h Marshall had predicted that he would;[21] to the
contrary he in some respects enlarged upon them. After his day, however,
the office passed into temporary eclipse behind its own creature, the
Cabinet,[22] an ignominy from which Andrew Jackson rescued it. As "the
People's Choice," as all by himself "one of the three _equal_
departments of government,"[23] as the leader of his party, as the
embodiment of the unity of the country,[24] Jackson stamped upon the
Presidency the outstanding features of its final character, thereby
reviving, in the opinion of Henry Jones Ford, "the oldest political
institution of the race, the elective Kingship."[25] The modern theory
of Presidential power was the contribution primarily of Alexander
Hamilton; the modern conception of the Presidential office was the
contribution primarily of Andrew Jackson and his times.

"THE TERM OF FOUR YEARS"

Formerly the term of four years during which the President "shall hold
office" was reckoned from March 4 of the alternate odd years beginning
with 1789. This came about from the circumstance that under the act of
September 13, 1788, of "the Old Congress," the first Wednesday in March,
which was March 4, 1789, was fixed as the time for commencing
proceedings under the said Constitution. Although as a matter of fact
Washington was not inaugurated until April 30 of that year, by an act
approved March 1, 1792, it was provided that the presidential term
should be reckoned from the fourth day of March next succeeding the date
of election. And so things stood until the adoption of the Twentieth
Amendment by which the terms of the President and Vice President end at
noon on the 20th of January.[26]

THE ANTI-THIRD TERM TRADITION

The prevailing sentiment of the Philadelphia Convention favored the
indefinite eligibility of the President. It was Jefferson who raised the
objection that indefinite eligibility would in fact be for life and
degenerate into an inheritance. Prior to 1940 the idea that no President
should hold for more than two terms was generally thought to be a fixed
tradition, although some quibbles had been raised as to the meaning of
the word "term". President Franklin D. Roosevelt's violation of the
tradition led to the proposal by Congress on March 24, 1947, of an
amendment to the Constitution to rescue the tradition by embodying it in
the Constitutional Document. The proposal became a part of the
Constitution on February 27, 1951, in c