Elias Boudinot – President of Congress (1782–1783)

In the last hard winter of the war, when rumors of peace traveled faster than pay and slower than hunger, a compact, careful New Jersey lawyer with a Huguenot name took the chair of Congress and tried to carry a country across the narrow bridge between victory and legitimacy. Elias Boudinot did not have the theatrical silhouette of a general or the lapidary sentences of a pamphleteer. He had instead a habit of exactness, a tenderness for procedures that protect the weak, and a talent for guiding a room without scalding it. In November 1782 the delegates elected him President of the United States in Congress Assembled, an office that was mostly gavel and very little scepter, and for the next twelve months Boudinot presided over a string of decisions that would decide whether the United State ...