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So You Think You Know American History?

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Who Was the First U.S. President?

Who Was the First U.S. President?

That doesn’t look a whole lot like George Washington, does it? George became President in 1789, but the United States was already a going concern (to some extent) by 1781. So what did the country do for the intervening eight years? Did it engage in anarchy?

Not quite. Before the Constitution was adopted, the law of the land of the United States consisted of the Articles of Confederation. As students, we didn’t study that eight-year period in depth, except maybe to note that these same Articles of Confederation were a condign failure.

Yet, there were eight U.S. Presidents of the Continental Congress, and therefore of the More-or-Less-United States, serving one-year terms under those same articles. They were, in order:

  1. John Hanson of Maryland (1781-1782, pictured above), who wanted to resign immediately because he had neither any compensation or power, but he manage to stick it out.
  2. Elias Boudinot of New Jersey (1782-1783) was next.
  3. Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania (1783-1784)
  4. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia (1784-1785), who wound up disapproving of the Constitution because it concentrated too much power—an early Tea Partier
  5. John Hancock of Massachusetts (1785-1786)—he’s the one with the oversized signature on the Declaration of Independence
  6. Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts (1786-1787)
  7. Arthur St. Clair of Ohio (1787-1788), born in Scotland
  8. Cyrus Griffin of Virginia (1788 only)

Only after Griffin’s presidency did the U.S. Constitution become formally ratified and George Washington elected the “first” President under the new rules.

For an interesting discussion of these eight presidents, who have become more or less lost to history, click here.

 

A Change of Leeches

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

That I should give my hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in mere homage to, or recognition of, his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations of a proper respect for “the President’s great office” is either a rogue, a dupe or a journalist. They come to us out of a fascinating but terrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various language of oppression and the superstition of man-worship; they carry forward the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.

Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Let the President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going about the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest of a thieving corporation, but at our expense—shining and dining and swining—unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd “progress,” does not prove it, and the presumption of his “great office” is against him.

Can you not see, poor misguided “fellow citizens,” how you permit your political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers, all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding, this “manifestation of a proper respect for the nation’s head” has no decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the managers of the performance?—that while you toss your greasy caps in air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; power is of the People, and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable privilege—to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one!—Ambrose Bierce, Antepenultimata (1912)