The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution by Lindsay M. Chervinsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution by Lindsay M. Chervinsky Ari Helo The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. By Lindsay M. Chervinsky. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 416. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-0-674-27103-6; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-98648-0.) Let me first offer my most crucial criticism of this wonderfully readable book: the author fails to explicate what is new in her research work. What are the essential corrections or supplements to the huge research literature in political history on George Washington and his cabinet? The book is well written and thoroughly documented, but for those familiar with Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's monumental The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993), Lindsay M. Chervinsky's book offers only good supplementary reading. One is also inclined to ask the purpose of the first one hundred pages of introductory information. After dozens of pages about the War of Independence, the reader is back again in colonial times on page 100. Moreover, while detailing Washington's various wartime headquarters correspondence committees and the Confederation executive departments' workings during and after the War of Independence, the author offers no hint that such developments might have connections to any larger Western history of modern bureaucracies or even colonial-era governmental experience. The world-famous British Bill of Rights (1689) is referred to as "a bill of rights," and is discussed in such a general manner that one might come away believing that before the Glorious Revolution the British Parliament had nothing to do with taxation (p. 95). Even early colonial assemblies levied taxes. One might also wonder why the author does not bring up the core principle of the British (and European) parliamentary system, namely, that the government must enjoy the confidence of the majority of the legislature, a crucial feature of the parliamentary form of government that America never adopted. Some of Chervinsky's formulations might well have been more cautious, such as "The cabinet worked to sideline Congress and to bring the state governments under federal oversight during this process" (p. 263). Before the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), the Constitution gave full license to the states to decide on all such issues as slavery and women's rights (regarding both property and political rights). Even religious freedom was secured only from the federal government's infringements. Many states did not yet guarantee such a right for their inhabitants, free or slave. [End Page 368] Now to the positive aspects of this fascinating story of Washington's cabinet and its workings from November 1791 until the end of his term in March 1797: First, it is wonderful, for a change, to encounter a history book about the early republic in which the author is genuinely interested in the subject and not only in moralistic judgments about slavery. Perhaps a paragraph or two would have been in order on that subject—marginal here in the sense that the cabinet had no constitutional powers to do anything about it. However, this book is truly about the cabinet, and it is admirably detailed on who said what on each and every subject brought to its attention. Once the author gets to the actual story from page 100 onward, her skillful prose truly catches the reader's attention. One learns about Washington's early hesitation in even forming any cabinet, of which the founders at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 gave very different opinions and eventually failed to either subscribe to such an innovation or truly reject it. Chervinsky's prose brings all the familiar developments to life again, the Thomas Jefferson–Alexander Hamilton controversies, the cabinet's occasional power struggles with Congress, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Jay Treaty mayhem, and others. Particularly mind-boggling is the telling of Edmund Randolph's eventual doom. All in all, The Cabinet is a very interesting read and, as is often the case with good traditional history books, makes wonderful pleasure reading as well. Ari Helo University of Helsinki Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association