America Had A President Before George Washington?

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Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. Our next story comes from our regular contributor, Christopher Klein. Klein is the author of four books and a frequent contributor to the History Channel. Did you know that there was an American president before George Washington? Here’s Christopher Klein with a story.

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Speaker 2: The sky was as bright as George Washington’s resplendent blue dress uniform as he strode triumphantly into Independence Hall on November 28th, 1781. It was shortly after noon in Philadelphia, but it was dawn throughout America. Just weeks earlier, the British had surrendered at Yorktown, and the newly christened government of the United States of America had convened to elect the fledgling country’s first president. It wasn’t George Washington, but John Hanson of Maryland. As Washington entered the chamber to receive the official recognition of Congress, his gaze fell upon Hanson, the first man to hold the title “President of the United States in Congress Assembled.” The man occupying what Washington called the most important seat in the United States rose to his feet and congratulated the general on his glorious success that effectively ended the American Revolution. Although he held the nation’s highest office nearly a decade before Washington, don’t expect to find John Hanson’s image alongside Old George’s familiar face on quarters, one-dollar bills, or used car ads on Presidents’ Day. The man, some historians argue, was truly the country’s first president, was long ago swept into the dustbin of history. While Washington has sparked countless tomes, Hanson has barely inspired footnotes. However, both men led remarkably parallel lives, only on opposite sides of the Potomac River. Hanson was born into a prominent family in Port Tobacco, Maryland, and spent much of his life on a plantation less than 20 miles away from Washington’s beloved Virginia estate, Mount Vernon. Both men were prosperous merchants, slave owners, and devout patriots. Hanson and Washington paid periodic visits to each other’s homes and discussed matters concerning the colonies’ growing disagreements with the motherland. Hanson’s political career began in 1750, when he was appointed sheriff of Charles County, and in 1757, he was elected to the Maryland General Assembly. America’s forgotten first president was one of Maryland’s leading opponents of the Stamp Act and other onerous measures passed by the British Parliament, and he backed greater rights for the colonies. When war broke out in 1775, Hanson was a key figure in persuading Maryland to back the rebels who had the British under siege in Boston. He spearheaded the recruitment of troops and procurement of arms in Frederick County, his new home. With money scarce, Hanson frequently paid the soldiers with his own money. Hanson supported independence for the American colonies, and his family joined in the patriotic cause during the American Revolution and paid a terrible price. Hanson’s eldest son, Alexander, served Washington as a private secretary, but two of Hanson’s sons would be killed serving in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. His son, Peter, was killed in action defending Fort Washington, named after George Washington, in November 1776. Hanson’s youngest son, Samuel, a surgeon on Washington’s staff, died of disease in June 1781, in the war’s waning months. He was 24. During the early years of the war, John Hanson served in the Maryland House of Delegates, which named him as a representative to the Second Continental Congress in 1779. At the time Hanson joined the Continental Congress, Maryland was the lone holdout in ratifying the Articles of Confederation, the proposed national constitution that required unanimous consent by all 13 states. Maryland refused to join until other states ceded their claims to lands west of the Appalachian Mountains to the central government, and by some accounts, Hanson played an important role in getting them to agree. On March 1st, 1781, Hanson and Daniel Carroll affixed their signatures to the Articles of Confederation, which created a new national government for the United States of America. The Articles also called for the institution of a governing body, “the United States in Congress Assembled,” and provided for the annual election of one of its members as president. When the Congress met for the initial time on November 5th, 1781, its first official act was to unanimously elect John Hanson to the office. With his health failing and his heart heavy after the loss of two children just months before, Hanson would rather have been free to return home, but he accepted the position out of his sense of public duty. Hanson’s position differed greatly from today’s presidency. It was not an executive office separate from the legislature. It was more akin to a prime minister in a parliamentary system. The new president had little executive power and more closely resembled a presiding officer, but Hanson clearly viewed his duties as more than merely ceremonial. Based on his second thoughts on accepting the position, just eight days after taking office, he wrote to his son-in-law, “The load of business which I have very unwillingly and very imprudently taken on me, I am afraid, will be more than my constitution will be able to bear.” The president offered to resign, but was convinced by his fellow delegates to remain on the job. Hanson’s declining health made it increasingly difficult to keep up with the job requirements, which included presiding over sessions, receiving foreign ministers, writing correspondence to state governors and foreign leaders, and signing all laws, treaties, and official papers. In January 1782, Congress agreed to transfer primary responsibility for writing letters to the states from Hanson to the Secretary of Congress. It said it made the move in order that the president may be relieved from the business with which he is unnecessarily encumbered. When the president took seriously ill in the spring of 1782, a special measure allowed Carroll to temporarily preside over the Congress, although he was precluded from signing official papers. Despite these obstacles, the Congress under Hanson’s one-year tenure accomplished much. In the critical months after the victory at Yorktown, the government chartered a national bank, signed treaties with Holland and Sweden, launched the Post Office, created the Great Seal of the United States, and designated the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving. Hanson formed a quasi-cabinet with the first Treasury and Foreign Affairs departments and named the country’s first Secretary of War and Postmaster General. With his presidential term complete in November 1782, Hanson retired from Congress, and he passed away little more than a year later, on November 22nd, 1783. The Articles of Confederation proved to be a bug-filled operating system for America. It was too weak to govern the country and lacked executive and taxing power, but it set the stage for the vastly improved Constitution 2.0, and George Washington would be the first president elected under the United States Constitution. Like a bad childhood memory, the Articles of Confederation era has been mostly purged from America’s collective history, along with Hanson and the seven men who succeeded him as President of the United States in Congress Assembled. Perhaps symbolically, the whereabouts of Hanson’s body is a mystery. Sometime in the 1980s, the corpse went missing from its crypt and has never been found. He’s such a historical enigma, as some biographies list his birth year as 1715, others 1721. The only place where Hanson’s been on equal footing with George Washington is on top of a pedestal in the United States Capitol. Bronze statues of both first presidents are part of the National Statuary Hall collection of Significant Americans. At least for now, proposals have been floated to replace Hanson’s likeness with that of Underground Railroad heroine Harriet Tubman. Hanson does have a highway and middle schools named in his honor in Maryland. There’s also a John Hanson National Memorial in Frederick, Maryland, next to the site of his former residence, which will keep him from fading into obscurity. The first American to hold the title president may not be totally forgotten, but don’t expect to see John Hanson appearing on dollar bills or used car advertisements anytime soon.

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Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Christopher Klein, the author of four books and a frequent contributor to the History Channel. And by the way, all of our history segments are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College. Go to Hillsdale.edu. Hanson, our first president. Under the Articles of Confederation, there was so little executive power and, well, America couldn’t operate as 13 separate countries, and finally, by 1787, we decided to scrap the old and come up with our Constitution, which, in the end, was simply an update on a flawed model. The story of our nation’s forgotten president here on Our American Stories.