A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 6, part 2: Andrew Johnson

by Unknown

Q. The President himself being in correspondence with those parties upon the same subject, would it not have been proper to have advised him of the reception of that dispatch?

A. I know nothing about his correspondence, and know nothing about any correspondence except this one dispatch. We had intelligence of the riot on Thursday morning. The riot had taken place on Monday.

It is a difficult matter to define all the relations which exist between the heads of Departments and the President. The legal relations are well enough defined. The Constitution places these officers in the relation of his advisers when he calls upon them for advice. The acts of Congress go further. Take, for example, the act of 1789 creating the War Department. It provides that—

There shall be a principal officer therein to be called the Secretary for the Department of War, who shall perform and execute such duties as shall from time to time be enjoined on or intrusted to him by the President of the United States; and, furthermore, the said principal officer shall conduct the business of the said Department in such manner as the President of the United States shall from time to time order and instruct.

Provision is also made for the appointment of an inferior officer by the head of the Department, to be called the chief clerk, "who, whenever said principal officer shall be removed from office by the President of the United States," shall have the charge and custody of the books, records, and papers of the Department.

The legal relation is analogous to that of principal and agent. It is the President upon whom the Constitution devolves, as head of the executive department, the duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed; but as he can not execute them in person, he is allowed to select his agents, and is made responsible for their acts within just limits. So complete is this presumed delegation of authority in the relation of a head of Department to the President that the Supreme Court of the United States have decided that an order made by a head of Department is presumed to be made by the President himself.

The principal, upon whom such responsibility is placed for the acts of a subordinate, ought to be left as free as possible in the matter of selection and of dismissal. To hold him to responsibility for an officer beyond his control; to leave the question of the fitness of such an agent to be decided for him and not by him; to allow such a subordinate, when the President, moved by "public considerations of a high character," requests his resignation, to assume for himself an equal right to act upon his own views of "public considerations" and to make his own conclusions paramount to those of the President—to allow all this is to reverse the just order of administration and to place the subordinate above the superior.

There are, however, other relations between the President and a head of Department beyond these defined legal relations, which necessarily attend them, though not expressed. Chief among these is mutual confidence. This relation is so delicate that it is sometimes hard to say when or how it ceases. A single flagrant act may end it at once, and then there is no difficulty. But confidence may be just as effectually destroyed by a series of causes too subtle for demonstration. As it is a plant of slow growth, so, too, it may be slow in decay. Such has been the process here. I will not pretend to say what acts or omissions have broken up this relation. They are hardly susceptible of statement, and still less of formal proof. Nevertheless, no one can read the correspondence of the 5th of August without being convinced that this relation was effectually gone on both sides, and that while the President was unwilling to allow Mr. Stanton to remain in his Administration, Mr. Stanton was equally unwilling to allow the President to carry on his Administration without his presence.

In the great debate which took place in the House of Representatives in 1789, in the first organization of the principal Departments, Mr. Madison spoke as follows:

It is evidently the intention of the Constitution that the first magistrate should be responsible for the executive department. So far, therefore, as we do not make the officers who are to aid him in the duties of that department responsible to him, he is not responsible to the country. Again: Is there no danger that an officer, when he is appointed by the concurrence of the Senate and has friends in that body, may choose rather to risk his establishment on the favor of that branch than rest it upon the discharge of his duties to the satisfaction of the executive branch, which is constitutionally authorized to inspect and control his conduct? And if it should happen that the officers connect themselves with the Senate, they may mutually support each other, and for want of efficacy reduce the power of the President to a mere vapor, in which case his responsibility would be annihilated, and the expectation of it is unjust. The high executive officers, joined in cabal with the Senate, would lay the foundation of discord, and end in an assumption of the executive power only to be removed by a revolution in the Government.