The Prophets of Philadelphia: How the Framers Designed the Presidential Pardon to Protect Oligarchy
An Essay on the Eternal Function of Executive Clemency
"Property was the main object of Society."
— Gouverneur Morris, Constitutional Convention, 1787
In the summer of 1787, fifty-five of America's wealthiest men gathered in Philadelphia's State House to design a government that would protect what they had from those who had not. Among the powers they granted their new executive was the presidential pardon—a tool they claimed was for mercy, but which they designed as an escape hatch for their own class. Reading their debates now is like reading a confession: they knew exactly what they were creating, and they created it anyway.
George Mason of Virginia saw it clearly. "The President ought not to have the power of pardoning," he warned, "because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself." Edmund Randolph went further, predicting that a president might "exercise it to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt."
They weren't wrong. They were prophets. From the Whiskey Rebellion to Iran-Contra, from Marc Rich to cryptocurrency executives, the pardon power has functioned exactly as Mason and Randolph predicted: as a tool to protect the wealthy and connected from the consequences of their crimes.
The Property Confession
To understand the pardon power, we must first understand what the Framers were actually doing in Philadelphia. Gouverneur Morris, the Convention's most brutally honest member, spelled it out on July 5th, 1787: "An accurate view of the matter would prove that property was the main object of Society. The savage State was more favorable to liberty than the Civilized; and sufficiently so to life. It was only renounced for the sake of property which could only be secured by the restraints of regular Government."
Translation: We traded freedom for property rights. The only reason we accept government at all is to protect our wealth. And if protecting property is government's main job, then the tools of government—including the pardon—must serve that end.
Twenty-five of the fifty-five delegates owned enslaved humans. They had just lived through Shays' Rebellion, when indebted farmers nearly overthrew the Massachusetts government. They weren't designing a democracy; they were designing a property protection system. The pardon power makes perfect sense in this context: when the legal system occasionally threatened the propertied class, the president—who they assumed would always be one of them—could simply erase the verdict.
The Insurance Policy
Alexander Hamilton, defending the pardon power in Federalist 74, spoke of "critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth." But tranquility for whom? Hamilton had specific rebellions in mind—tax revolts by farmers, uprisings by the enslaved, protests by debtors. The pardon wasn't about mercy for the powerless; it was about cutting deals to protect the powerful.
The first major test came quickly. In 1795, George Washington pardoned the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion—after they were convicted of treason for resisting a tax that benefited wealthy Eastern creditors at the expense of Western farmers. The message was clear: challenge the economic order and face the gallows, unless you were important enough to bargain with. The pardons weren't mercy; they were strategic clemency designed to defuse broader uprising while maintaining the tax structure.
This pattern—prosecution of the many, pardons for the few—would become the template. It allowed the government to appear strong while actually being selective, to claim justice while practicing favoritism.
The Slavery Precedent
Nothing demonstrates the pardon's true purpose more starkly than its relationship to slavery. While I cannot document specific pardons for those who murdered enslaved people, the pattern is clear in what we do know:
President Millard Fillmore pardoned Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres, the white captains of The Pearl, who had attempted to help 77 enslaved people escape to freedom in 1848. The enslaved people were sold back into slavery, but the white abolitionists who tried to help them received presidential mercy after serving four years.
President Franklin Pierce pardoned Noah Hanson in 1854, a free Black man convicted of assisting slaves to escape—the only known presidential pardon of a Black person for Underground Railroad activities. The rarity itself tells a story.
Andrew Johnson's mass pardons of Confederate leaders after the Civil War—restoring their property rights and political power—extended this logic. The pardon protected not just individual oligarchs but oligarchy itself, ensuring that challenges to the economic order, even civil war, couldn't fundamentally redistribute power.
The Gilded Age Pattern
The post-Civil War period established the template for modern pardons:
The Whiskey Ring: President Grant pardoned John McDonald, the kingpin of the ring, on January 26, 1877—but only him, not the 109 others convicted. McDonald had been Grant's appointee as Revenue Collector and had helped secure Missouri for Grant's reelection. The message was clear: connections matter.
The Utah Territory: President Benjamin Harrison granted amnesty to Mormon polygamists in 1893. While most polygamists were actually among the wealthier Mormons (since supporting multiple households required substantial resources), the amnesty helped clear the path for Utah statehood and the integration of Mormon economic power into the national system.
The Modern Machinery
The twentieth century brought new forms of property requiring protection—financial instruments, intellectual property, government contracts—and the pardon power evolved accordingly:
Warren Harding's Administration was riddled with scandal, but contrary to myth, Harding didn't pardon Charles Forbes of the Veterans Bureau. Forbes went to prison after Harding's death, serving 20 months. The real scandal was that such corruption existed at all—Forbes had embezzled money meant for wounded veterans, yet received a relatively light sentence.
The Oregon Land Frauds: Not Cleveland but William Howard Taft pardoned conspirators in the Oregon land fraud scandal, including John Hicklin Hall. Theodore Roosevelt alleged these pardons were part of a deal to deny him the 1912 Republican nomination.
Richard Nixon received a preemptive pardon from Gerald Ford, protecting not just a man but the entire network of corporate interests that had funded illegal campaign activities.
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush: Bush pardoned six Iran-Contra conspirators on Christmas Eve 1992, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, just days before Weinberger's trial was to begin. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh stated that Bush appeared to be preempting being implicated himself by evidence that would come to light during the trial.
Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive whose ex-wife had donated $450,000 to Clinton's library. Rich had traded oil with Iran during the hostage crisis and evaded $48 million in taxes—crimes that would have meant life in prison for anyone without his wealth.
George W. Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence, protecting the vice president's chief of staff who had obstructed investigation into the politically motivated exposure of a CIA officer.
Each pardon protected not just an individual but a system—the network of wealthy interests that funded campaigns, shaped policy, and expected protection in return.
The Digital Age: Same Game, New Property
Today's pardons protect cryptocurrency executives, tech moguls, and digital-age fraudsters—new forms of property requiring the same old protection. When presidents pardon billion-dollar fraud perpetrators who happen to have revolutionary blockchain technology, they're following a script written in Philadelphia.
The Trump administration disproportionately pardoned "the powerful, famous, well-connected and wealthy" accused of white-collar crime. Analysis by House Democrats revealed Trump's pardons wiped out $1.3 billion in restitution owed to victims. Meanwhile, thousands of people convicted of drug offenses remained in prison.
The exception that proves the rule: Obama's clemency initiative, which granted 1,715 commutations, 98% for drug offenses. This represented the only major use of the pardon power in modern times to help the poor rather than the wealthy—and it was treated as revolutionary.
The Consistent Pattern
From the Whiskey Rebellion to cryptocurrency fraud, the pattern never changes:
White-collar criminals with political connections receive clemency at dramatically higher rates than street-level offenders
Financial crimes by the wealthy are routinely forgiven while similar thefts by the poor mean mandatory minimums
Presidents protect their political allies and donors from consequences
Tax evaders, securities fraudsters, and campaign finance violators escape justice if they're connected
Every president from McKinley to Carter granted at least 20% of clemency requests. That percentage fell to 12% for Reagan and single digits for every subsequent president—except when the beneficiaries were wealthy or connected.
This isn't corruption of the system. This is the system.
Morris Was Right
The essay's title calls the Framers "prophets," but that's imprecise. Prophets predict the unexpected. The Framers simply described what they were building. When Morris said property was "the main object of Society," he wasn't warning us—he was explaining the operating manual.
The pardon power works exactly as intended:
It protects property from popular justice
It maintains class solidarity among elites
It provides escape routes when the legal system occasionally convicts the wealthy
It ensures that challenges to economic order can be defused through strategic clemency
The Framers didn't fail to prevent corruption of the pardon power. They successfully built corruption into it. The only thing that would surprise them is our surprise.
The Bitter Irony
There is one delicious irony the Framers didn't anticipate. They assumed the pardon would protect their kind of oligarchy—educated, refined, steeped in classical learning. Instead, it protects any oligarchy—including the vulgar new money they would have despised. The Whiskey Ring conspirators had no Latin; the crypto billionaires quote memes instead of Cicero. But money is money, and the pardon power doesn't discriminate between old and new.
Hamilton and Madison imagined future presidents would be "enlightened statesmen" pardoning the occasional gentleman who fell afoul of popular passion. They didn't imagine presidents pardoning cryptocurrency fraudsters who code Ponzi schemes. But why should the tool care about the hand that wields it? They built a machine to protect wealth from justice. The machine works perfectly.
The Privateers and Pirates
The War of 1812 provides a perfect illustration of how the pardon power protects those who blur the line between legal and illegal enrichment. President Madison issued over 1,100 letters of marque to privateers—essentially legal pirates who captured British merchant vessels for profit. When some crossed the line into outright piracy, pardons awaited.
Most notably, Madison pardoned Jean Lafitte and his Baratarians on February 6, 1815, after they helped defend New Orleans. These were men who had operated outside the law for years, smuggling slaves and stolen goods. But when their services proved useful to the state—and their wealth made them worth courting—presidential mercy was forthcoming. The pattern is eternal: break the law for profit, become useful to power, receive absolution.
Franklin's Final Wisdom
In his final speech to the Convention, Benjamin Franklin admitted he had many doubts about the Constitution they had created. But he consented to it because "I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best." Then he expressed his hope that it would be "well administered."
Well administered. Not justly administered—Franklin was too wise for that hope. Just administered well enough to maintain order, to protect property, to keep the machinery running. By that standard, the pardon power has been administered exactly as well as Franklin could have hoped. It has protected property across three centuries, adapted to new forms of wealth, and maintained oligarchic power through civil war, depression, and technological revolution.
The tragedy isn't that the system is broken. The tragedy is that it works perfectly.
Conclusion: Reading the Operating Manual
We should read the Constitutional Convention debates not as the record of democracy's birth but as oligarchy's operating manual. The Framers told us exactly what they were building. Mason warned the pardon would protect presidential co-conspirators—and it has. Randolph predicted it would screen the guilty from justice—and it does. Morris explained that government existed to protect property—and it continues to.
Every president who pardons a wealthy criminal follows the Framers' design. Every commutation of a billionaire's sentence fulfills their intent. Every use of clemency to protect the powerful from the consequences of their crimes demonstrates that the system works exactly as specified.
The Framers weren't prophets. They were architects. And we live in the house they built, where the presidential pardon stands as a permanent emergency exit for the wealthy, clearly marked and always functional, leading directly from the courtroom back to the boardroom.
The Constitution, that "bundle of compromises," included this most essential compromise: justice would exist, but wealth could always purchase an exception. The Framers documented this feature extensively, debated it thoroughly, and implemented it deliberately.
We're not witnessing the corruption of their system. We're witnessing its proper function. The only failure is our persistent delusion that it was ever meant to work differently.
The pardon power endures, unchanged in its essential function since 1787: protecting property from justice, oligarchy from democracy, the few from the many. The Framers built it that way. They explained why. They even warned us it would be abused—though "abuse" suggests deviation from intended function. How can a tool be abused when it's being used exactly as designed?
The answer, of course, is that it can't.
