The veto power discussed in Federalist No. 73 does not appear in Article II, the “executive article,” as it’s sometimes called–but instead in the description of the legislative process in Article I, section 7. This fact should keep us mindful of the whole idea of checks and balances discussed in Nos. 47 and 48, namely that it involves the “partial agency” of one branch in the business of another. Thus the veto is not, strictly speaking, an executive power, but a legislative power lodged in executive hands.

In Federalist No. 74, Hamilton begins a rapid review, for the remaining essays on the presidency, of the powers that are truly executive, and that appear in Article II of the Constitution. Rapid review, indeed: Hamilton devotes a single paragraph to the clause making the president the “commander in chief” of the armed forces, remarking that its “propriety . . . is so evident in itself” that “little need be said to explain or enforce it. Notwithstanding his brevity (and he had alluded to the war power in No. 70, after all), Hamilton says enough to send the presidential minimalists packing:

Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand. The direction of war implies the direction of the common strength; and the power of directing and employing the common strength, forms an usual and essential part in the definition of the executive authority.

The president is not merely–in fact he is not at all–a field commander executing the orders of a Congress that declares or authorizes war. He is responsible for “the direction of war,” the strategic decisions about the use of the nation’s “common strength” in defense of the whole community’s survival and security.

Most of No. 74, a very short essay, is taken up with a discussion of the power to pardon. The only objection to this power that Hamilton confronts is a complaint that it extends even to the crime of treason. How can it be proper for a president to extend the hand of mercy to traitors? With his mind still on the president’s wartime responsibilities, Hamilton says that “the principal argument . . . is this; in seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a well timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth,” and the timing may be everything. As always, Hamilton opposes any carving out of exceptions to the full panoply of power that a government may need to preserve itself and the community for which it is responsible (see No. 23).

And a note may be in order to the word historians out there. Hamilton’s use of the noun “insurgent” here in 1788 appears to be earlier than all but one of the uses of it recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But Alexander Hamilton was ahead of his time in so many things.

(For explanation of this recurring feature, see here.)