Articles of Confederation, Part III: the Anomalous as Evolutionary, contd.

Likewise bearing upon the structure of the union of American states, Article IX also made known that much of the day-to-day administration of the United States would be carried out via a mechanism which almost wholly set it apart from most existing and subsequent state, provincial, and national governments. As per the text thereof, this mechanism would take the form of,

A committee, to sit in the recess of Congress, to be denominated “A Committee of the States,” and to consist of one delegate from each State; and to appoint such other committees and civil officers as me be necessary for managing the general affairs of the United States under their direction – and to appoint one of their number to preside, provided that no person be allowed to serve in the office of president more than one year in any term of three years [.]

Article IX goes on to describe the many and various powers to be exercised by the Committee of the States. As these included nearly all of the capabilities otherwise delegated to Congress itself, said body would seem to have been intended to function as an extension of the authority and jurisdiction of the same. Whenever Congress was in recess, therefore – for up to six months at a time, as per the terms of Article IX – the United States of America would function under what was essentially a directorial style of government. On one hand, in light of the fact that a committee of thirteen people is bound to form a more efficient decision-making body than a legislature of indefinite size, the use of such a system would seem to represent a degree of administrative streamlining otherwise uncommon to the Articles.  On the other, it placed the fledgling American republic at a significant distance from both contemporary state and national governments and that which would later be described by the Constitution.

            Essentially a collegial system of government wherein executive power is exercised by a body of elected or appointed representatives rather than a singular head of state, directorates favor deliberation over decisiveness while also tacitly acknowledging that the effective administration of a complex polity demands at least some degree of procedural consolidation. Historically, governments on this model have been implemented in an attempt either to balance the power and authority of a centralized administration against the concomitant possibilities of corruption and demagoguery or as a means to provide relatively limited – but necessary – cohesion to an otherwise loose confederation of diverse and functionally autonomous states. Perhaps the most famous example thereof arose in France at the height of the Revolution in 1795 – resulting from the excesses of the Committee of Public Safety (1793-1795) and preceding the establishment of the authoritarian Consulate (1799-1804) – though more successful implementations both predated and followed it. Switzerland represents by far the most prominent of the latter, having been governed as a directorial republic since the adoption of its current constitution in 1848. Grounded upon the Swiss Canton’s centuries-long tradition of federalism and decentralization, the national government thereof possesses a collective executive – i.e. the Federal Council – comprised of seven individuals elected by a joint sitting of the upper and lower houses of the national legislature – i.e. the Federal Assembly – for a four year term. Each Councillor takes responsibility for an executive department – as in a cabinet – and the largely ceremonial offices of President and Vice-President rotate among their number on a yearly basis. While this mode of government has proven quite durable within the context of the Swiss federal state, however – wherein a social tendency toward consensus, a reliance on referenda for even minor policy decisions, and a constitutional guarantee of neutrality have collectively contributed to the promotion of a very stable, sober political culture – it remains exceedingly exceptional both currently and historically.

            Indeed, with the exception of the aforementioned French Directory (1795-1799), the only other functioning example of a directorial government native to the era in which the Articles of Confederation were written was that of the state of Pennsylvania. Said government was established upon the adoption of the that state’s first constitution on September 28^th, 1776, with Sections 3, 9, and 20 thereof specifically outlining the form, function, and responsibilities of the Supreme Executive Council. The members of this body were to be elected to a three year term as representatives of the City of Philadelphia and the various counties of Pennsylvania – initially this brought their number to twelve, though the creation of further counties increased it to nineteen – with a President and Vice-President selected to serve a one year term by a joint sitting of the Council and the state legislature. As a whole, the Councillors, President, and Vice-President were responsible for appointing magistrates and military officers, preparing and presenting the agenda of the General Assembly, presiding over cases of impeachment, granting pardons or reprieves, and in general ensuring that the laws approved by the state assembly were faithfully carried out. If the length of its existence is any measure of success, the Council’s fourteen year tenure as the executive branch of the government of Pennsylvania – from the adoption of the state’s first constitution in 1776 until its replacement by a second in 1790 – would seem to represent a substantial endorsement. This seems particularly evident when a comparison is made between the style of government favored by Pennsylvania upon its assumption of independence from Britain and those erected by its sister states.

            With the exception of New Hampshire – whose similarly-structured executive council was superseded by a governorship when its original constitution was replaced in 1784 – every other state within the contemporary American republic functioned under some form of elected or appointed singular executive. Some, like those of Delaware or Maryland, were very weak, being selected by the relevant legislatures and quite limited in their capacity for independent decision-making. Other, like New York, were quite strong, owing to the fact that there were popularly elected, faced no limitations on their ability to be re-elected, and enjoyed significant authority over public appointments, the passage of laws, and the ability of the state assembly to carry out its assigned duties. Regardless of these kinds of procedural or structural differences, however, the frequency with which various states authorities chose, in some form or another, to translate their experiences as colonists under a singular executive into a model for their post-independence governments would seem to indicate a strong preference among the citizens of the United States of America, circa 1776/77, for political centralization. Bearing this observation in mind, the creation of a national government by delegates chosen to represent these same states which for up to six months at a time would be governed by a collegial executive would indeed appear a rather anomalous development.    

            The most likely explanation for this choice almost certainly applies to the framers of New Hampshire and Pennsylvania’s aforementioned constitutions as well as it does to the authors of the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, the same reasoning probably also explains the weakness of certain contemporary state governors as compared to their colonial predecessors. The answer, in a word, is fear. Inclined though they appeared to be towards the concept of a singular executive at the head of their respective governments – as much a cultural preference as it was a political one – most of the framers of the first state constitutions nonetheless viewed the practical implications of a powerful head of state with suspicion and distrust. Not only did the history of English/British civilization – of which they considered themselves the inheritors – abound with examples of powerful monarchs whose unchecked authority made possible any number of abuses against theirs subjects’ rights and prerogatives, but the events of the 1760s and 1770s had themselves made clear that even the much-lauded Bill of Rights (1689) was too limited in scope to prevent an aggressive Parliament from abrogating the privileges of certain peoples for whom it claimed to make law. Among the members of the Founding Generation, therefore, structural reform was the obvious answer. The resulting community-wide effort to construct more equitable, more representative, and safer forms of government took on different inflections and produced different results depending on the nature of the task at hand or the political and cultural traditions of the relevant state. Almost universal, however, was a conviction that a centralized, singular executive – on the model of the British monarch or the various colonial governors – was far too dangerous to replicate in America without certain modifications to the basis of its authority and the scope of its power. 

            New York, of course, was the glaring exception. Its first constitution, adopted on April 20^th, 1777, was written by and for the landed and merchant elite of that state, for whom the offices of Governor, Chancellor, and the Supreme Court would be in effect – thanks to steep property qualifications on voting and standing for election – their personal property. The constitutions of the twelve remaining states were, by comparison, significantly more aggressive in the ways they sought to circumscribe the power of the relevant chief executives. All of them, for instance, put in place some form of limitation upon the ability of an individual to hold the office of governor or president for a number of years in succession. Many of them also declared that the office of chief executive would be filled via an election within the legislature of the state in question, thus ensuring that the governor or president thereof would be subject to significant restraint and oversight on the part of the relevant lawmaking bodies. Both of these measures represented structural responses to the fear of unchecked executive power that culture and experience had nurtured in the political character of the contemporary American population. The framers of the constitutions of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire arguably took this response to its logical extreme by attempting to do away with the concept of a singular executive altogether – doubtless in response to their own particular experiences during the colonial era – but their efforts nonetheless sprang from the same impulse as that which motivated their counterparts in most other states.  

            This same fear and suspicion of power was almost certainly what moved the framers of the Articles to structure the resulting national government as they did – i.e. without a singular executive, substituting a collegial body in its place. Granted, it was certainly possible that John Dickinson – himself a Pennsylvanian – or certain members of his drafting committee consciously attempted to emulate the examples of their own states in adopting such an unusual model for the national government of the United States, though that needn’t have been the case. The common sense of distrust that surrounded the notion of a strong chief executive was what conditioned the structure of the various state governments to begin with, and doubtless represented a more durable point of consensus than any specific framework or model. While it might perhaps appear rather strange that the resulting discussion amongst the representatives of eleven states with singular executives and two without resulted in a national administration that more closely resembled the latter than the former, the nature of the task would seem to substantially account for its outcome. Just as the framers of most of the state constitutions had been at least somewhat afraid of executive power, and the cohorts from Pennsylvania and New Hampshire appeared to be particularly so due to their respective experiences with unusually strong or arbitrary governors, so the framers of the Articles were doubtless collectively sensitive to both the inherent danger of a powerful chief magistrate and the ease with which national governments could become distant from and unresponsive to their nominal constituents.           

            Revulsion towards what they perceived to be the manifest abuses of successive British governments were, after all, some of the strongest motivating and uniting factors behind the Anglo-American crisis and the resulting political revolution. Certainly the Crown-appointed governors of a number of colonies had also incurred the displeasure of their subjects by seeming to abuse the civil and political rights to which the latter believed they were entitled, but contemporary colonial legislatures often represented bastions of opposition and resistance to exactly this kind of behavior. In consequence, while fear of executive authority was effectively nurtured, loyalty to and trust in specific colonial governments remained generally uninjured. The nearest national government, however – the Crown, Parliament, and the British courts – possessed no such saving grace. British history and culture certainly remained a source of pride for many Americans throughout the era of the Revolution, but the contemporary institutions of British government were almost wholly sources of antagonism towards the petitions and remonstrances of the American people. Evidently far more concerned with successfully regulating an increasingly complex fiscal-military empire than respecting the rights and liberties of a handful of far flung colonists, executive, legislative, and judicial authorities of Great Britain seemed inadvertently to demonstrate that national governments – owing to the sheer number of interests they must find a way to balance – must necessarily deal in abstractions. Unavoidable though this may have been, it likely soured many members of the Founding Generation on the very concept of national political authority. The end result would seem to have been the conviction on their part – largely borne out by the structure of the governments they went on to create – that the most powerful mechanisms of government ought to be those in closest proximity to those they governed. Combined with the aforementioned fear nurtured by many contemporary Americans of a strong chief executive, state legislatures would seem to have been the most trusted institutions, followed by state executives, followed by a national legislature, followed by a national executive.

            The Articles of Confederation – and the structures described in Article IX in particular – certainly appears to reflect this hierarchy of popular confidence. It frames a legislature largely beholden to the states, provides for a collegial executive on only a semi-permanent basis, and makes no provision for a national judiciary of any kind. Indeed, it was something like the logical antithesis of the contemporary British government – with no Crown, no courts, and a weak Parliament incapable of asserting itself in most domestic policy areas. However quickly or emphatically the majority of Americans turned against this form of national administration – aided in large part by the inability of the Articles to respond to the economic and diplomatic hardships that beset the nascent United States in the latter half of the 1780s – even its momentary existence is exceedingly noteworthy. Notwithstanding the length of time it has been in force or the prestige it has accrued as a result, the adoption of the United States Constitution was not the inevitable end result of the American Revolution. Rather, it was the result of a lengthy and complex process whereby experience, assumption, and theory were tested and re-tested under various conditions over the course of a little less than twenty years. Models of state government were tried and modified, which provided lessons for later efforts, which simultaneously informed and were informed by an attempt to create a national government that met both the practical needs and the moral and ethical expectations of a people who had only begun to think of themselves as a nation. The procedures laid out in the aforementioned text of Article IX whereby disputes between states were heard by Congress, or which described and empowered the Committee of the States, are in effect signposts along this path. While they have since been passed by as essential components of an effective national government, they nevertheless illustrate that American constitutional thinking once approached some of the most basic questions about the nature of power and the meaning of sovereignty from a very different perspective than which most present-day Americans are likely familiar.