This week US President Donald Trump wielded the startling powers of the United States presidency when he dismissed senior generals and replaced them with handpicked successors. While there was nothing unconstitutional about the act, Trump’s opponents argued that he was using the powers of the presidency to create a sort of latter-day praetorian loyal to his person. The idea is that somehow this is new, and an unparallelled use of presidential power.

It may be that Trump wants generals loyal to him or at least to his program, but it certainly isn’t the case that Trump is using the power of the presidency in an innovative way. At the very moment the Constitution came in to affect in 1788, anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution feared that the president was nothing more than an elective king or warlord. Article II of the federal constitution made the president Commander-in-Chief of the military, a position analogous to the British monarch’s in Great Britain’s constitution. George Washington’s constitutional war powers were striking in their totality.

Washington’s vaunted self-control never kept him from perceiving himself of a divinely appointed figure charged with leading the armies of the new American republic against their enemies. When Charles Inglis, the Loyalist rector of Trinity Church New York, prayed aloud for George III with Washington in attendance, the furious American commander stood by while Patriot militias surrounded the church and sacked Inglis’ home. Prayers in the Washingtonian military and political order would be offered for the general, or the army, but certainly not for the monarch. Observers noted this Cromwellian aspect of Washington’s generalship. In 1787 an admirer sent Washington a “piece of antiquity” that had been owned by Oliver Cromwell. Washington wrote a note of thanks for the gift, but historians have been quick to note the care Washington took to distance himself from the English dictator’s historical legacy. [1]

While Washington distanced himself from the Cromwellian legacy of using the military to seize power, he did not have the same difficulty accepting the near-dictatorial powers offered to the president by the Constitution. The powers of the presidency dwarfed the wartime powers Washington exercised in his wartime service under the authority of the Continental Congress. Even in the 1790s, anti-federalist and Jeffersonians warned that the presidency represented a form of executive power to total they saw the president as a de-facto king or dictator.[2]

Congress added a religious component to the American presidency in 1791 when they passed an Act for raising and adding another Regiment to the Military Establishment of the United States, and for making Farther Provision for the Protection of the Frontiers. This act moved the American chaplaincy firmly under the control of the president. Chaplains would be commissioned military officers. In Roman Catholic Europe, in Lutheran Scandinavia, and in Switzerland, clergy serving as chaplains remained essentially creatures of the church. The military itself had little control over them. The American republic chose to subordinate chaplains to the president, thereby making them at once officers of the state and also the churches they held their ordination in. The act also created the standard wherein the president, and not the church, set the terms of engagement for soldiers with religious actors. The act enfranchised chaplains to serve military functions for which they were uniquely suited, at the same time they pursued their religious vocations on terms set by the president. The president, therefore, simultaneously operated as a Caesar to his soldiers, and the pope of his chaplains. President Washington might not have claimed Cromwell’s legacy, but he proved to be a Protestant warlord nonetheless.

[1] Ernest Hawkins, Historical notices of the missions of the Church of England in the North American colonies. London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London: 1845), 337; Rock Brynner, “Cromwell’s Shadow over the Confederation: The Dread of Cyclical History in Revolutionary America.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 106 (1994): 35–52.

[2] Richard Norton Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 262, 283