The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency

In this fascinating study of early American politics, Nathaniel C. Green uses the presidency as a lens through which to see the development of American national identity, the struggle to establish the authority of the American constitutional system, and the tensions between the emergence of partisan divisions and the desire for national unity. Green eschews the familiar stories about the early American presidency. He does not look at the office of the presidency from the perspective of its occupant. He avoids the momentous early constitutional debates over the scope of the powers of the presidency and the humdrum of presidential administration and policy making. The presidency being “made” in these pages is the presidency of the public imagination. How did people talk about the presidency, and those who aspired to exercise the powers of the presidency, in the early years of the republic? Through a wide-ranging but close examination of how presidents were received in American political culture, Green gives us new insights into how political authority was constructed under the new Constitution, how national political ideals were defined and contested, and how political conflict was managed. Green canvasses a vast collection of electoral campaign literature, newspaper essays and reports, private correspondence, and public speeches to give us a fascinating view of how people perceived the president himself and how they invested those individuals with their hopes and aspirations for their republican experiment. The book gives particular attention to George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson (James Monroe and John Quincy Adams make only cameo appearances).