one The Confidence of the Whole People Visions of the Presidency, the Ideas of Progress and Prosperity, and "We, the People" Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. --Alexander Hamilton, The New-York Packet, Tuesday, March 18, 1788 I think that ''twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. --Words popularly attributed to Sojourner Truth, the Woman''s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851 Dreams of God and of gold (not necessarily in that order) made America possible. The First Charter of Virginia--the 1606 document that authorized the founding of Jamestown--is 3,805 words long. Ninety-eight of them are about carrying religion to "such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God"; the other 3,707 words in the charter concern the taking of "all the Lands, Woods, Soil, Grounds, Havens, Ports, Rivers, Mines, Minerals, Marshes, Waters, Fishings, Commodities," as well as orders to "dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper." Explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought riches; religious dissenters came seeking freedom of worship. In 1630, the Puritan John Winthrop, who crossed a stormy Atlantic aboard the Arbella, wrote a sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," that explicitly linked the New World to a religious vision of a New Jerusalem. "For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill," Winthrop said, drawing on Jesus''s Sermon on the Mount.

(Forever shrewd about visuals, Ronald Reagan added the adjective shining to the image several centuries later.) We''ve always lived with--and perpetuated--fundamental contradiction. In 1619, a Dutch "man of warre" brought about twenty captive Africans--"negars"--to Virginia, the first chapter in the saga of American slavery. European settlers, meanwhile, set about removing Native American populations, setting in motion a tragic chain of events that culminated in the Trail of Tears. And so while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after. As did basic facts of geography. There was a breathtaking amount of room to run in the New World.

The vastness of the continent, the wondrous frontier, the staggering natural resources: These, combined with a formidable American work ethic, made the pursuit of wealth and happiness more than a full-time proposition. It was a consuming, all-enveloping one. For many, birth mattered less than it ever had before. Entitled aristocracies crumbled before natural ones. If you were a white man and willing to work, you stood a chance of transcending the circumstances of your father and his father''s father and of joining the great company of "enterprising and self-made men," as Henry Clay put it in 1832. The next year, President Andrew Jackson appointed one such man to be postmaster of Salem, Illinois. Though a Whig at the time--Jackson was a Democrat--Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept. His rise from frontier origins became both fable and staple in the American narrative.

Lincoln understood the power of his story, for he knew that he embodied broad American hopes. "I happen, temporarily, to occupy this big White House," Lincoln told the 166th Ohio Regiment in the summer of 1864. "I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father''s child has." No understanding of American life and politics is possible without a sense of the mysterious dynamic between the presidency and the people at large. Sundry economic, geographic, and demographic forces, of course, shape the nation. Among these is an unspoken commerce involving the most ancient of institutions, a powerful chief, and the more modern of realities, a free, disputatious populace. In moments when public life feels unsatisfactory, then, it''s instructive--even necessary--to remember first principles. What can the presidency be, at its best? And how should the people understand their own political role and responsibilities in what Jefferson called "the course of human events"? In the beginning, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the presidency was a work in progress.

Ambivalent about executive authority, many of the framers were nevertheless anxious to rescue the tottering American nation. Governed by the weak Articles of Confederation--national power was diffuse to nonexistent--the country, George Washington wrote in November 1786, was "fast verging to anarchy & confusion!" The Constitutional Convention, which ran from May to September of 1787, was focused on bringing stability to the unruly world of competing state governments and an ineffectual national Congress. In 1776''s Common Sense, Thomas Paine had suggested the title of "President" for the leader of a future American government. Still, the colonial suspicion of monarchial power was evident in Paine''s pamphlet. "But where, say some, is the king of America?" Paine wrote. "I''ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king, and there ought to be no other." The tension between the widespread Paine view (that central authority was dangerous) and the practical experience of the Revolutionary War and the Confederation period (that a weak national government was even more dangerous) shaped the thoughts and actions of the delegates who gathered in the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall, in May 1787.

Physically diminutive but intellectually powerful, James Madison, who laid out a plan for the new government with care, admitted the proper executive structure was a perplexing problem. "A national Executive will also be necessary," Madison wrote fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph before the convention. "I have scarcely ventured to form my own opinion yet, either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted, or the authorities with which it ought to be clothed." Madison''s uncertainty reflected the reality of the time. There were competing schools of thought. On the floor of the convention, Alexander Hamilton of New York proposed a president to be elected for life; others favored plans by which the legislative branch would select the executive, effectively creating a parliamentary system. Even when the drafting was done, the precise nature of the presidency--of its powers and relative role in guiding the nation--was an open mystery to the framers. Yet they were willing to live with ambiguity.

Why? Because of George Washington. It was generally assumed that General Washington, a man with Cincinnatus-like standing who had voluntarily surrendered military power at the close of the Revolutionary War, would be the first to hold the post. (The delegates did provide that the president had to be a natural-born citizen, "or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution," suggesting that there has always been a wariness of foreign influence and of the foreign-born.) All in all, given the expectation of a President Washington, the creation of the office was an act of faith in the future and an educated wager on human character. From the start Americans recognized the elasticity of the presidency--and hoped for the best. Such hopes have not always been realized. Near the end of Donald Trump''s first year in power, for instance, The New York Times reported that, before taking office, he had "told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals." This Hobbesian view of the presidency--that every single day is a war of all against all--is novel and out of sync with much of the presidential past.

In his 1867 book The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot delineated the elements crucial to the government of a free people: "First, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population--the dignified parts.and next, the efficient parts--those by which it, in fact, works and rules." Bagehot argued that the projection of aspirations above the usual run of political business was vital. "The dignified parts of government," Bagehot wrote, "are those which bring it force--which attract its motive power." In the American context, this is especially true of the presidency, for the president, in the words of James Bryce, had become "the head of the nation." Speaking in Bagehot''s vernacular, Bryce also observed: "The President has a position of immense dignity, an unrivalled platform from which to impress his ideas (if he has any) upon the people." His influence could therefore be nearly total. "As he has the ear of the country," Bryce wrote, "he can force upon its attention questions which Congress may be neglecting, and if he be a man of constructive ideas and definite aims, he may guide and inspire its political thought.

" In a twenty-first-century hour when the presidency has more in common with reality television or professional wrestling, it''s useful to recall how the most consequential of our past presidents have unified and inspired with conscious dignity and conscientious efficiency. "Every hope and every fear of his fellow citizens, almost every aspect of their wealth and activity, falls within the scope of his concern--indeed, within the scope of his duty," Harry Truman said. "Only a man who has held the office can really appreciate tha.