Thomas McKean – President of Congress (1781)
This project traces the American presidency back before there was a President in the modern sense, following the thread from the presiding officers of the Continental and Confederation Congresses through the constitutional office that would later eclipse them. The aim is to keep the texture of the rooms intact—the improvised desks, the scarce ink, the letters passed hand to hand—while tracking what these men actually did and failed to do as they tried to hold a country together long enough for it to become one. We are not chasing statues; we are reconstructing working days.
Thomas McKean entered those working days with the blunt tools of a self-made lawyer and the stubbornness of a border man. Born in 1734 in the Pennsylvania backcountry to parents of Ulster-Scots stock, he learned early that order was something you built, not something given. He read law in New Castle, Delaware, gathered clients one case at a time, and moved quickly into the tangle of local power: clerkships, assembly seats, the dry, relentless business of committees. He was precise by habit and pugnacious by temperament. When the Stamp Act jolted the colonies in 1765, McKean pushed Delaware’s delegation at the Stamp Act Congress toward a stiff spine; he cared less for oratory than for getting language onto paper that could force London to see limits.
By the time war came, he had become that peculiar revolutionary figure who believed in both process and rupture. In July 1776 he was in the Continental Congress as one of Delaware’s delegates when the vote for independence broke awkwardly: George Read hesitant, McKean in favor, Caesar Rodney absent. McKean sent an urgent summons; Rodney rode through the night, dusted with the road and the after-scent of a cancer-ridden jaw, and broke the tie for independence. McKean’s signature on the Declaration would come later—he was away on militia duty when others put pen to the engrossed parchment—but the point is not ceremony; it is the instinct to close the circuit at the moment it mattered. He kept closing circuits like that for the rest of his life.
He also collected jobs the way a harbor collects boats in a storm. While serving in Congress, he became chief justice of Pennsylvania in 1777, a post he would hold for more than two decades with a ferocity that made both criminals and politicians wary. He wrote crisp opinions, kept the courts moving in wartime conditions, and insisted that the law was not a polite suggestion. Enemies called him imperious; admirers called him indispensable. Either way, he did not duck the grind.
When Samuel Huntington’s health gave out in the summer of 1781 and resignation loomed, Congress turned to McKean for the presidency. On July 10 he took the chair in Philadelphia under a government that had only just become legal in its chosen form. The Articles of Confederation had taken effect in March; the office he now held—President of the United States in Congress Assembled—was at once grand in title and narrow in power. He could preside, sign, coordinate, and press; he could not command. What he brought was energy, a lawyer’s impatience with woolly procedure, and a willingness to say no to distraction.
He found a government built like a wagon with too many owners: thirteen states tugging at the wheels, an army perpetually unpaid, a treasury supervised by Robert Morris that needed both teeth and trust, and an alliance with France that had to be honored in practice not just toasted in rhetoric. McKean tightened the screws he could reach. He drove business across the calendar instead of letting it drift: committees reconstituted with clear mandates; correspondence answered; duplicative efforts pared back. With Morris he pressed the states for the impost and for compliance with requisitions, knowing that without a revenue stream independence would be an eloquent insolvency. He could not make legislatures love taxes in a year of war, but he could make the appeals in language no one could pretend to misunderstand.
He presided while the southern campaign turned. Greene maneuvered and bled the British through the Carolinas; the allied plan to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown firmed. McKean’s role was logistical and ceremonial at once: resolutions of thanks and support moving out on schedule; communications with Rochambeau and Washington routed without insult to rank or delay; the delicate etiquette of a Franco-American partnership sustained by the steady issuance of paper that said, in effect, we are a serious people. When the express riders brought news in October that Yorktown had fallen and that Cornwallis had surrendered, it arrived in a chamber chaired by a man who believed celebrations should be brief and then followed by work. Congress proclaimed a day of thanksgiving; McKean signed the orders that dressed gratitude in the garb of a republic.
The victory did not cure the structural disease. Even as bells rang, the Confederation’s weaknesses stared back from the ledger. The army’s pay was still a promise; creditors circled; states hoarded their own tax receipts and enacted policies as if the war had been fought for thirteen sovereignties, not one. McKean’s instinct was to push where the law allowed and to scold where it did not. He refused, as president, to let Congress become merely a clerk’s office for resolutions no one intended to execute. He was brusque with delay. He prized men who brought solutions rather than speeches. He read Washington’s warnings about discontent and took them as signals to act, not invitations to draft more elegant paragraphs.
He did all this while still sitting as chief justice of Pennsylvania, riding the circuits, convicting thieves, and holding the line against disorder in a city that could turn unruly by noon and self-righteous by dusk. The double load ground him down. By the autumn he had done what he thought could be done in the chair—received the victory, steadied the alliance, disciplined the docket—and he wanted out before exhaustion made him sloppy. On November 5, 1781, he resigned, and Congress elected John Hanson to succeed him.
What remains from those four months is not a doctrine but a demonstration. McKean treated the presidency of Congress as a workbench. He showed that even within the stunted powers of the Articles a determined chair could raise the tempo, enforce order, and force a scattered body to behave like a government for long enough to catch a decisive victory. He did not pretend the structure was sounder than it was. He did not romanticize scarcity. He did not mistake allied compliments for credit that could be spent on soldier’s wages. He pushed paper until it became action, and he knew when to put the gavel down.
The years after the chair confirmed his basic cast. As Pennsylvania’s chief justice and later as its governor, he favored strong administration and did not mind sharp elbows. He brawled with Federalists, then with members of his own party, replaced officials who in his view mistook office for entitlement, and made enemies with a speed that did not trouble his sleep. The law to him was not a stage; it was a spine. If that made him harsh, it also made him reliable in crises. He lived long enough to see the federal Constitution correct what the Articles could not carry, long enough to see the presidency turn from a gavel into an executive force, and long enough to insist, sometimes loudly, that republican order is something you hold with both hands.
The portrait that fits him best is not oil on canvas but a ledger kept neat in a dark year. He presided through the campaign that ended at Yorktown; he signed the thanks; he pressed the states for money; he left before vanity could write a longer chapter than service required. He was, for a hard season, the habit of getting things done.
\