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Presidential Address: Council and Cabinet in the Mainland Colonies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

H. Hale Bellot
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Extract

The cabinet in Great Britain is an emanation of the privy council. The councils in the royal colonies upon the American mainland, like those in the West Indies, were, in the language of the royal instructions to colonial Governors, ‘our’ councils, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a prospect of a like development overseas. Yet it did not occur. The offspring of the colonial council in America is the senate of the United States. That body, like the colonial councils, has both legislative and executive functions. At the start it numbered a mere twenty-six members; and it was expected that the president, following the practice of colonial governors, would seek its advice in the discharge of his office. His cabinet had a quite different pedigree. It was envisaged in 1787 as something ‘[our Government] has always wanted, but never yet had.’ But it was, and still is, a meeting, not of ministers having seats in one or other of the houses of the legislature and collectively responsible to it, but of heads of departments individually responsible to the president. And it was historically, not a cabinet after the English model in a state of arrested development, but paradoxically a device of the legislature adapted to a presidential system. Why, it may be of interest to enquire, did this happen?

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 5 , January 1955 , pp. 161 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1955

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References

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