The Evolution of the Office of the President of the United States of America

By Sean Burns

The Evolution of the Executive Office of the Presidency is a history book that deals specifically with the Office of the Presidency. How did it begin? How was it created? How did the office itself evolve from when President General George Washington stood on the steps of Federal Hall in New York City in 1789 to the office that is now occupied by incumbent President Joseph P. Biden?

Due to recent historical events, we as voters and taxpayers must heed caution in whom we select as a candidate for the office by asking the basic questions of will this candidate respect the integrity of the office for the actions of past presidents? How has it reflected in the office itself as a whole in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson was meeting with the ambassador of France? His intent was to buy the port of New Orleans. However, after corresponding with Napoleon Bonaparte, the ambassador was able to go beyond that and do one better by offering President Jefferson the entire Louisiana territory.

While the United States Constitution has legal provisions on how to add new states to the union, nothing in that near-absolute document gives the chief executive the wherewithal of how to obtain the land so that new states can be added.

Article II of the United States Constitution enumerates the powers of commander in chief of all military forces. However, what kind of orders, directives, or missions that the president can order military personnel to undertake is not listed.

The intelligence of, the educations, past experiences of the men themselves—what was it that specifically had proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they would be the kind of men that we ought to be electing to the presidency? George Washington was the first man elected to the presidency. The Founding Fathers had designed the office with him in mind.

While George Washington was the incumbent president from 1789 to 1797 he established a very high standard of ethical morality. Every man that has been elected after him was measured by that standard of ethical morality. So we as a nation have collectively looked to such a standard in those we have elected.

That high standard of ethical morality was implicit to the kind of man that George Washington was, so we ought to be looking for persons that would fit that standard. This work started with a few essays written in college about the presidency. They have been expanded on, reedited, and revised to where it is that the reader will be able to enjoy.

While it is not a biographical presentation of the presidents themselves, the book is a way of measuring the presidents to determine if they fit the standard. Two main sources of reference for this work: the philosophy of government that was devised by French philosopher Charles Secondat, better known as the Baron de Montesquieu, as well as what Henry David Thoreau had written in Civil Disobedience.

“The best government is one that governs least”; “the best government is one that governs not at all”—which of these two philosophies has a president administrated by in acting as the chief magistrate? How have their actions, both positive and negative, reflected on the office?

This book is about many things: history, ethics, policy decisions, philosophy of government that the presidents had prior to and during their respective administrations. How have these philosophies and their experiences and political beliefs reflected on the office?

Within the contents of this book is a fictional story, “The Trial of a President.”

For the president that is on trial is three hundred pounds, a billionaire, and married to a former Playboy playmate. However, the defendant is not being tried in a regular municipal criminal court of law. Based on the saying “a jury of one peers,” other past presidents are trying him in an extraordinary court of law. The presiding judge is an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638144687

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The Evolution of the Office of the President of the United States of America

Sean Burns

ISBN 978-1-63814-467-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63814-468-7 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 Sean Burns

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

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Table of Contents

Trial of a President

Beginning Thoughts

It has often been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step; this began with one essay, when I was in a constitutional law class at what was then Hesser, now Washington College, in the Criminal Justice program. I graduated in the middle of my class, with a respectable solid B average for both the associate’s and bachelor’s degrees during the four years I was there. Now that I have graduated, I have completed quite a few more on the subject. The idea of combining them all into one complete piece of work is what you are reading now.

I have been devoted to the study of presidential history all my life. I continue to be an enthusiastic prospector of knowledge; the issue is how to use it. As a person who is involved in many things, I am always striving to apply it in a positive way. Given the unstable economy and the obstructions of a present government, a lot of American citizens have lost faith in their ability to effectively and efficiently administer the responsibilities to maintain it. There is a need to take a risk, a big one, in the attempt to receive some compensation for work that has been done, and it will stand as a measure of what kind of person I am.

A college education has some value regardless of where you earned it. If you wanted name recognition and prestige then the choices are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, West Point, or Annapolis Naval Academy, or some other well-known institute of higher learning that will accept you based on the standards of admission. Please do enjoy my work, for this was completed with a passion and was not done halfway but with the heart and soul of an artist.

Compensation is not necessarily going to be in terms of disposable income. It might be used as a measure for attempting admission into the New Hampshire University School of Law at Franklin Pierce University in Concord, New Hampshire. Prior to making that attempt will be a devoted and spirited attempt at the MBA program in Manchester at their branch campus. Never be afraid to fail, for it’s going to happen at some point and will no doubt occur; it takes more courage to make the attempt than to refrain and never try.

When it comes to having a tremendous storehouse knowledge of history, there is the question of what a person does with it after obtaining it. I am attempting to answer that very inquiry. Events happen all the time, and in a twenty-four-hour news cycle reporting it as it happens, and media sources sending it out all over the world, the events that do happen are recorded and saved and remembered in some future work.

Then it becomes history. It’s not so much what happens as to why did it happen and what effects it will have on those involved who witnessed it.

As of this writing, in December 2016, we are going to see in a month the forty-fifth President of the United States of America take the oath of office. What kind of president Donald Trump is going to be remains to be seen. However, he has forty-four predecessors who have during their respective terms of office affected it in ways that made it evolve into what it is today. This work focuses on the particular office itself as a separate entity and how it has evolved. While writing, I have backtracked, not going chronologically but strategically, focusing on various aspects that are critical parts of the job.

Now that President Donald John Trump has proven what kind of president he is, demonstrating what kind of a leader he is in the administration of the execution of his duties, one thing I have done in this work is a comparison to his predecessors and how history has looked upon them. Several key parameters have been applied. Is the president acting like a decisive and strong confidential leader? Or are they capitulating and weak-willed, given in to the opposition? Are they standing up to them, and forcing their critics to compromise, or bullying them by force to do the above? What effect will these actions have on the office of the presidency as a whole? As the incumbent president, they are the face and the voice of that office. While they are granted tremendous power, just how are they going to use that power and not abuse it?

Chapter 1

The office of the president of the United States of America is the position of the top chief executive. General George Washington was the first man to be elected to office in 1789. Two years prior at the constitutional convention, when this job was being created, there was no else who could fulfill the position. General Washington was a natural leader, an efficient administrator trusted by all, the only one of the forty-five that have been elected in the two hundred and thirty years since the first one in 1789 who got 100 percent of the votes.

Article II of the United States Constitution states the job’s responsibilities. The president of the United States is commander in chief of all US military forces, to conduct the nation’s foreign policy, to enter into treaties with other nations, and to appoint the ambassadors, judges, and other officials that are needed. For the government to function as a whole, to develop policies so that it can be managed, a president can negotiate a treaty with another nation or appoint someone to be on the Supreme Court for it to be ratified. Or that judge needs two-thirds of the votes to be able to take up their new position. The president must report annually to Congress in a State of the Union address, and this can recommend laws that that Congress should act on. Finally the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The person who is elected president is not above the law; he is subjected to it. The Madisonian system of checks and balances factors in. Yes, a president is commander in chief; but does not have the power to declare war. Congress and the United States Senate have that power; a bill to declare war is voted on by this bicameral legislature and needs a two-thirds vote to pass. A vote for impeachment starts in the House of Representatives, if articles to do so pass. The president is then officially impeached with a trial to be held in US Senate, acting as the jury, with the chairperson of the House Judiciary Committee acting in the role of prosecutor and the chief justice of the Supreme Court acting as the judge or arbitrator. After the trial is conducted then the Senate votes to remove the president from office. While such a trial and vote has taken place twice—Andrew Johnson in 1867, and Bill Clinton in 1997—neither was removed from office, and both went on to finish their administrations.

On April 30, 1789, fifty-seven-year-old General George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City to take the presidential oath of office which he devised himself; I, the author, will never be elected as chief executive, so in taking creative discretion:

I, Sean Michael Burns, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, so help me, God.

During his speech, George Washington had spoken. I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent. For what he did would be modeled by his successors, for without George Washington, if we as a nation did not have his guiding and firm trusting hand to do so, what kind of country, if we were still in existence, would we be? I do not want to answer that question, for it is too hideous to contemplate.

After March 3, 1797, the precedent-setting two-term limit was respected and adhered to for one hundred and forty-three years. In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke the precedent and took the oath of office for a third term. On February 27, 1951, Congress and the two-thirds’ majority of states ratified an amendment to the US Constitution and added the twenty-second amendment that set a term limit of two four-year terms for election to the office of the president of the United States.

In 1985, there was an attempt to repeal this amendment. Representatives Barney Frank, Jose Serrano, Howard Berman, Guy Vander Jagt, and David Dreier, as well as Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, introduced legislation to repeal this amendment; it never made it out of committee. On January 4, 2013, Representative Jose Serrano once again introduced it as HJ Res. 15, proposing to repeal it, as he has every two years since 1997.

This has continued to fail to pass, so why attempt to amend it? If it’s not broken, then why try and fix it? It has continued to fail, never being passed, so why attempt it? For it has only resulted in it coming back to slap them in the face.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, there was no greater decisive issue facing the presidents of the United States, as well as the rest of the federal government, than slavery, to the men elected to the position during this time in history. For being a very great and decisive issue, like all others, it was not the problems themselves but how the current incumbent at the time dealt with it. What laws to congress, policy decisions, or executive orders are issued is a factor.

There was a compromise of 1820 which, at the time, was believed to have settled it. In the early 1830s, there was a conflict between then President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun, who had proposed that his own home state of South Carolina could annul the federal tariff on cotton. President Jackson denied that an individual state has this power, causing a tenth amendment crisis.

The tenth amendment is all about the separation of powers between the individual states and the federal government. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it, or the states, respectively, or to the people.

One individual state having the power to nullify a federal tariff on cotton, due to the fact it does not want to pay it, Jackson threatened to send in federal troops to restore order; Calhoun responded with advocating succession. Andrew Jackson’s exact words were, He ought to be hung. It was a hard crime-control approach that ended the crisis. The issue itself continued during the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s, a problem that got worse. Three out of four of Andrew Jackson’s predecessors, their rankings being among the best and worst chief executives, put them at the bottom of it. Weak, indecisive, and giving in to stronger, more dominant factions instead of being strong and assertive chief executives was what the nation got in the 1850s.

The Compromise of 1850, which had as part of it the Fugitive Slave Law, required all citizens of the United States to return all escaped slaves to their masters and to cooperate with it. In 1850, then President Zachary Taylor had threatened to veto it; for a Southerner and someone who was also a plantation and slave owner, one would think he would be in favor of such and would have signed it, but he was also a confirmed unionist and stated he would lead the Army himself if succession broke out. Old Rough and Ready was ready to admit new states to the union in the western territories, even if they were free states.

The expansion of the United States to be one nation from coast to coast had begun in 1803 with Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana purchase to the 1848 Mexican war which, by treaty with Mexico, the United States had won and bought fair and square, stunned and shocked fellow Southerners. When the governor of Georgia Alexander Stevens threatened succession, President Taylor responded by saying he would hang all who were taken in rebellion with less reluctance than he had done to spies and deserters in the Mexican war.

On July 4, 1850, during the celebrations of the nation’s birthday, after consuming tainted milk and vegetables, Taylor was diagnosed with acute gastroenteritis and died a week later. His vice president, Milliard Fillmore, a Northerner from Buffalo, NY, took the oath of office on July 9. He subsequently signed the Compromise of 1850 into law. A hard worker who tried to implement the policies of his party but did not have General Taylor’s forceful aggressiveness, he was passed over in 1852 in favor of General Winfield Scott as his party’s standard bearer. General Winfield Scott lost the 1852 presidential election to a little-known retired politician who was a former US congressman and senator from New Hampshire named Franklin Pierce, a dark-horse compromise candidate when none of the men who could have won and were better known were passed over.

A US senator from Chicago wanted to build a railroad from his own home city to the Pacific. In order to make it happen, he went to Southern congressmen to get it passed as part of the Kansas-Nebraska act. This if passed would have nullified the Compromise of 1820, leaving the question of slavery to the individual states, taking it out of the hands of the federal government, therefore weakening its power. Franklin Pierce was in favor of doing so. Northern congressmen and senators had voted against it. As a result of it, fighting had broken out in Kansas. Franklin Pierce, who was an attorney (you would have thought he was able to comprehend the finer points of it), was however unable to. As a Northerner, he sided with the South on this one, and as a result was not going to be reelected to a second term. I would say that while he was a good man who was deeply committed to public service, he enjoyed politics and being in Washington, DC. A dark-horse candidate has to be liked to some degree, and he was good enough as a compromise. Someone who would keep the fires burning and the trains running, a maintenance man, someone who would not be forceful or aggressive.

Given the state of the nation in the 1850s, the United States of America as a union seemed to be a sinking ship. If the South wanted to succeed, Pierce would not have done anything to stop them. I believe that given his family’s traumatic situation, his domineering wife who would have divorced him if he continued a political career, and his alcoholism, which was a problem all his adult life, he was destined to be a failure as president. Enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act made him unpopular and seemed like appeasement to the South but was hated up North.

Just when you think things could not get any worse, his successor was even more of a failure. More of a weak-willed fatalistic coward than a strong, aggressive, powerful chief executive, a man who as elected five times to the US House of Representatives from his own home state of Pennsylvania.

He was ambassador to Russia in the Jackson administration and served in the US Senate. He ran for president in 1844 but lost to James K. Polk, whose successful overseeing of the administration and prosecution of a successful war with Mexico in 1848 made him a very favorable chief executive. Unfortunately, he finished one term in 1849 and died three months later.

The man who took over after Franklin Pierce was James Buchanan, a man who flip-flopped on almost every issue. He comes out and speaks against the idea of having federal regulations for the banking industry; then he is all for it. Having federal control over the banking industry was a necessary detail, rather than having them be private enterprise corporations whose bottom line was profit first and foremost. It’s not big government that is the problem but huge corporations with almost unlimited financial resources. Unfortunately, we did not as a nation have any banking regulations until 1913.

Buchanan was totally appeasing, for when South Carolina succeeded in 1860, he threw his hands up and said there was nothing he could do about it; truly the absolute worst chief executive we ever had in the history of our nation.

However, in the presidential election of 1860, there appeared a tall, lanky, hardscrabble frontiersman, a man who was as tough and as strong as the ax he used to split the rails, a hardworking, ambitious, and very congenial gentleman by the name of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had suggested keeping the practice where it had already existed; however, he was against the idea of extending it into the new territories. There was an attempt in 1850 to add to the compromise a provision that made the entire Pacific Coast and southwestern and midsouth as slave states.

As well as dividing line between north and southern California, one being slave and the other being free, an attempt was made to add it to the Compromise of 1850. This failed for it would have created a disproportion between the number of free and slave states. More slave than free would be a violation of the Compromise of 1820; it failed.

In 1861, when Lincoln took the oath of office, there were seven Southern states that had succeeded from the Union; the time for compromises was over. The only question was when the hostilities would start. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a US Military base at Fort Sumter located on an island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina.

In response, President Abraham Lincoln called for an all-volunteer force of seventy-five thousand troops by executive order. This is a directive issued by a chief executive; a governor of a state, a mayor of a city, or a county commissioner also have the discretion to issue one. Also known as delegated legislation, it is in the practice of creating administration law. The precedent is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed (from Article II Section 3 Clause 5, mostly in the administration of enforcing the law).

President Lincoln as commander in chief needed a full military compliment to defend against the Confederates who had struck the first blow. He as president did not recognize the Confederacy as a separate sovereign nation, so they were going to have to fight for it. This was the first time that a US president had called for a military draft in a time of war.

Congress makes laws; they have the power to declare war, not the president. After the attack on Fort Sumter, like the attack on the US ships in 1917 by Germany, or Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, President Lincoln issued the order, being reactive then proactive, to prosecute the war. The basis of the constitutional democratic style of government is the Madisonian system of checks and balances, the separation of powers wherein no one working for the government can have too much power.

Presidents have traditionally gone to Congress to petition for a declaration of war after the fact; the above examples serve as justifiable reasons for doing so. The only way that an executive order can be invalidated was if it was with the intent to make laws that do not currently exist. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman tried to by executive order place all the steel mills under federal control; there was no previous laws passed by Congress giving him the power to do so.

For four brutally hard years from 1861 to 1865, over half a million Americans died during this conflict, many by disease or on the battlefield. A civil war is a conflict wherein a nation can cease to be, having a new government set up by those who are victorious. President Lincoln had wanted a general who would not just stick it to the South; he wanted a general that would keep