THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND THE CABINET[1]
OF all the great offices established by Congress in 1789, that of the attorney-general was in some respects the least satisfactory in its organization. The portion of the Judiciary Act devoted to the attorney-general's place is curiously brief. Its very brevity suggests the immaturity of the administrative-judicial system of the central government. Aside from his function as federal prosecutor, the attorney-general was to be legal adviser to the President and to the heads of departments. This arrangement brought him into the range of executive control, making him, like the secretaries, a ministerial officer of the chief magistrate.[2]
When, in 1790, Edmund Randolph, first of the attorneys-general, wrote of himself as 'a sort of mongrel between the State and U. S.; called an officer of some rank under the latter, and yet thrust out to get a livelihood in the former. . ."[3] he cast no doubtful reflection on the status and relation of his position. He knew that he was head of no department, and his salary of fifteen hundred dollars[4] was so small that probably he could not have been expected to support himself by it. He was obliged to trust to legal practice to eke out a living. There is no evidence to show that he was even expected to remain at the seat of government, though he was inevitably obliged to keep in touch with the President, at least by occasional correspondence. And, should the federal business warrant it, the President might summon him to a conference with the secretaries. That he was reckoned an adviser in legal matters by Washington from the start there is no doubt.[5]
- ↑ For two other articles by the present writer on certain historical features of the President's cabinet, the reader is referred to the Yale Review for August, 1906, and to The American Political Science Review for August, 1909.
- ↑ 1 Statutes at Large. 92. September 24, 1789.
- ↑ Conway, Omitted Chapters, in the Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph (1888), page 135.
- ↑ Provided by statute of September 23, 1789. 1 Statutes at Large, 72, sec. 1.
- ↑ Pickering quotes from memory, declaring that Washington said of Randolph: "I made him. . .a member of my cabinet from the first."? C. W. Upham, Life of Timothy Pickering, vol. iii, page 226.
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