Known for his highly positive accounts of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 101-year-old University of North Carolina emeritus history professor William E. Leuchtenburg has now undertaken in Patriot Presidents to recount the first six American presidencies—the presidencies of men who played significant roles in the American Revolution. “I call these leaders ‘Patriot,’” he says, “because they were deeply involved in the Patriot cause of the American Revolution and sought to preserve the ‘Spirit of ‘76’ in their presidencies.” He intends for this book to be the first in a series covering the entire history of the American presidency. 

In general, readers familiar with this field will find little that is new here. What does find its way into Leuchtenberg’s writing from time to time is an oddly anachronistic impulse to judge the first six American presidents by the same measure as New Dealers used in evaluating Franklin Roosevelt’s performance in office. Thomas Jefferson, for one, comes up short by this standard, while John Quincy Adams could have seen his own programmatic impulses reflected in various post-1932 administrations. Little attention is paid to the constitutionalism of the earlier period—for obvious reasons.

The book begins, logically enough, with an account of the drafting of Article II of the Constitution. Talented though the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 were, Leuchtenburg rightly notes, “they had only the foggiest notion of how an executive branch should be constructed.” While James Madison and others at the Constitutional Convention had come to think a powerful, independent presidency was necessary, some opposed the creation of a unitary executive. Still, whatever debates were raging and rumors were circulating, the Convention felt comfortable assuring the citizenry that “we never once thought of a King.” In fact, they denied the presidency the most important power of European executive offices: “the sole prerogative of making war and peace.”

Understanding of how the presidency came to have the powers it does have is vital, but our author has unfortunately erred on the side of brevity. The ratification campaign, for example, goes by in a mere six pages. He breezes by important debates among notables such as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton about how much the presidency “squints toward monarchy.” With a piquant account of George Washington’s response to news of his election and of the general’s journey to New York for his inauguration, Leuchtenburg quickly turns to the first presidency.

Washington, we are reminded, established precedents in presidential behavior long, in many cases still considered binding at virtually every step. Many of them, such as taking the oath of office in public and giving an inaugural address, are unmentioned in the Constitution. That his political peers considered these events as momentous as he did is made clear by their willingness to serve in roles subordinate to his, as James Madison’s role in drafting the president’s First Inaugural Address and the House’s response to that address made clear. The famous story of Vice President Adams’ grasping for some formal—but not monarchical—mode of address for the president shows us that whatever feelings of awkwardness Washington endured were not his alone. In a new republic, how much formality should the presidency feature? How accessible would be too accessible? President Washington (contemporaries still often called him “the General”) groped for just the right mix. However unsure he might feel, he insisted, “My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings.” Even friendly observers could be heard lamenting “the odour of incense” surrounding the president during the inauguration and after.

Not only would Washington’s behavior blaze a path for his successors, but it would give foreigners an idea of republicanism as well. “We may reasonably hope, under the smiles of Heaven,” Washington noted, “to convince the world that the happiness of nations can be accomplished by pacific revolutions in their political systems, without the destructive intervention of the sword.” The functions of the presidency may seem obvious now, but that was certainly not the case for Washington. It was up to him to bring clarity to the role.

Leuchtenburg makes much of the formation of Washington’s Cabinet. He tells the reader that such a body even came to exist reflected Washington’s ongoing role as a constitution-maker. There is little new about Leuchtenburg’s account of the Cabinet’s political composition, however: he largely affirms narratives from historians such as Clinton Rossiter that emphasize the expansive view of government taken by Alexander Hamilton and others in his faction.

After a quick account of party battles during Washington’s tenure, Leuchtenburg concludes first with Thomas Jefferson’s summary of the Great Man’s character—“His mind,” recalled the secretary of state, “was great and powerful, without being of the very first order. … Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every … consideration was maturely weighed. … His integrity was most pure. … He was indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, & a great man”—then an unnamed Federalist author’s observation concerning Washington’s retirement—“thus ended a scene the parallel of which was never before witnessed in any country.”

The book ends with the fitting observation that though the work of founding the states and the Union had been difficult and the Founders imperfect, the likes of “Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, [and] John Adams” would be hard to match today.

Like Harry Truman following Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Van Buren succeeding Andrew Jackson, and George H. W. Bush ascending to the place of Ronald Reagan, John Adams faced a daunting task as the United States’ second president. He remarked of the day he took the oath of office, “A solemn scene it was indeed, and it was made more affecting to me by the presence of the General, whose Countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He Seem’d to enjoy a Tryumph over me. Methought I heard him think ‘Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! see which of Us will be happiest.’”

Though separated from the president by politics, Thomas Jefferson advised James Madison that Adams was disinterested and wise, besides having good judgment, but averred that the president did not understand what drove men. Likely this had to do with Adams’ finding himself on the side of Hamiltonians who, as Jefferson had it, were led by greed and lust for power. Leuchtenburg fitly subtitles his John Adams chapter “Preserving the Republic in Wartime.” An alternative subtitle might have referred to the tendency of presidents to leave office in less esteem with their countrymen than when they came into it, as Adams was a clear instance of that phenomenon (though perhaps Washington suffered the same fate before him).

Leuchtenburg makes a major error in placing Adams at the Constitutional Convention. While Adams’ Defence of the Constitutions did supply influential arguments to those arguing in favor of a strong executive, he was in fact serving as ambassador to the United Kingdom during the Philadelphia conclave and the succeeding debate over ratification. To Adams’ consternation, his role as an advocate for executive power led to attacks on him for allegedly “monarchical principles” for the rest of his life (as it has since). Leuchtenburg, for example, reminds us that Adams at one point referred to hoi polloi as the “common Herd of Mankind,” but he omits that this was a common usage at the time. Rather than supporting unbridled aristocracy or absolute monarchy, Adams’ political science is better understood as holding that both the elite and the common men should have institutional defenses in a well-wrought constitution.

Still, Adams as president did not assert himself overmuch in the legislative process. He never vetoed a bill, and he willingly turned over documents to Congress concerning his administration’s French diplomacy. Granted, his party allies controlled Congress at the time, but his leadership of them was entirely nominal—even notional. His administration was dominated by diplomacy with the French and naval incidents, and despite many Federalists’ war fever, Adams steered the country clear of open conflict. When Congress authorized military spending commensurate with this difficulty, Adams asked George Washington to assume command of an expanded army. To his annoyance, the General insisted he must be allowed to choose his second-in-command, then tabbed Adams’s bitter rival Alexander Hamilton. If that were not bad enough, Adams learned that his Cabinet had for several months been taking direction from the former treasury secretary. Ultimately, Adams decided to negotiate with the French government over his Cabinet’s objections. The Convention of Mortefontaine gained America everything it could have wished for, including an end to the Quasi-War and lifting of the obligations incurred during the American Revolution. Adams, in a characteristic fit of modesty, called the agreement “a diamond in my crown.” He thought—claimed, at least—that he had saved America from the ruinous war Hamilton had envisioned.

Sadly for Adams, the electorate did not appreciate his efforts. Instead, it narrowly opted for the Republicans in the election of 1800—and then the House of Representatives chose Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr. Adams, embittered by his rejection, left town early on the morning of March 4, 1801, and did not witness Jefferson’s democratized inauguration ceremony. The new president’s Inaugural Address broke with tradition by laying out a set of principles to which his administration would be devoted. Little did he or his auditors know that his two successors would follow the same program.

As has now become customary, Leuchtenburg’s account of Jefferson’s speech notes that he was not a powerful speaker, mentions his nods to majority rule, religious tolerance, and the right to dissent, and omits the third president’s dedication to “the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies.” Besides that, of course, Jefferson foreshadowed future events in insisting that the American government was inherently strong—strong despite its military weakness, soon to be exacerbated by Republican policy—because when needed, the citizens would “fly to the standard of the law.” Leuchtenburg says that Jefferson was “an inveterate strict constructionist,” but one might also have called him “an inveterate republican,” I suppose, or “an inveterate patriot.” He also garbles the takeaway line from Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists by incorrectly quoting it. Jefferson did not, in fact, contemplate building any such “wall of separation” as president—he simply meant that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause already had.

The Jefferson chapter is unreliable regarding other legal matters too. For example, one finds an assertion that all of the “Midnight Judges” were Federalists, which Richard Samuelson has shown to be false. The account of Marbury v. Madison concludes that “Jefferson established the principle of judicial review,” which is perplexing—though perhaps not as much so as the assertion later in the chapter that James Madison was Jefferson’s vice president.

The Jefferson chapter ends with a lengthy discussion—six of the chapter’s thirty-four pages in length—of Jefferson’s post-presidential life, his views on slavery, what Franklin Roosevelt thought of him, etc. Alas, “in the twenty-first century, Jefferson’s presidency is not a usable past for a statesman seeking to defend or expand national power.” Just so.

Leuchtenburg’s chapter on Madison’s presidency focuses on the War of 1812. Madison’s administration won scant plaudits for the conduct of the war itself. The British destruction of Washington, DC’s government buildings still marks a low point for the United States. In the end, the British agreed to a palatable treaty more because they did not want anything from the United States than in response to Madison’s martial prowess. Scattered American naval victories, while good for morale, had little military effect. In the wake of the war, the Republicans chartered a new national bank and paid for inland roads—both steps they had earlier insisted would be unconstitutional. John Randolph of Roanoke, famously an ultra-Republican, quipped of Madison that he “out-Hamiltoned Alexander Hamilton.” By that point, however, the great hope of Randolph’s faction, James Monroe, had gone over to the “enemy” and embraced many of Madison’s policies.

The final two chapters of Patriot Presidents, on the administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, take up men substantially different from their predecessors. Yes, both had served the country during the Revolution—Adams-fils as a junior diplomat and Monroe as a young officer and authentic war hero, but neither had been a great figure in it. Still, its legacy weighed heavily on each of them. James Monroe, for one, had come out of the Revolution thinking there should not be political parties. His tours of the country while president evoked great shows of patriotic sentiment from his countrymen even in cities, including Boston, Hartford, and New York, that had been staunchly Federalist. It was a formerly Federalist newspaper in Boston that dubbed the Monroe Administration “the Era of Good Feelings” in response. Leuchtenburg says that Monroe “had sought ‘to consolidate the people of the Union towards one another and to mitigate the asperities of party spirit,’” and in this, he was a success. Part of his secret lay in the virtual elimination of government spending, which left the president without even a single secretary.

By way of criticizing Monroe, Leuchtenburg quotes nationalist Justice Joseph Story saying the House of Representatives, rather than the president, took the policy lead in Monroe’s day. Yet two pages later, he concedes that Monroe took the lead in bringing about the Missouri Compromise. Too, the founding of Liberia with a capital named for Monroe reflected the president’s goal of eliminating slavery from the United States. Other major developments of Monroe’s tenure included the Transcontinental Treaty and the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine. He also sent two naval vessels to the Oregon coast, a first. Probably no presidency since Washington’s had been so momentous as Monroe’s.

The second Adams, like James Madison before him, had his best days outside his presidency. When it comes to his presidency, Leuchtenburg writes that though Congress rejected virtually every proposal he made, Adams “could take pride in his recommendations as president in urging initiatives by the national government that are the precursors of those advanced by successors from Theodore Roosevelt to Joseph Biden.” Congress’s unresponsiveness to his program owed at least in part to what one observer called a “disposition … as perverse and mulish as that of his father.” The short of it was that although he made legislative proposals, he thought that his role in the legislative process should end there, and so he pursued them no further. Raised by two overbearing parents to expect of himself at least the political success he had, Adams was highly demanding not only of himself, but of his contemporaries. Those who shared his politics were frustrated by his principled aloofness.

Quincy Adams’ extreme political tone-deafness was most remarkably on display in what was fated to be his sole Inaugural Address, in which at the end of what he seems to have regarded as a six-term Jeffersonian interregnum he laid out a set of legislative proposals of which Alexander Hamilton could only have dreamt—and capped it off by admonishing members of Congress not to be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” Perhaps deep down he wanted to follow his illustrious father in being a presidential failure. Leuchtenburg draws a stark contrast between “the Jeffersonian perception that liberty is preserved by diminishing the national state” and Adams’s “bold” declaration “that ‘liberty is power.’”

Apparently having judged an attempt at a summary conclusion to what are essentially six separate accounts inapt, Leuchtenburg instead provides an epilogue. It begins with the familiar scenes at Monticello and Quincy on July 4, 1826, where the North and South Poles of the Revolution breathed their last—each of those patriots optimistic about America’s future.​ From there it leaps to Jefferson’s characteristic observation of the Revolutionary era that, “I knew that age well. I belonged to it, and labored with it.” Men of that age should not be remembered as possessed of “a wisdom more than human,” he concluded. Our author adds, “The Framers realized, too, that they had not only done nothing to eliminate the bane of slavery but had even incorporated the vile serfdom in the Constitution.” Though a la mode, it is an incorrect interjection, of course: first, because Jefferson, who was not after all a Framer of the US Constitution, did quite a lot to speed slavery’s end, as did Adams, and second, because several of those who were involved in drafting the US Constitution ended their careers having done quite a lot to speed the end of slavery, in their states as in the country at large.

The book nears its end with the fitting observation that though the work of founding the states and the Union had been difficult and the Founders imperfect, the likes of “Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, [and] John Adams” would be hard to match today and with President James Monroe’s observation that he would pray for perpetuation of Americans’ blessings. The author’s closing observation that “the nation found … [these] sentiments congenial” leaves us to question whether he disapproves of them himself.