The anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution worried the office of the presidency was too powerful.
“To be the fountain of all honors in the United States,” An Old Whig wrote in December 1787, “is in reality to be a king.”
The anti-federalists were certain that at some point a man of low character would take office and twist the government to his own narrow ends. “He will spare no artifice, no address and no exertions to increase the powers and importance of it,” argued The Federal Farmer. “The servile supporters of his wishes will be placed in all offices, and tools constantly employed to aid his views and sound his praise.”
The anti-federalists especially feared that the president would use his pardon power to corrupt the nation. “The unrestrained power of granting pardons,” Cato wrote in November 1787, “may be used to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt.” A president possessed of enough ambition, Cato went on, “has power and time sufficient to ruin his country.”
The anti-federalists, like their Federalist counterparts, drew their examples from both distant history and recent experience. The tyrant, as they imagined him, was both a figure of antiquity — a man, as Aristotle wrote, with “no regard to the common good, except for his own advantage” — and their former king, “A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.”