The man who received Washington’s victory dispatch from Yorktown was not a general or a governor. He was the sitting president of the Continental Congress. His name was Thomas McKean, and almost no one today knows he ever existed.
George Washington officially took the oath of office on April 30, 1789. That date has been stamped into American memory as the starting point of the presidency itself. But it marks something more specific: the presidency as defined by the U.S. Constitution. Before that document existed, before there was an executive branch, a cabinet, or a veto, the United States had presidents. Not one or two, but somewhere between eight and fourteen, depending on how you count. They ran the country through revolution and its immediate aftermath. They signed the Treaty of Paris. They guided a fragile, broke, post-war nation through its most precarious years. And history, for the most part, forgot all of them.
The reason they’ve been forgotten isn’t that they didn’t matter. The job they held barely resembles the one we call the presidency today. Historians still argue about whether these men deserve the title at all.
A Country That Didn’t Trust Its Own Government
Americans had considerable experience with executives. They had lived under the British king, who had broad powers. The Articles of Confederation provided for no separate executive, but the Congress did elect its own president, who was more or less the Speaker of Congress. That was a deliberate choice. The writers of the Articles feared placing too much power in one person. The president could not appoint delegates to committees, take actions independent of the Congress, or control the voting process.
According to the U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives, when the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, delegates elected a presiding officer to oversee the revolutionary legislature’s sessions. Given the title of “president,” this officer’s responsibilities included ruling on parliamentary issues, managing official correspondence, advancing or holding back legislation, and meeting with important allies and foreign dignitaries as the “first member” of the Continental Congress. The president could not appoint delegates to committees, take actions independent of the Congress, or control the voting process.
These weren’t presidents like we think of today. They had no executive power, no veto, no cabinet. They were essentially meeting moderators, glorified chairmen who handled correspondence and signed documents. The position was so toothless that delegates actually lost influence when elected to it.
A job with no independent authority and a built-in status demotion. And yet, men accepted it. Some of their stories are remarkable.
The Forgotten Eight (and the Six Before Them)
Before Washington took the oath of office in 1789, fourteen men held the title “President of the United States in Congress Assembled.” Some sources claim only eight, counting those who served after the Articles of Confederation took effect in 1781. But six others presided over the Continental Congress during the Revolution itself, guiding the colonies through independence and war.
The most commonly cited starting point is John Hancock, whose flamboyant signature on the Declaration of Independence has made him the one pre-Washington president most Americans can accidentally name without realizing what they’re naming. Hancock was still president of the Continental Congress when the Declaration of Independence was adopted. He also oversaw the appointment of George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and his term ran from 1775 to 1777.
Then came the figures who governed under the Articles of Confederation proper. Thomas McKean of Delaware served as president of the Confederation Congress from July to November 1781 and was in office when the British surrendered at Yorktown. John Hanson of Maryland succeeded McKean and became the first president to serve a full one-year term under the Articles of Confederation, from 1781 to 1782. Hanson is the man some historians consider the true “first president” under the new governing document. George Washington himself acknowledged the weight of the role in a letter to Hanson, writing that he congratulated him “on your appointment to fill the most important seat in the United States.”
Elias Boudinot of New Jersey served as the second president under the Articles, from 1782 to 1783. Boudinot’s presidency coincided with the end of the American Revolutionary War. He presided over the country during the signing of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. He also advocated for the rights of Native Americans and Black people, personally sponsoring youths from both groups to receive an education. He would later oversee the national mint in Philadelphia from 1795 to 1805 and served as president of the American Bible Society.
Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania served as president from 1783 to 1784, supervising important national moments including the ratification of the Treaty of Paris and George Washington’s resignation as commander of the army. On December 23, 1783, Washington appeared before Congress at Annapolis and surrendered his command to Mifflin, who as president represented the civilian authority receiving that resignation. Washington formally handed his military commission to a man most Americans have never heard of.
From November 1784 to November 1785, Richard Henry Lee governed the nation, followed by Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts in 1786.
Henry Laurens deserves particular attention. He served as president of the Continental Congress from November 1777 to December 1778, and was one of the men who signed the Articles of Confederation. In 1780, while sailing to the Dutch Republic as American minister, British forces captured his ship. Papers he threw overboard were recovered, revealing a secret American-Dutch treaty. Britain declared war on the Netherlands, and Laurens became the only American ever imprisoned in the Tower of London. He spent over a year in the Tower before being exchanged for General Cornwallis himself, the commander who had surrendered at Yorktown. Laurens then helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris.
The man exchanged for Cornwallis helped write the document that ended the war. That deserves a chapter in every American history textbook.
Arthur St. Clair of Pennsylvania served as president from February to November 1787 under the Articles of Confederation. After his term ended, Congress appointed him governor of the Northwest Territory in 1788. He ultimately died destitute, giving away what little was left upon his death.
Cyrus Griffin of Virginia was the eighth and last president to serve under the Articles of Confederation, from 1788 to 1789. Washington took the oath of office on April 30, 1789, stepping into an executive role that the Constitutional Convention had defined as categorically different from the one Griffin and his predecessors had held.
Why Washington Was Different
As the University of Wisconsin-Madison documents, the Constitutional Convention agreed to have a single executive, though fierce disagreement persisted over how that executive should be chosen and how much authority the office should hold. One of the major defects in the Articles of Confederation was the absence of any independent executive at all. When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, how much authority to vest in the new office became a central point of contention.
The debate was genuine and fierce. As Patrick Henry, a staunch opponent of a stronger central government, declared to the Virginia Ratification Convention in June 1788, the Constitution “squints towards monarchy” and “your president may easily become king.” But the delegates also knew from their experience with the Articles of Confederation that the lack of a single head of state created its own problems, especially in dealing with foreign affairs. To be taken seriously on the world stage, they had to fix that.
Some wanted the president to be elected by Congress for a long term, but ineligible for reelection. Others favored direct election by the people for a shorter term with no term limits. A compromise eventually provided that the president would be elected for a four-year term by electors chosen in a manner prescribed by the state legislatures.
What the framers built was categorically unlike what had come before. The new president could sign or veto legislation, command the military, appoint cabinet members and judges, and conduct foreign policy directly. The Confederation Congress president, by contrast, had far fewer responsibilities. The ability to manage official correspondence had stood as the most visible function of the entire office.
The pre-constitutional presidents and Washington didn’t hold the same office. They shared a title, the way a school principal and a prime minister both get called “head” of something. The similarity ends at the word.
So Were They Really Presidents?
The honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you’re measuring.
The President of the United States is an office defined by the Federal Government in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, where it is clearly stated that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The men who presided over the Continental Congress and Confederation Congress did not hold that title in that sense. They were, in fact, the president of the Congress over which they presided.
But purely technical distinctions have a way of flattening what actually happened. These men presided over a nation navigating the end of a revolution and the uncertain years that followed. According to The Augusta Press, until the Articles of Confederation were adopted in 1781, the Continental Congress was the chief governing body for the fledgling United States, and its president was the highest-ranking office-holder in the country, though the job functioned more like the Speaker of the House than a modern chief executive.
As Bill Stanley, president of the Norwich Historical Society, put it: “This is a chapter of history that has been totally forgotten, and that’s why we say, the forgotten founders.”
The fact that none of them could act without congressional approval, and that the position carried no salary and actively reduced the influence of whoever held it, makes it hard to call the role equivalent to what Washington stepped into. But the fact that they used the same title, served the same fragile nation, and helped hold it together long enough for a Constitution to get written, that’s not nothing.
The Part History Books Skipped
There’s a pattern in how countries remember their origins. The story needs a beginning, and beginnings need a single clear starting point. George Washington is that starting point for the American presidency, and not without reason: he defined the role. He established the precedent of a two-term limit. He built the cabinet structure from scratch. He was the first person to exercise the full executive authority the Constitution created.
But the Washington presidency history that gets taught in schools tends to treat 1789 as though the years before it were simply a waiting period. They weren’t. Between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and Washington’s inauguration, the country survived a war, signed a peace treaty, established its postal service, and argued itself into a new governing document. All of that happened under presidents whose names are now trivia questions.
Samuel Huntington served as president when Maryland’s 1781 ratification of the Articles of Confederation transformed the Continental Congress into the Congress of the Confederation. Huntington was president when America officially became the United States as a legal entity. He has been almost entirely erased from popular memory. Although Huntington held the title of president, it was a very different office than the one we know by that name today. He wasn’t commander in chief or the head of an executive branch. He was the presiding officer of the Congress, closer in function to the Speaker of the House. And yet, as Huntington’s advocates argue, there was still a country to preside over, and someone had to do it.
What the Distinction Actually Tells Us
The argument over whether to count these men as presidents is really an argument about what the word “president” means, and by extension, what Americans believe the presidency is for.
The founders who built the Articles of Confederation presidency were terrified of concentrated power. They had just fought a war against a king. Their solution was to create a presiding officer so constrained that the job was almost symbolic. The result was a nation that technically had a chief executive but practically had no executive at all, which is part of why the Articles failed and the Constitution replaced them.
The framers who built the Constitutional presidency learned from that failure. The new office was strong enough to govern, but bounded enough to answer to the law. What they created with Washington was genuinely new, not just a more powerful version of what came before, but a different kind of office altogether.
Where the Real Story Lives
The forgotten presidents deserve to be remembered not because they were equivalent to Washington, but because the contrast between their role and his is where the actual story of American governance lives. The country tried one kind of executive and found it inadequate. The founders argued furiously about what to replace it with. They landed somewhere that Patrick Henry thought looked too much like a monarchy and Alexander Hamilton thought was barely enough. And then they handed it to Washington, who spent eight years defining what the thing actually was in practice.
He established the two-term precedent that held for 150 years. He built the cabinet from scratch, making choices about what “advise and consent” actually looked like day to day. He set the tone for how a president addresses the public, conducts foreign policy without becoming a king, and steps down without being forced out. None of that was written in the Constitution. Washington wrote it himself, through action.
That argument, about how much power is too much and how much is too little, didn’t end in 1789. It’s still going. The names of the men who held the first version of the job are a reminder of how long, and how seriously, Americans have been having it. The presidency didn’t arrive fully formed. It was assembled, piece by piece, by people most of us have never heard of, and then handed to someone who understood that the most important thing he could do with it was eventually give it up.
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