Senate, or was it perhaps the better part of wisdom to re-examine the whole idea?

    James Wilson was the first delegate to raise this particular subject during the discussion of September 7^th. The day’s conversation had previously been focused on the nature of the Senate’s appointment powers, and this was indeed the avenue to which it would return. But for a moment, before being diverted, Wilson gave voice to certain concerns. Specifically, the assembled delegates having for the moment opted to take up the clause of the proposed constitution which stated that, “The President by & with the advice and consent of the Senate shall have the power to make Treaties &c [,]” the gentleman from Pennsylvania, “Moved to add, after the word ‘Senate’ the words, ‘and the House of Representatives.’” His rationale, as he thereafter went on to explain it, was simple enough. “As treaties [,]” he said,

Are to have the operation of laws, they ought to have the sanction of laws also. The circumstance of secrecy in the business of treaties formed the only objection; but this […] so far as it was inconsistent with obtaining the Legislative sanction, was outweighed by the necessity of the latter.

In keeping with his position on the question of executive appointments, Wilson seemed to be speaking mainly from a place of principle when he made this assertion. Secrecy, he admitted, was often an important element in the successful negotiation of international treaties, and it would have been difficult to argue that the expansive and changeable House of Representatives would be better able to keep its proceedings secret than the much smaller and more stable Senate. The former was bound to attract a more energetic sort than the latter, and the security of certain sensitive negotiations may well have suffered if the larger of the two was made party to the discussions in question. All that being said, Wilson nevertheless endorsed the inclusion of the House along with the Senate in the ratification of binding treaties. As aforementioned, such documents were to possess, “The operation of laws,” and he evidently found it inconceivable that the more representative chamber of Congress should have been excluded from any process that produced them. The result may have been inconvenient – taking the form, perhaps, of the occasional breach of secrecy – but to Wilson’s thinking it was an acceptable trade-off given what was at stake.

    During this brief dip into the subject of treaty ratification amidst the larger discussion of executive appointments, the only other delegate who was recorded as having spoken was Connecticut’s Roger Sherman. And while his observation on the matter at hand was a relatively brief one, it was also characteristically astute. “The only question that could be made [,]” he said, “Was whether the power could be safely trusted to the Senate. He thought it could; and that the necessity of secresy in the case of treaties forbade a reference of them to the whole legislature.” But while this comment might seem on the surface like little more than a straightforward rebuttal of Wilson’s cited reflection – in as much as Wilson thought secrecy less important and Sherman thought it more important – it in fact cut to the heart of the issue then under discussion. Wilson’s position, in essence, was that the treaty-making power which he and his fellow delegates were preparing to bestow upon the national government came too near to being a species of legislation for it to fall only partly within the purview of the United States Congress. If treaties thus negotiated were indeed to possess the full force of law, it then stood to reason that the body responsible for making law for the United States should have been granted full power and responsibility to examine the same and vote its approval or rejection. This was a reasonable enough position, of course, but one which Mr. Sherman seemed to think only served to obscure the real issue at hand. While Mr. Wilson had claimed, as justification for granting the House equal responsibility for treaties with the Senate, that if treaties were to, “Have the operation of laws, they ought to have the sanction of laws also [,]” – i.e., that if treaties were going to be treated like every other federal law then they should be approved by Congress like every other federal law – what he really meant to say was that he didn’t trust the Senate to see to this task alone.

    Such a belief, as far as Roger Sherman was concerned, was quite unfounded. And while he did not explain his reasoning, per se, his base assertion was nevertheless a sound one. The assembled delegates, recall, had already provisionally agreed to allow the Senate to approve of treaties on its own recognizance without any reference to the House of Representatives. Wilson objected to this procedure, on the general grounds that things that behaved like laws should be treated like laws, but he did not go into very much detail as to why. Why, in his mind, could the Senate not attend to the ratification of treaties on its own authority? Why, given the aforementioned need for secrecy, did this not represent an acceptable compromise between requiring the approval of both chambers of Congress and allowing the executive to make treaties on their own? The answer, as near as Sherman could figure it, was that Wilson simply didn’t trust the Senate. He hadn’t said as much, of course, but what other answer could there be? He didn’t trust the Senate in the same way that he trusted both chambers of Congress together and was willing to sacrifice the needs of secrecy to satisfy his own peace of mind. Sherman, as noted above, disagreed with his position. And though he did not explain from where he derived his trust in the upper house, it was nevertheless very shrewd of him to identify this selfsame sense of institutional faith as the crux of the issue at hand. Between asking the Senate to ratify treaties alone and asking both chambers of Congress to do so together, the former course was inarguably the more practical of the two. It stood to reason, then, that the only question worth answering was whether one trusted the Senate or one held them under suspicion.

    Without being able to say, precisely, how each of the assembled delegates ultimately felt compelled to respond, the result of the vote which was held shortly thereafter on Wilson’s motion would seem to serve as evidence for a fairly definitive general consensus. Wilson’s proposal having been seconded by his countryman Thomas Fitzsimmons, the final tally was ten states opposed and only one state in favor. The only delegation that voted to adopt the motion, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Wilson’s own Pennsylvania. Most of the attendees to the Philadelphia Convention, it seemed, had come around to the idea that vesting the upper house of Congress with certain unique responsibilities was both a safe and useful course of action. And while they would continue to debate precisely how and under what circumstances these responsibilities were to be exercised, they no longer appeared interested in questioning whether the Senate could be trusted or whether its members were in need of institutional restraint. On the contrary, rather than seek to restrain the Senate, most of the delegates seemed increasingly to be of the opinion that a sufficiently empowered Senate might act as a useful restraint upon the nation’s chief executive. They too, quite possibly, did not trust the Senate implicitly – being, as it was, a self-consciously aristocratic body. But they almost certainly reserved their deepest suspicions for the office that was most obviously ripe for abuse. A council of notables, after all, might well conspire to defraud the people, but a canny executive could do so without requiring any knowing assistance at all.

    This exact sentiment, in point of fact, formed the basis of a further discussion of the Senate’s treaty-making power which took place some time later during that same session of September 7^th. Having returned to, and partly settled, the matter of the upper chamber’s appointment power, the assembled delegates turned they attention once more to the Senate’s presumptive role in the ratification and enforcement of international agreements. At this point in the course of the Convention, the draft text of the proposed constitution declared that, “The President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall have power to make Treaties […] But no treaty shall be made without the consent of two thirds of the members present [.]” Wilson’s attempt to grant the lower chamber equal authority to that of the upper chamber had, as aforementioned, been voted down by an overwhelming majority, but this had evidently done little to dampen the vehemence of that selfsame gentleman’s concerns. Indeed, upon having the relevant draft text read back to him, Mr. Wilson promptly rose to declare that he, “Thought it objectionable to require the concurrence of 2/3 which puts it in the power of a minority to controul the will of a majority.” Rufus King then proceeded to voice his concurrence, “Remarking that as the Executive was here joined in the business, there was a check which did not exist in Congress where the concurrence of 2/3 was required.” Evidently, as far as these two gentlemen were concerned, powerful Senate minorities were to be feared and avoided no less so than a corrupt executive.

    There was something to this branch of argument, of course, particularly in the context of an equally apportioned Senate. The entire purpose of the upper house, pursuant to the terms of the Connecticut Compromise, was to allow every state to hold the same degree of authority regardless of the size of their respective populations. Small states like Connecticut, for example, would be on an equal footing with large states like New York, thus forcing such large states to seek compromise in order to achieve their desired outcomes. But in the event that the Senate was granted a unique and particularly sweeping power – like, say, the right to advise and consent to executive appointments or to ratify or reject international treaties – this measure, whose intention was to grant the small states some sense of security and confidence, might in turn produce a situation in which the principle of majority rule became meaningless. Consider, to that end, a fairly straightforward scenario. The Senate, pursuant to its established responsibilities, is tasked with either approving or rejecting a treaty of amity and trade between the United States and a foreign power. The President, pursuant to his own authority in this sphere, has worked long and hard with his envoys and their foreign counterparts to secure what they all feel to be a mutually beneficial agreement, and the document in question has now been submitted for Senate appraisal. Of the twenty-six Senators then seated, the approval of eighteen is required before the treaty can be considered ratified. A debate ensures, speeches are given, points are raised, and a final vote is eventually held. Seventeen Senators, representing all of the largest states and a number of the smaller ones, vote in favor. The remaining nine, representing, say, the smaller New England states nearest the border with Canada, votes against. The motion is thus defeated; the treaty is not adopted.

    Granting that this is a purely hypothetical scenario wholly lacking in detail or context, the circumstances which might produce it are not all that difficult to imagine. If the agreement in question was between the United States and the Kingdom of Spain, for example, with the aim of opening up trade between the former nation and the latter’s colonial possessions in the Americas, it might easily come to pass that Southern states intent on trading in slaves and transporting their produce to market via the Spanish port city of New Orleans might find themselves in direct opposition to Northern states whose commercial interests favored access to British and French possessions in the Caribbean or in Canada. The representatives of New York and Pennsylvania might conceivably see their way clear to approving of such an accord, their states’ commercial leanings tending to favor any agreement that promised opportunity for profit, but the New England states might as easily claim to see in such a pact a concerted Southern effort to disrupt their accustomed mercantile superiority. “This is only petty animus,” their representatives in the Senate might accordingly claim, “A jealous attempt to gain an advantage for themselves while our own merchants suffer for a lack of commercial opportunities. The great empires of Europe will not tolerate making agreements with the same nations as their rivals, and the representatives of the South have selfishly chosen to prejudice their own interests over those of the commercial heart of this nation.” Concessions might be made, to be sure, provided all parties come to agree that the accord was never intended as an instrument of spite. But, then again, they might not, the result of which would be the rejection of a potentially lucrative trade agreement at the behest of a minority of Senators representing a minority of the American population. For a nation which would claim for itself the mantle of liberty and justice, this would seem to be a result at once unjust and potentially dangerous.

    Bearing the possibility of such an outcome in mind, Messrs. Wilson and King accordingly believed that requiring a two-thirds majority for the ratification of treaties to be both inadvisable and unnecessary. Inadvisable, as Mr. Wilson mentioned, because it would place far too much power in the hands of a minority of the American people, the result of which might end up being the complete erosion of popular trust in the very notion of an American republic. And unnecessary, as Mr. King mentioned, because the President would act as a check on Congress in their own right. What King meant by this, almost certainly, was that the threshold of treaty ratification need not have been so high because the chief executive was intended to play an integral role in the relevant process from start to finish. If the Senate were to posses sole the responsibility for approving treaties, it might indeed make good sense to require a two-thirds majority for ratification. Setting the relevant threshold at only a simple majority would allow as few as fourteen Senators representing less than half of the total population to grant the approval of Congress to a series of legally binding treaty directives with potentially wide-ranging consequences. But the Senate, of course, was not to possess this power. As mandated by the text of the proposed constitution, the upper chamber of Congress was permitted to review and provide their consent only to such agreements as the President saw fit to present them. And since the President was to set to be the only officer in the entire federal government who could claim to represent the whole of the American people, their role in the treaty-making process might be considered a form of “pre-clearance.” It would be permissible, in short, for only a simple majority of Senators to vote to approve a given treaty because said treaty had necessarily already been approved by the one magistrate in the entire country who could claim a national mandate.

    In the moment, as it happened, no one took this argument up. Or, at the very least, they did not take it up directly. The next argument to be offered, however, did represent something of a philosophical counterpoint. Wilson and King, recall, had shown themselves to be both distrustful of the Senate and willing to place their confidence in the President as the common representative of the American people. A minority in the Senate, they said, should not be allowed to obstruct the vital business of the nation, while the office of President, they said, could be trusted to ensure that no treaty placed before the Senate for approval failed to account for the best interests of the population. James Madison’s response to these assertions – if, again, response is the right word – was to give voice to a substantially divergent set of sentiments. But first, to the apparently unanimous approval of his colleagues, he, “Moved to insert after the word “treaty” the words “except treaties of peace” allowing these to be made with less difficulty than other treaties [.]” That Messrs. Wilson and King appeared to support this alteration is substantially unsurprising. It was their assertion, after all, that a two-thirds threshold represented an unnecessarily high barrier against the passage of potentially critical international agreements. Madison’s suggestion that treaties of peace might be approved by only a simple majority accordingly addressed this concern, at least in part. But Mr. Madison, as it turned out, had further changes to suggest.

    From seeming to offer solace to those who believed that the President had an important role to play in the treaty-making process – namely as an agent of restraint upon the authority of the Senate – the gentleman from Virginia thereafter proceeded to propose something that seemed calculated to offend these very same individuals. Madison, it was thus recorded,

Moved to authorise a concurrence of two thirds of the Senate to make treaties of peace, without the concurrence of the President. The President he said would necessarily derive so much power and importance from a state of war that he might be tempted, if authorised, to impede a treaty of peace.

Evidently, as far as Madison was concerned, the role to be played by the President within the treaty-making process should have been a source of suspicion rather than comfort. Oh, perhaps the chief executive could be counted on when it came to treaties of commerce and the like, but treaties of peace? As the Virginian explicitly noted, the President stood to derive far too much unchecked power from the existence of a state of war to grant them too much leeway when it came time to sue for peace. Granted, it wasn’t entirely clear how the Senate might go about forming a peace treaty on its own initiative given that most of the foreign policy machinery of the national government was to rest in the hands of the executive branch. Would the upper house choose its own negotiators? Would Senators simply attend to the business themselves? Madison did not say. But what was clear was how little comfort the gentleman in question derived from this one aspect of the President’s authority. Better, he seemed to think, to allow the Senate to bypass the chief executive entirely in the event that enough of its members agreed to do so.

    The immediate response to Mr. Madison’s proposal was understandably somewhat mixed. Pierce Butler of South Carolina spoke up immediately to offer his support, and a short time later would give voice to a very interesting justification. But before he could do so, Nathaniel Gorham and Gouverneur Morris first made clear their abiding skepticism. Gorham, for one, “Thought the precaution unnecessary as the means of carrying on the war would not be in the hands of the President, but of the Legislature.” Morris then proceeded to add that he also, “Thought the power of the President in this case harmless; and that no peace ought to be made without the concurrence of the President, who was the general Guardian of the National interests.” The crux of both of these arguments, of course, was that the President’s powers within the context of a state of war actually weren’t to be feared as much as Madison avowed that they should be. How was the President supposed to take undue advantage of their war powers if it lay with Congress to make the relevant declaration? A conspiracy between these two entities might conceivably give rise to some species of military tyranny, it was true, but how likely were Congress and the President to find their interests so aligned? Gorham did not say. Nor did he pay any heed to the notion that an ill-designing President might seek to take advantage of a war they did not start for the purpose of further empowering themselves.

    And then, of course, there was the aforementioned Mr. Morris, who seemed to think that the President’s role as the superintendent of national affairs absolutely required them to play some part in drafting treaties of peace. Was it possible that this superintending authority might conceivably be abused? Was it possible that some future President might attempt to use their war powers in a way that was anything but harmless? Morris, also, did not say. But while this conspicuous silence might seem to indicate a sense of cupidity on the part of the gentleman from Pennsylvania and his colleague from Massachusetts, this need not have necessarily been the case. More than likely, rather than being too naïve for their own good, Morris and Gorham were simply of the opinion that the President should not have been a source of fear and suspicion. They and their colleagues had created the office to serve a particular purpose, after all, and it doubtless seemed strange to them to then fetter it with myriad restrictions for fear of what some future occupant might do. If the executive branch was to function as the chief organ of the nation’s foreign policy, they doubtless reasoned, then it made little sense to burden it with a great many caveats and qualifications, thus lessening its effectiveness. 

    It was at this point that Pierce Butler finally gave voice to the reasons behind his aforementioned support for Madison’s cited proposal. He was, he said, “Stenuously for the motion, as a necessary security against ambitious & corrupt Presidents.” And as evidence of the kinds of ambitious and corrupt behavior he hoped to guard against, he made mention of two instances from recent European history. The first, as Butler put it, was, “The late perfidious policy of the Statholder in Holland [,]” while the second was, “The artifices of the Duke of Marlbro’ to prolong the war of which he had the management.” The gentlemen said no more about either of these allusions, unfortunately, leaving it up to his audience to piece together precisely what it was he meant. Luckily for those of us otherwise unfamiliar with all the myriad ins and outs of 18^th century European history, a little research would seem to provide a fairly obvious set of explanations. In the first instance, Butler was almost certainly referring to a series of events which took place in the Dutch Republic between about 1780 and 1787 known collectively as the Patriottentijd. And in the second instance, he was unquestionably speaking about the actions taken and the opinions expressed by John Churchill, 1^st Duke of Marlborough, during the closing phase of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714).