This article recovers the forgotten history of “dictatorship” in the American founding, revealing how the Roman model of temporary emergency power shaped the constitutional order of 1787. While modern scholarship often equates “dictatorship” with autocracy, the founding generation understood it as a venerable republican safeguard designed to preserve liberty in times of crisis.
Throughout the Revolutionary War, America experimented extensively with forms of emergency governance explicitly modeled on the Roman dictatorship, at both the national and the state levels. These projects for republican dictatorship were widely discussed, and generated a heated series of debates among members of the founding generation. The article's first half documents these debates, highlighting the ubiquity of "dictatorship" as a political and legal concept in the War for Independence.
The second half explores why, given this background, the Roman model of dictatorship was left out of the Constitution framed at Philadelphia in 1787. This omission stemmed from a concerted campaign waged against it by America’s leading authors and statesmen—Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. Surprisingly, these critics rejected dictatorship not primarily from fear of concentrated authority, but because they deemed this institution ill-suited to the rigors of modern statecraft. Jefferson condemned it as legislative despotism in disguise; Hamilton dismissed it as a dangerous stopgap concealing constitutional weakness; and Adams denounced it as an aristocratic weapon against popular rights. All three advocated instead for a permanent executive with substantial prerogatives, who would be capable of navigating periods of emergency without constitutional disruption.
This historical reconstruction offers three key insights. First, it refutes the myth that the founding generation neglected the problem of emergency powers. Second, it demonstrates that early American constitutional debates engaged not just with monarchical models but also with diverse republican paradigms of executive power, models that have been largely erased from our constitutional memory. Finally, it highlights the constraints embedded in formal emergency institutions like the dictatorship, which led certain Antifederalists to gravitate to dictatorship as a safer, more republican alternative to the presidency.
This overlooked history is worth reconsidering in the present moment, as “dictatorship” has re-emerged as one of the keywords of contemporary American politics.
