Historical Significance of the term “Cabinet” in England and the United States1

Henry Barrett Learned

American Political Science Review, 1909, vol. 3, issue 3, 329-346

Abstract: The institution which is today termed the president's cabinet was, in its origin, a creation of George Washington. It grew out of the need of a vigorous, well organized and well directed central administration which should somehow be closely associated and unified under an executive chief magistrate.Even before the close of the Revolutionary War there were signs that men desired to see the continental government in the guidance of a capable and trusted chief. There were occasional suggestions, too,—among which Pelatiah Webster's is quite the best known—that a committee or board of administrative officials not too strictly hampered by congress, might aid the chief executive as counsellors. Though ready after a brief discussion to establish a single executive magistrate at the head of the projected government, the convention of 1787 seems to have balked at Gouverneur Morris's crude plan for a president's council. The convention yielded, however, to the president the right to require from the principal officers their opinions in writing, and thus unconsciously helped to predetermine a privy council. In the early autumn of 1787 George Mason of Virginia expressed his fear lest there should “grow out of the principal officers of the great departments” what he termed a Council of State. The phrase was quickly reiterated by George Clinton of New York. James Iredell in answer to Mason, perceiving and writing of the analogy between some such body and the English cabinet committee, viewed the possibility of its existence in the new American government as in no wise dangerous.

Date: 1909
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