How to address the President? That is indeed the question would become the first major battle for Congress.

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Hello, and welcome to the political history of the United States.

Episode 5.19, the title controversy.

When we left off last time, we had just covered the first federal election in the United States, with a focus being placed on the election of George Washington as the first president and John Adams as the Vice president.

We had talked at some length about the worries that Washington harbored towards becoming the president.

He was, of course, always going to agree to serve as the nation's first president.

It was never something that anybody ever really meaningfully questioned.

So what I want to do today, though, is get Washington officially seated as the president and walk us through the first inauguration.

The first inauguration gives us a good glimpse into how much everybody in the new national government was really just winging it.

Today we are used to a government that is full of norms that after some 230 or so years, just seem like second nature.

Second, I want to take some time to look at some of the very real difficulties that George Washington was facing going into his first term as president.

Although pretty much everybody was fine with Washington himself, there remained a significant distrust of the office of the President.

The revolution had put a bad taste in everybody's mouth when it came to centralized power.

And now the United States had asked.

This deep distrust of executive power is going to lead to an incident at the very beginning of Washington's presidency that is literally going to leave everybody trying to figure out just how to address their new president.

John Adams is going to run headlong into this fire, and before the administration ever really even gets going, is going to find himself alienated from Washington.

Before we really kick off our deep dive into the start of the Washington presidency, let's go ahead and make it official.

Let's make Washington the president.

As you would probably expect, in every single town that Washington traveled through, there was celebrations.

Bells were rung, cannons were fired, and salutes were given.

Some 20,000 people had lined the roads in Philadelphia to watch the victorious general of the revolution ride through the city.

Arriving in New York on April 23, Washington was treated to the biggest celebration of them all.

Much of the city had come back to watch Washington enter into the new capital.

It really was a huge celebration, rife with lunches, parties and parades.

There must have been something sweet for Washington entering into this huge celebration in New York City itself.

During the war, the city had become something of a white whale for him.

He spent years fixated on the recapture of New York, fully believing from the time that he lost the city until the very end of the war, that New York was really the key to everything.

Now, nearly a decade later, Washington was about to take up the highest single position in the newly formed government, one that he had so desperately wanted to see created in the city that he had yearned to recapture during the war.

The date of the inauguration itself was on April 30th.

It was, as compared to his arrival a few days before, a bit more of a subdued affair.

However, it still did manage to completely consume the city.

Here, though, we start to get into what I said earlier, that fact that largely everybody was just making this whole thing up as they went along.

At around 1pm Washington, along with a group of newly elected legislators, proceeded to the still under construction home of Congress.

Washington was to be greeted by a joint session of Congress, which was to be presided over by the President of the Senate, the Vice President of the United States, John Adams.

Congress had originally planned to begin their work on March 4th.

However, as is something of a theme for the young nation, pretty much everybody was running fashionably late.

It was not until April 1 that the House had enough members that they could declare a quorum and get down to business.

It took another week for the Senate to reach the same point, not establishing their own Quorum until April 6.

The first order of the day was confirming what everybody already knew and making it official that the first president was going to be George Washington, with Adams serving as the Vice President.

Now we are going to turn back to the debates going on during those early weeks of Congress.

A bit later today, however, for now, let's jump ahead to the inauguration on April 30.

On that day, Washington was set to attend that previously mentioned joint session of Congress.

Yet even here, with something as simple as a meet and greet of Washington, questions abounded about exactly what the appropriate steps to welcome him should be.

Although the Federalists had won the battle to put a far more energetic government into place, one that contained far more centralized power than under the Confederation.

That does not necessarily mean that the fears over executive power had been fully mollified.

In reality, these fears still were openly simmering right at the very surface.

This is going to most famously manifest itself in the controversy over titles which is going to take up the second half of our episode today.

However, these fears were plainly on display on April 30, on the morning of the inauguration, John Adams was a bit of a mess.

It is not necessarily that Adams was feeling unsure of himself.

Indeed, quite the opposite was true.

However, he was deeply concerned about the political theater aspects of this joint session.

What should Adams be doing while Washington addressed Congress?

How should Congress greet the President?

Should they stand, remain seated?

Some kind of a middle ground?

To any of us living in the United States today, these arguments and debates might come across seeming trivial at best, if not bordering on the absurd.

However, questions over that fine line between respect for the presidency and deference to the power of Congress and the Republic itself loomed large for everybody, making these questions anything but absurd to those assembled.

These debates continued right up until around 2pm when Washington arrived.

Per reports, even the always very down to business John Adams was rendered speechless by the moment.

Here, right at this moment that Washington was about to be sworn in, a problem appeared.

Federal judges were to be chosen by executive appointment, subject to congressional approval.

However, as Washington was not yet the president, there were no federal judges.

Quickly, it was decided that Robert Livingston was sufficient enough a state official to give the oath.

Standing on a balcony with Congress looking on from one side and throngs of people below watching, George Washington took the oath of office.

Just like that, he was now the President of the United States.

Following the oath of office, Washington made his way back inside of Federal hall, where he planned to deliver his inaugural address.

Historian John Fairling speculates that this was the single worst part of the entire process for Washington.

Nobody was ever going to confuse George Washington as being some great and skilled orator.

Washington was soft spoken, meaning that many inside of the chamber couldn't even hear what he was saying.

For those who did hear what Washington said, it really was nothing terribly exciting.

Per Farling, one of the Pennsylvania senators commented that the speech was dull and stupid.

Washington reminded everybody that, hey, I didn't choose this job, and that he was just simply responding to the public pressure.

The only real thing of note that he did that caused any surprise was declining a salary, a request that Congress would later decline themselves in an attempt to assure that the presidency could be held by men who were not independently wealthy.

It is worth mentioning that during the inaugural address, Washington did make mentions of his hopes that party animosities would not develop during his administration.

Already, by the beginning of his first administration, there was at least some growing concern for Washington that political parties might develop, which could potentially prove to be troublesome for the young republic.

The debates over ratification of the Constitution had deeply exposed rifts between the Federalists and the anti Federalists.

Washington surely hoped that this type of factionalism was limited just to the debates over ratification.

However, going by his statements here, and then later confirmed by his statements during the Farewell address years later, at the end of his presidency, he surely had his doubts.

Less than half an hour after taking the oath of office, it was all over.

Following a brief service at St. Paul's the assembled were treated to a firework show that night.

With the day done and Washington now the President, it was high time to get down to the business of governance.

It would be an understatement to say that Washington was walking into a difficult job.

If the Confederation had been moribund before the Constitutional Convention, by the time of ratification, it was barely even breathing.

Sure, Washington was coming into a government that would hopefully have all the power it needed to adequately address these problems.

However, before any of that could happen, Washington needed to get his own office established.

The Constitution provided little more than a broad outline of the powers and limitations on the presidency.

It was going to be up to Washington to put those systems in place in order to ensure that the government effectively operated.

Yet even this only tells part of the story.

More than just the pragmatic job of running the government, Washington was going to have to deal with that distrust over executive authority.

We've already mentioned here today just how serious of a problem this really was.

The concern was not even so much that Washington would abuse the power.

He was about as trusted as anybody could be, but rather that eventually there was going to be a post Washington reality that needed to be considered.

In order to understand how deep these worries really were and to see just how deftly Washington navigated these troubled waters, we are going to turn to the question of just how one should address the President.

What was his official title going to be?

It is through this lens that we should be able to understand not only the problem, but but the risks that it posed to the long term viability of the Country's top executive.

The debate over how to properly address the president is going to become something so closely linked with John Adams, which, as we are going to see, is for good reason.

However, this is not an argument that Adams started, but rather was something that existed before he took office, and he just decided to jump right on top of it.

In fact, in the weeks leading up to the inauguration, this had been a frequently debated issue.

Terms like his Excellency or his Highness proved to be popular options in the press.

Others felt, however, that the republican nature of the government made any titles antithetical to the exact thing that they were doing.

Really, though, the problem that everybody is going to run into here is the fact that John Adams is, well, John Adams.

As we already saw earlier today, Adams was very much a stickler for the rules.

He wanted all the proper decorum to be observed.

This is perhaps not surprising coming from a man who had just spent the majority of the time since the end of the revolution living and working in Europe.

Adams had been a member of the delegation to France during the war, and then had returned again afterwards, becoming the first minister to Great Britain and the court of George iii.

This is not to say that Adams was something of a monarchist, although that term is certainly going to be thrown in his direction.

More, it was that Adams, to his core, was somebody who liked order.

None of this should be a particular surprise, since we have already talked about how, when Adams arrived ahead of Washington, he quickly turned his attention to ensuring that all those finer points were met and that everybody knew what they were going to be doing during the inauguration.

This was all the way down to those very specific details of who stood and when.

In his biography of Adams, historian John Fairling argues that after spending so much time in and around royal courts in Europe, that Adams had become completely accustomed to the importance of titles, and that this had become something of a blind spot for him.

He argued that Adams seemed to be unaware just how much his own position had changed, pointing out that decades before, in the battle against Thomas Hutchinson, Adams had plainly stated that he hated all the formalities and ceremonies.

Farrelling, whom it is worth mentioning, also has a biography of Washington that I've drawn from.

Points out that few people seemed to notice or possibly care that Washington carried himself with a particular type of dignity that was not all that unlike those European monarchs that Adams himself had spent so much time around.

For Washington, this particular brand of dignified aloofness had become something of his trademark, going all the way back to the revolution.

Likewise, in all fairness to Adams, these debates extended well beyond questions over presidential titles.

All throughout the national government, everybody was arguing over the proper decorum and respect due to each branch.

These debates went so far as seeing the Senate argue with the House on exactly how communications between the two chambers should work in order to show proper respect.

The first decisions on how to address Washington came from James Madison.

Madison advised Washington that he should tread carefully when it came to titles, and that his name alone carried all of the weight in the world.

Washington, deferring to Madison's advice, agreed, and in fact, during those days leading up to the inauguration, had Madison drafting his official correspondence with the House and the Senate.

Madison, who was also tasked with writing the responses to Washington for the House, was essentially responding to his own letters.

In the House's official response to Washington following the inauguration, congratulating him, they addressed him simply as George Washington, the President of the United States, with a simple sir acting as the only title in the correspondence.

The fact that there was any problem at all with this did not readily become apparent until after the inauguration.

Whereas the House had responded quickly and congratulated Washington, the Senate had become completely consumed in a fit of analysis paralysis.

They found themselves unable to send Washington any kind of acknowledgment of his becoming president because they were unable to figure out just what they should call him.

On the one hand, you had now Vice President John Adams arguing for an august title for Washington.

Well, the opposition against such titles was led by Pennsylvania's William McLay.

John Adams was hoping that by having such a grandiose title for the president, that the end result would be to raise the presidency up and establish it as an independent authority from the Senate.

Maclay, on the other hand, despite being a committed Federalist, remained deeply skeptical of the power of the executive branch.

He worried about the message being sent by conveying such high minded titles on the President when the entire point of the revolution had been the rejection of George iii.

Maclay was genuinely worried that the anti Federalists, who already deeply distrusted the office of the President, would see such official trappings, such as titles, as the beginning of a transition from the Republic to a monarchy.

With Adams pushing hard for such titles, it would open the door for all sorts of anti federalist attacks against the new Constitution.

Meanwhile, the House was fighting against granting any high titles to Washington for two weeks.

Despite all of the other problems that the new government had to deal with, it was this issue on how to refer to Washington that reigned supreme and took nearly all of Congress's energy.

This process became so absurd that at one point it was suggested that the president be given a special chair with a canopy for the times that he visited the Senate.

Of course, all the meanwhile, men like Maclay and most of the House were absolutely losing their minds over all of this.

This, of course, also strikes at the fact that more than a battle between any two men, or indeed factions within Congress, this was becoming the first major contest between the House and the Senate.

On May 9, this whole ordeal really would hit its climax when the Senate committee to pick an appropriate title for the president and returned with the mouthful of his Highness, the President of the United States of America and Protector of the Rights of the same.

When this title was introduced before the Senate, pretty much everybody in the room lost their minds.

Now, among those who really lost their minds was John Adams.

Although Adams did not actually come up with the title in question, it was his rapid and dogged support of it that would really stick in the collective memory.

Adams quickly pressed for an immediate action to adopt the proposed title, while simultaneously laying into the Senate and pushing them to just abandon the House and accept the new honorific.

Adams, again being pretty much completely tone deaf here, believed that a simple title like president would humiliate the country before the eyes of the world and make the entire world despise Washington.

It was every bit as overdramatic as you probably think it was.

The Senate, who was now totally turned off on Adams, requested, much to his chagrin, a further delay to discuss their options with the House.

With the House of Representatives now thoroughly bristling back against the Senate over this issue, James Madison stepped in and helped calm the entire situation down in the House, he explained that titles were not necessarily all that they were cracked up to be, pointing out that there were plenty of people out there with lofty titles who possessed little actual power.

He encouraged the House to stand firm in their stance, pointing out that the Constitution didn't mention any special titles for the president, and that furthermore, Washington himself did not want any lofty titles.

In other words, Madison was arguing that titles were pretty pointless to begin with, and on top of that, the Constitution didn't call for them, and hey, Washington just didn't want one.

Washington himself knew that his best course of action here was just to stay as far away as he could from these debates for as long as he could Madison had shared that Washington was not itching for some pompous title, but the president himself had been silent on the matter.

This aloofness, however, was a problem in and of itself.

Although Washington remained silent, everybody orbiting around him did not we already know that Madison was claiming that Washington was opposed to any grandiose titles?

Edmund Randolph informed Madison that reports back in Virginia indicated that Washington was planning to resign the presidency should Adams prevail.

William Maclay claimed to be personally in the dark about Washington's wishes, but does seem to lament that Washington had not vocally expressed his wishes on the matter.

We do know that after all of this was said and done, Washington did express that he was happy with how things had ultimately turned out.

As historian Lindsay Chervinsky writes in her book the Cabinet, George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, Washington was likely also relieved that he had escaped the criticisms that had been directed towards his Vice president.

After several more increasingly tense days where pretty much everybody was fighting with everybody else, the Senate caved in and gave way to the House, agreeing that the President was just that, the President of the United States.

There would be no more titles beyond just that President.

In the end, John Adams played a surprisingly small role.

Following the outpouring of animosity towards his support for that long winded protector of the rights of the same title, Adams seems to have finally and probably pretty begrudgingly read the room and decided that it was time to back off.

That doesn't mean that he had changed his mind.

He had not, but rather that he understood that the temperature in the Senate was not conducive to further attempts.

Although he held out hope that in the future a loftier title would become accepted.

This entire ordeal proved to be particularly devastating for John Adams and his place in the new administration.

Now, obviously this is not the end of his political career or anything of that nature.

I don't think it is much of a spoiler here that Adams is going to become the second president.

However, his involvement in the titles affair would completely take his position inside of Washington's administration.

It isn't even exactly that Washington would act coldly towards Adams.

Indeed, they maintained a cordial enough relationship throughout both of his terms.

However, Adams would never become an actual voice inside of the Washington administration.

He was now excluded from the decision making process.

Washington had seen it as necessary to distance himself from Adams.

Following the title controversy, the entire ordeal had proved to be an embarrassment for Washington, even if he emerged relatively unscathed, Cordial as the relationship may have remained.

And although the two men did seem to respect each other, Washington never again fully trusted the political judgment of John Adams, Leaving him with little option other than to keep a safe distance from his vice president.

Adams had, in very short order, torpedoed his reputation and had earned himself his own lofty titles like the Duke of Braintree, the Dangerous Vice, and my personal favorite, his Rotundity.

Meanwhile, the senate bristled under Adams role as their presiding officer.

Sure, they all understood that he was the tiebreaking vote, but that was it.

He was not a senator.

Adams, in what was far from an endearing move, became known to launch into lectures directed towards the senators, about the practices of the British parliament and how the senate should try to emulate those practices.

Suffice it to say, the senators very quickly were over all of this, and they were very, very tired of their presiding officer.

Adams, perhaps either reading the room or throwing up his hands in defeat, would ultimately retreat into the role that we know the vice president for today, abstaining from active involvement in the body, except for when a tie breaking vote was necessary.

Although Adams was just about the most vocal guy in the room about his feelings regarding a certain need for decorum, he certainly was not alone in this, Nor was he totally without cause.

Adams strongly believed that the elevation of the presidency was necessary in order to help the executive rise above the potential squabbles and cliques that would emerge in the Senate and seek to corrupt the country's highest office holder.

This entire ordeal really strikes at the key point, however, that the United States under the Constitution, had in fact moved back in the direction of their old British ties.

If the articles of confederation had been meant to be a complete break from their old monarchical past, the Constitution acted to counter those articles and move the country back towards the centralized authority that they had not so long ago done away with.

Although federalists were going to argue that the president was going to be well constrained by those checks and balances put into place in the Constitution, the anti federalist camp saw this all as a more slippery slope, threatening to ultimately return everybody to a monarchy that they had worked so hard to escape from for men like William Maclay, the matter of how to properly address the President was nothing less than that first step down a path towards the gradual return of monarchy.

Our discussion today has been completely locked within the government itself.

We have talked about how the battle was between the individual senators as well as between the House and the Senate.

Although true that this is where the shots would be fired, it is not to suggest that the controversy over titles was completely contained within those walls.

Indeed, the controversy over titles had spilled out into the public at large.

The public was very nervous about the new government, especially the Executive office.

As we've previously discussed ad nauseam, everybody trusted George Washington.

He was essentially beyond reproach.

However, everybody was also very aware that Washington was not going to be the President forever and that eventually power was going to have to pass on to somebody else.

For a public that remained skeptical at best and outright distrustful of executive power at worst, the decision not to convey lofty titles when addressing the President came as a significant relief.

All throughout that summer, debates and discussion over titles continued throughout the country and often appeared in newspapers as well as personal letters.

During the time, at least one person suggested, and indeed a number of people supported, referring to all future presidents with the title Washington.

A clear call back to the Romans use of the term Caesar for their emperors.

Although it is not fully clear if this idea was serious or rather if it was meant to be a bit of a poke at the slightly ridiculous nature of the ongoing debates.

During that first year of Washington's administration, the controversy had largely become the substitute for the greater question over the authority of the federal government and the very nature of the republic itself.

When we start looking at Alexander Hamilton's plan to assume the war debt from the states, he is quickly accused of seeking aristocratic titles for himself.

Accusations of men attempting to create an aristocracy or a monarchy loomed large during the earliest days of the new government.

Although we will probably be focusing little on specific titles moving forward, we are going to continue to spend a lot of time with this uneasiness that hung over the country during the early days of the new government.

The Constitution always provided a framework for the government, a list of enumerated and prohibited rights for different branches.

However, within that structure, everybody was more or less making it up as they went along.

Over the next few episodes, we are going to spend our time examining those earliest days of the new republic and the precedents being established throughout all of this.

Those questions about the nature of centralized power are going to loom large over the government.

They are going to help to dictate the lens through which power is viewed.

These debates will likewise get further tangled up in global affairs, as across the ocean, the United States first ally the French were getting ready to violently dispatch with so many of their own aristocratic titles, the US Senate finally caved in on the title issue in the middle of May.

Just two months later, on July 14, angry Parisians would storm the Bastille, launching the French Revolution.

Next time, with the title controversy behind us, regardless of how much those questions would linger, it was time for our new national leaders to get down to business.

That meant beginning the process of addressing all of those problems that had led to the Constitutional Convention in the first place.

Until then, I hope you all have a fantastic two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you all back here next time as everybody gets down to the business of running the new government.

Sam.