ABSTRACT
The colonists’ revolt against British rule had engendered not only a deep antipathy to monarchy but a suspicion of all executive power. The concentration of power in the federal legislature was at odds with Americans’ professed attachment to the separation of powers. Envisioning what an American presidency should look like and anticipating how it would work was extraordinarily difficult because the republican executive the delegates were trying to create was unlike anything the world had seen before. Europe knew only monarchies, and the Articles of Confederation, as people have already noted, had no chief executive. The uncertainty and disagreements that vexed the framers’ deliberations over executive power were confessed by Virginia governor Edmund Randolph at his state’s ratifying convention. A delegate at the Constitutional Convention, Randolph had refused to sign the document in part because of his concerns about the new presidency.
