ABSTRACT
No one can definitively say who the first British prime minister was, but every American school boy and girl knows that George Washington was the first president of the United States. Unlike the office of prime minister, which emerged gradually during the eighteenth century, the presidency was invented during a few months in the summer of 1787 by those whom we are fond of calling our “founding fathers.” Prior to that moment, there was no American presidency; indeed, the new nation had no national chief executive of any sort.1
