This group covers political leadership during the Continental Congress and the revolutionary institutions that preceded the federal presidency.
Nathaniel Gorham’s turn in the chair began not with trumpets but with the small, exacting necessities that keep a weak government from collapsing into embarrassment. The famous man elected to preside—John Hancock, emblem of…
Richard Henry Lee’s tenure in the chair arrives in the afterglow of a miracle and the onset of a long migraine. The miracle was the war’s end—Washington’s graceful bow at Annapolis, the definitive treaty…
Thomas Mifflin’s year in the chair belongs to the narrow space where performance and contrition meet: a politician and soldier with a reputation dinged by whispers from the coldest winter of the war, returned…
In the last hard winter of the war, when rumors of peace traveled faster than pay and slower than hunger, a compact, careful New Jersey lawyer with a Huguenot name took the chair of…
The story most people hear about John Hanson arrives as a neat provocation: before George Washington there was another “first president,” a dignified Marylander who held the office under the Articles of Confederation and…
In the late autumn of 1779 a spare, careful man from Connecticut took the chair in Philadelphia and set about the unglamorous work of keeping a rebellion orderly. Samuel Huntington did not look like…
Arthur St. Clair’s year in the chair feels like a hinge cut out of iron: heavy, cold to the touch, load-bearing in a way that is easy to miss if you only glance at…
Cyrus Griffin’s season in the chair arrives like the last careful breath before a long swim—measured, deliberate, and entirely aware that the air he is gathering must carry more than just himself. When he…
On a gray December afternoon in 1778, a slender man with a narrow, thoughtful face and a faint scar along his cheekbone took the chair at the front of a crowded hall in Philadelphia.…
In the hard winter of 1777, when the wind off the Susquehanna cut through wool and warmed breath froze to mustaches, a cluster of men in borrowed rooms tried to keep a country alive…
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