Presidential Directives:
Background and Overview
Responding to the request of a duly constituted joint committee of the two Houses of Congress “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving...,[1] President George Washington assigned Thursday, November 26, using an October 3, 1789, instrument of proclamation.[2] It was the first proclamation issued by a President under the federal government established by the Constitution.
Four months earlier, on June 8, 1789, President Washington sent a communique to the acting holdover officers of the Confederation government, directing the preparation of a report “to impress me with a full, precise, and distinct general idea of the affairs of the United States” handled by each official.[3] The forerunner or prototype of a body of presidential directives which would subsequently come to be denominated “executive orders,” the communique was issued, of course, before the creation of the great federal departments.
Various proclamations and orders would be issued by Presidents during the nineteenth century. A number had accumulated by the time efforts were begun, during the latter half of the century, to account better for them through a numbering process and to standardize their forms. Consequently, an examination of published collections of presidential papers, such as James D. Richardson's A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, prepared under the direction of the congressional Joint Committee on Printing, reveals that, prior to the Lincoln Administration, a number of documents denominated as proclamations and other presidential instruments of no particular designation directed certain actions to be taken.[4] These latter types of documents were what came to be officially called executive orders, largely because the first of them to be selected to begin the numbered series had been captioned “Executive Order Establishing a Provisional Court in Louisiana” by Richardson in his compilation of presidential papers. Signed by President Abraham Lincoln, it was dated October 20, 1862. However, another- ↑ Annals of Congress, vol. 1, September 25, 1789, pp. 88, 914-915; Ibid., September 26, 1790, p. 90.
- ↑ James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 1 (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), p. 56.
- ↑ John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington, vol. 30 (Washington: GPO, 1939), pp. 343-344. James D. Richardson (see note 2, above), who had compiled and published the first thorough collection of presidential papers in 1895, overlooked this directive and similar such orders of President Washington.
- ↑ See Robert D. Stevens and Helen C. Stevens, “Documents in the Gilded Age: Richardson's Messages and Papers of the Presidents,” Government Publications Review, vol. 1, 1974, pp. 233-240.
