Federalist 70 Read Closely, Hamilton's Case for Energy in One Executive

Imagine, if you can bear it, a presidency run by committee. Seven co-presidents, carefully balanced by region and faction, each with a vote, each with a press office, each able to explain that the disaster was outvoted on his watch. Every crisis would get a working group. Every working group would get a subcommittee. And every voter who wanted someone held responsible would discover that responsibility had been sliced so thin you could read the newspaper through it.

That is not a fantasy the Founders dreamed up to scare people. It was a live proposal in 1787, and Alexander Hamilton spent one of the best essays in the Federalist Papers taking it apart. Federalist 70 appeared in New York newspapers in March 1788, under the shared pen name Publius, as part of the campaign to win ratification. Let us read it the way it deserves to be read: slowly, passage by passage, with the text in front of us.

The setting, and the fear Hamilton had to answer

The Articles of Confederation had no executive at all. Congress did everything, which in practice meant Congress did very little. The states had their own experiences: some governors were weak and hemmed in by councils, while New York had a strong single governor. And everyone in America remembered George III. The word "executive" made a great many patriots think "king".

So when the Convention met in Philadelphia, the shape of the executive was one of its hardest questions. On June 1, 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania moved that the executive consist of a single person. Edmund Randolph of Virginia objected that a unity in the executive would be the foetus of monarchy, and he preferred three executives drawn from different parts of the country. After days of argument the Convention chose a single executive, one of many choices traced in The Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan and the Final Constitution Compared. When the Constitution went out to the states, the opponents of ratification seized on the point. A single president, they warned, was a monarch in waiting.

Hamilton's task in Federalist 70 was to turn that fear inside out. A single executive, he argued, was not the danger to liberty. It was the safeguard.

Passage one: energy is not a dirty word

Hamilton opens by naming the prejudice he means to defeat. There is an idea, he says, that a vigorous executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. Then he plants his flag:

"Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government."

He immediately says what energy is for, and the list is worth reading in full:

"It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy."

Notice what is on that list. Defense, yes. But also the steady administration of the laws, the protection of property against mobs, and the security of liberty. Hamilton is not praising power for its own sake. He is saying that a government too weak to enforce its own laws will not protect anyone's rights, because rights that cannot be enforced are only wishes.

Then comes the line every student of the Constitution should know by heart:

"A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government."

That is the whole argument in three sentences. Good intentions written on parchment do not govern. Execution governs. A system that looks elegant in a seminar and falls apart in practice is, in Hamilton's verdict, simply bad. Some modern reformers might want to cross-stitch that one and hang it over the desk.

Passage two: the four ingredients, and the two safeguards

Hamilton next breaks energy into its parts:

"The ingredients which constitute energy in the executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers."

And he pairs them immediately with what keeps energy safe:

"The ingredients which constitute safety in the republican sense are, first, a due dependence on the people, secondly, a due responsibility."

This pairing is the key to the whole series. Hamilton never asks Americans to trade safety for energy. He claims the Constitution gives them both. Federalist 70 deals with the first ingredient, unity. The later essays take up the others: duration in Federalists 71 and 72, which defend the four-year term and reeligibility; adequate provision in Federalist 73, which bars Congress from raising or cutting the president's salary during his term so it cannot starve him into submission; and competent powers in Federalists 73 through 77, which cover the veto, command of the military, pardons, treaties and appointments.

Keep the four-and-two structure in mind. When someone today says a strong president threatens republican government, Hamilton's answer is that energy and safety are not opposites. The question is whether the energy sits in a place where the people can see it and answer it.

Passage three: why one man acts better than many

Hamilton's first argument for unity is practical:

"Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterise the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished."

Anyone who has served on a church board, a school committee or a homeowners' association will recognize the truth here. Committees deliberate. That is their virtue, and Hamilton grants it to the legislature, where deliberation belongs. But an executive has to act, often quickly, often without the luxury of public debate. Diplomacy needs discretion. War needs speed. A committee that must reach consensus before answering an invasion will be answering it in the past tense.

He then explains how unity can be destroyed in two ways: by splitting the executive power among two or more people with equal dignity and authority, or by giving one person the title while subjecting him to the control of advisers whose consent he needs. The first was the plural executive Randolph wanted. The second was the council model several states used, in which a governor could do little without a body of councillors. Hamilton opposes both.

Passage four: the Roman examples

Hamilton reaches for history, as the Founders always did. He writes:

"Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator..."

The point is pointed. Rome divided its executive between two consuls, and when real danger came, the Romans had to suspend their own system and appoint a dictator. A divided executive did not prevent the concentration of power. It made the concentration more extreme when the emergency arrived, because the ordinary machinery could not cope.

Hamilton also recalls the dissensions between the Roman consuls and the misadventures of the decemvirs, the board of ten men who were given power to write Rome's laws and who, by the traditional account, grew into a tyranny of their own. His lesson is that dividing executive power among several men does not divide ambition. It multiplies the number of ambitious men and gives them reasons to fight one another, with the public caught in between.

There is something for modern Americans in this. A government that spreads executive power across dozens of commissions and boards does not avoid strong executive action. It still acts. It simply acts through people no one elected, and when a true emergency comes, it reaches for improvised concentrations of power that the ordinary rules never contemplated.

Passage five: dissension, and the man who cannot be blamed

Hamilton then turns to what happens inside a plural executive. Whenever two or more people share an office, he observes, there is always danger of difference of opinion. Personal rivalry and pride make it worse. Men often oppose a thing, he notes dryly, merely because they had no hand in planning it, or because it was planned by someone they dislike. The legislature can afford such quarrels, because its debates can improve laws before passage. In the executive, quarrels only delay and weaken action at the moments when action matters most.

And then the central passage of the essay. A plural executive, Hamilton writes, does its worst damage not in what it does, but in what it hides:

"But one of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the executive, and which lies as much against the last as the first plan, is, that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility."

He explains why. When an executive is plural, every failure becomes a puzzle. The blame can be passed from one member to another with so much skill and so many plausible stories that the public cannot tell who was really at fault. Each member says he argued against the mistake. Each points to the others. The people, who should be the final judges, are left with no one to punish at the next election and no one to praise.

This is the heart of Federalist 70 and the reason it matters more now than when Hamilton wrote it. Accountability depends on knowing whom to blame. Hamilton argues that the people lose their two greatest securities in a plural executive: the restraint of public opinion, which loses its force when censure is divided, and the ability to discover clearly whose misconduct deserves removal from office or punishment.

Passage six: the council that shelters the king

Hamilton anticipates the objection that a council would check a president's worst instincts. He answers with the English example. The king of England has a council, Hamilton notes, but the English constitution holds the king's ministers responsible for his acts precisely because the king himself cannot be held responsible. In a monarchy that makes sense. In a republic, where the chief magistrate is elected and can be impeached, a council would only give him cover. He could always say his advisers overruled him, or that they advised the very thing they now criticize.

Then comes the most counterintuitive argument of all, borrowed from the political writer Jean-Louis De Lolme: that the executive power is more easily confined when it is one. A single executive is a single target. The people watch one man more closely than they watch seven. Hamilton puts it this way in substance: it is far safer to have a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people. A divided executive is not a weaker executive. It is a less visible one.

This turns the Anti-Federalist fear upside down. They worried that one man would be too powerful. Hamilton replies that one man is easier to watch, easier to blame and easier to remove than a committee whose members cover for one another.

What it meant then, and what it means now

In 1788 Federalist 70 was a defense of the presidency the Convention had built. It worked. New York ratified in July 1788, narrowly, and the single executive became the American model. Every state eventually settled on a single elected governor as well.

What it means now is uncomfortable for both parties. The modern federal government has quietly rebuilt the plural executive Hamilton warned against. It did not do it by creating co-presidents. It did it by creating independent commissions, insulated agency heads and tenured officials whose decisions the elected president cannot easily direct. The result is precisely the problem Hamilton described: faults are concealed and responsibility destroyed. When a regulation goes wrong, the president says he does not control the commission, Congress says it delegated the question, and the commissioners never appeared on any ballot.

The legal fight over that problem is laid out in The Executive Power Shall Be Vested in a President, and Every Word Counts, and the wider damage to accountability in Conservatives Are Not Against Government, We Are Against Rule by Bureau. Federalist 70 supplies the moral premise underneath both. Americans have a right to know whom to blame. Madison made the companion argument in Federalist 47, explained in Federalist 47 Defines Tyranny as All Powers Gathered Into the Same Hands: powers gathered into the same hands are the road to tyranny, whether those hands belong to a king or to a commission.

The strongest objection, answered

The strongest objection to Federalist 70 goes like this. Hamilton wrote for a small federal government with a handful of departments. He could not imagine a modern executive branch employing millions, wielding power over every corner of the economy, and commanding a military that can strike anywhere on earth within hours. Energy in that executive, the objection runs, is not a virtue but a menace. Better to divide and diffuse it.

Here is the answer, in three parts.

1. The size of the government is an argument for more accountability, not less. If federal power has grown enormously, the need for the people to know whom to hold responsible has grown with it. Dividing a vast power among unelected officials does not shrink it. It only hides it.
2. Hamilton never said the executive should be unlimited. His other ingredients, due dependence on the people and due responsibility, are the limits. Elections every four years, impeachment, the power of the purse, Senate confirmation and the courts all check a single executive. They work only if there is a single executive to check.
3. The right fix for a government that is too large is to make it smaller, through Congress, by repealing programs and withdrawing delegations, not to scatter its powers so widely that no voter can find them. A conservative who fears a powerful executive should want both a single accountable president and a government with fewer powers to hand him. That is a coherent position. A government with vast powers and no one in charge of them is not.

The case in brief

1. Hamilton held that "energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government", because a feeble execution of the laws is a bad government in practice.
2. Energy has four ingredients, unity, duration, adequate provision and competent powers, and safety has two, dependence on the people and responsibility; the Constitution was built to supply all six.
3. A plural executive, Hamilton warned, "tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility", leaving the people no one to blame and no one to remove.
4. The modern web of independent agencies has rebuilt the plural executive by another name, and Federalist 70's answer still applies: put power where the voters can see it.

What you can do: read Federalist 70 in full alongside Article II on our Constitution page, then teach the essay's feeble-execution passage to a student or a civics class.