Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Baxbury.

Welcome to Baxbury, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Brian Ballot.

And I'm Joanne Freeman. If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians. And along with Ed Ayers and Nathan Connelly, each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

I'll bet you didn't know that exactly 227 years ago on April 5, 1792, George Washington issued the first veto in American history.

Washington might have been the first president to use a veto, but he certainly wasn't the last. Later, we'll learn which president used the power more than any other.

And we'll discuss President Trump, who issued his first veto a few weeks ago. So today on the show, we explore presidential vetoes throughout American history.

Today we think of the president's ability to veto legislation as part of a kind of perpetual power play, a tug of war between the executive and legislative branches.

But during his presidency, which of course was the first presidency, George Washington wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to veto legislation.

That is, until a controversial bill came across his desk.

So not only was the bill messy, it was very unclear and struck people as sort of secretive. And it seemed to favor the northern states a little bit more. And so that was obviously very problematic.

That's historian Lindsey Trvinsky describing the first vetoed piece of legislation in American history.

The bill proposed a formula to calculate how many house representatives were to be assigned to each state. But before Washington passed judgment on the bill, he consulted with his cabinet.

Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of War Henry Knox favored the bill. And Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General,

Edmund Randolph opposed to the bill. And so Washington very interestingly asked them all for written opinions about what he should do in the first week of April before issuing the veto.

And I say interestingly because he had convened a cabinet meeting by this point. The first cabinet meeting took place on November 26, 1791.

And so there was precedent for meeting in person. And instead he decided to request written opinions, even though they were all in town, which I think says a lot about how he wanted to contemplate their decisions slowly and make a decision sort of in his own time.

But also if he was going to issue a veto, that was going to be a huge precedent that he was setting. And maybe, I mean, we don't know because he didn't write this down. He often didn't write down his thought process.

But maybe he wanted to make sure he had written evidence of support for a veto if he decided to go that route.

Which would be a very savvy political thing to do if you're George Washington.

Yes, and he never published any of those types of opinions or reports. But I do think it was definitely the back of his mind. He was way more politically savvy than people get from credit for Jefferson really sees told him what's your sense of why he grabbed hold of this as being so important.

Well, I think there were a couple of reasons. I think that he felt that the Constitution actually was much more explicit than people were giving a credit for. And so he felt that the Constitution was very explicit and you needed to have the strict reading of the Constitution. So I think it's part of a broader sort of ideological view of the way the Constitution needs to be read.

...