Madison and Jefferson (30 page)

The Virginian was abnormally contentious when he openly accused the small states of endangering the Union. Now in the minority, all he could do to turn the tide was to paint as bleak a picture as he could conjure and hope it reached the doubters. He made a dire prediction: republican liberty would yield to militarism. Left to their own devices, the disunited states would resort to standing armies and foreign alliances; they would form “partial confederacies,” constantly at war with one another. All of this would occur, he claimed, unless the small states accepted their vulnerability and saw that they were in no position to make demands.
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As provocative as Madison’s approach already was, he stirred up a hornets’ nest when he shifted the terms of debate to the volatile subject of North-South differences. In one day’s session at the end of June he declared that regionalism actually mattered more than the sizes of states. The three largest states were, he insisted, “as dissimilar as any three other states in the Union.” They were more prone to “rivalships” than to “coalitions,” because of slavery.

He had touched the third rail of American politics by conceding that the most fundamental socioeconomic distinctions in the country lay between North and South, “principally from the effects of their having or not having
slaves.” Upon acknowledging the central role of slavery, he was able to propose an unusual new configuration: apportionment in the lower house based on free inhabitants; apportionment in the upper house based on free inhabitants plus three-fifths of the slave population. If proportional representation in the Senate had passed on the strength of this reasoning, Virginia’s control of the Senate would have been ensured. But once again Madison’s argument fell on deaf ears.
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Out of the deadlock emerged the Connecticut compromise, granting proportional representation in the House. To appease the southern delegates, it counted three slaves to every five free inhabitants in constituting that body. It also established, once and for all, equal representation in the Senate. When a committee was formed to determine the number of seats in the House, the large-state advantage could not be missed: the three largest states held 43 percent of the seats. Sherman of Connecticut protested, and another committee was organized, which crunched the numbers again and donated a few more seats to the smaller states and New England.

Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania was horrified by what was happening. Trusting in a chosen few more than in an expanding union, he wanted to restrict the number of seats granted to new states. He saw danger in making population, instead of wealth, the standard for representation in the House, fearing this would allow the western states eventually to overpower the Atlantic states. Elbridge Gerry imagined that empowered western legislators would conspire to “drain our wealth into the Western country.” He believed, as well, that the West would be flooded with foreigners.
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Gouverneur Morris was a famously captivating speaker. He would come up with the preamble of the Constitution, “We the People.” As sardonic as he was charming, he exuded a robust self-confidence in spite of a crippling calamity: he had been one-legged since 1780, when in a freak accident his own horse-drawn chaise had run him over, and his doctor saw amputation as the only option. Though he could be reckless with language, irreverent, and often abrasive, Morris was an attention-grabber. As an unrepentant elitist, he contended that “remote wilderness” was not the “proper school of political talents,” and that westerners were pretty much all backward. He was just as perturbed that the Constitution would protect slavery, and that slave-owning southerners were to be rewarded with added seats in Congress. He would abide by the compromise but continue to make himself heard.
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Madison, Mason, and Randolph all responded to Morris’s geographical
absolutism by defending the principle of treating all new states as equals. Madison, thoroughly exasperated by this time, scolded Morris for his tendency to measure the human character “by the points of the compass.” Westward migration, he contended, could not be stopped, and it was only natural for people to move into less populous places where land was cheaper. True, the West was bound to grow at a rapid rate, as Spain yielded to America’s demands and the Mississippi opened up. But the Atlantic states, north as well as south, Madison argued, would all reap tremendous economic benefits by supplying commercial goods to the western states. It was the same cause he had taken up in Congress in years past, and he kept on doing so for one simple reason: it was in the best interest of Virginia.
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North and South could not agree on the apportionment of representatives in Congress. Each section feared that the other was to gain the upper hand. It was Pennsylvania’s James Wilson who finally provided the compromise solution in this instance, proposing that population-based representation also be tied to taxation and to a motion Congress had considered in 1783, which recognized the three-fifths principle. Northerners would be less offended if it appeared that counting southern slaves was a quid pro quo for taxing them. Wilson’s maneuver was less a concession than a performance, though. No one expected to realize federal tax revenues from slaves after the new government was established.
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The rancor of some debates, especially over slavery and the West, demonstrated the instability of Madison’s original coalition. Gouverneur Morris went so far as to accuse southerners of being unwilling to settle for anything less than a majority in Congress. He peered into the future and saw them conspiring with westerners to stage a war with Spain in order to secure the Mississippi. Northerners would be spilling blood in needless wars, just to satisfy the land-hungry South. He was not far off.
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Madison could not get his mind off proportional representation in the Senate and made one last attempt to salvage his plan. On July 14 he backed a motion presented by Charles Pinckney that would have recalibrated the system: no state, no matter how small, would be assigned any less than
one-fifth
the number of representatives of the most populous state. It was too little too late. On the sixteenth the convention voted to accept the Connecticut compromise—proportional representation in the House (counting slaves as three-fifths of a citizen for the purpose of apportioning seats), and equal representation in the Senate. Deeply troubled, Edmund Randolph asked for an immediate adjournment. Delegates from the large states met in private but failed to reach a consensus. Their coalition had
dissolved. A modified version of the absolute negative contained in the Virginia Plan was decisively voted down the next day.
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After his study of constitutions, after all of his outlinings of a grand plan, and after a month and a half of debate, James Madison had witnessed the rejection of virtually every one of his ideas. The council of revision was the first to go. His absolute negative was quashed and its modified cousin faded away, as proportional representation in the Senate fell by the wayside. The Senate, his repository of “virtue & wisdom,” was now his worst nightmare: a hapless pawn of the state legislatures.

If Madison won over few of his peers, it was not because his arguments were all unappealing—he had prominent defenders. But fears among the states which he had not prepared for ultimately redirected the course of debate. In a private letter to a friend, Washington, who sat silently through most of the proceedings, expressed his despair over the sectional sparring. Benjamin Franklin, though hardly a man of faith, put it best on June 28, when he proposed that each subsequent day of the convention should begin with a prayer. If his colleagues paused for a moment to give over their thoughts to a higher power, they might then, he said, rise above their “little partial local interests” and avoid behaving like “the Builders of Babel.” Regional bias had blinded delegates to the greater good.
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After his vision of a Senate comprised of an intellectual elite went down in flames, one might have expected Madison to pack his bags and leave the convention. Others did. But realizing that he would have to work with what he was given, he regrouped. For the remainder of the convention, he did everything possible to
reduce
the power of the Senate, looking to other branches to take on the responsibilities he had earlier assigned to the upper house.

He still faced an uphill battle. The tedium of the hot summer months brought a discernible impatience among the delegates. Speeches were shorter, and so were Madison’s notes. An August 6 report of the Committee of Detail gave the Senate sole authority to select Supreme Court judges and U.S. ambassadors, to make treaties, and to resolve disputes between states. If the president died or had to be removed for some reason, the president of the Senate took his place. Meanwhile, in addition to the direct appointment of U.S. senators, state legislatures were to have new tools at
their disposal: they could regulate the time and place of elections, determine districts, and set voter qualifications for House elections. Madison worried about abuses that were bound to occur if states had an uncontrolled right over election planning. They could corrupt the process by showing favor to one or another candidate. Equally galling to him, the Committee of Detail placed within the states’ grasp one very tight purse string: control over congressmen’s compensation.

Many besides Madison felt that after denying the Senate the power to police the states, the convention had gone too far in the other direction. So when the relentless Virginia delegate addressed these details, he obtained minor successes. He faced scant opposition when he motioned to reject the regulation of congressional elections by state legislatures. Even Roger Sherman, who agreed with Madison on little, concurred. And control over compensation of the officers of government was returned to Congress with virtually no protest.
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Madison’s strongest statement in the midsummer debates came after Oliver Ellsworth motioned to empower the state legislatures to approve the federal Constitution, rather than submit it to special ratifying conventions. Here, dismissing the legislatures as “incompetent” to weigh the issues at hand, Madison developed his theory of constitution writing:
Only a ratifying convention gave legitimacy to any new government wherein new powers were to be based on the supremacy of the laws.
This point was crucial to him. He felt that “the people,” not the states, must found the government. Popular ratifying conventions, like proportional representation, called forth the majority will. States, by definition, lacked a national focus. Their interests were naturally circumscribed, and they would only interfere with the duties, encroach on the powers, and clog the operations of the national government.
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After losing the Senate to the states, he argued that the office of the president was now the principal guardian of national interests. In appointing judges, for instance, “the Executive Magistrate would be considered a national officer, acting for and equally sympathizing with every part of the United States.” Madison held that the president would transcend the “selfish motives” and partiality of the Senate, whose loyalties were divided between state and nation.
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To make things right, some kind of popular authority had to be employed in choosing the president. Early in the convention James Wilson had been the first to bring up the idea of electors, but his proposal was dismissed without much debate. It was revived in late July, when Madison recognized
that temporarily chosen electors were less likely to corrupt the process than if the president were named by Congress directly. He would have preferred direct election of the president by the people at large—that is, all freemen in the United States without regard to state boundaries and without filtering their vote through any intermediate body. But he also knew that this method would favor the northern states, where the right of suffrage was, as he put it, “more diffusive.” The South’s three-fifths advantage would be eliminated in the direct election of the president, because the unfree cast no ballots.
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Little by little Madison and his allies chipped away at opposing arguments and made the idea of
some form
of popular election acceptable. Hugh Williamson of North Carolina and Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania came up with the solution whereby each elector would choose two candidates, one of whom could not be from his home state. This would oblige everyone to settle on a nationally respected figure. Madison endorsed this device, seeing its potential to defeat local prejudice. As he wryly (and somewhat cynically) put it, “The second best man in this case would probably be the first.”
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The delegates also moved away from the proposal made by the Committee of Detail that would have had the president serve one seven-year term. Delegates had already toyed with the idea of extending that term to eleven, fifteen, or even twenty years. Gouverneur Morris warned that this was a recipe for creating a “despot of America,” who would have the armed forces behind him if he should refuse to quit office. The delegates ultimately opted for a short presidential term and reelection.
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As delegates began arguing in favor of making the president eligible for reelection, Madison was even more convinced that Congress ought to be constrained from direct involvement in presidential politics. Every reelection contest would “agitate & divide” both houses, he said, and create a situation in which the candidate would be tempted to “intrigue” with the legislature. He would derive appointment not from the people but from the “predominant faction.” Or as Gouverneur Morris concisely put it: “Make him too weak: The Legislature will usurp his powers. Make him too strong: He will usurp the Legislature.”
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In September the delegates finally agreed to have the president serve a four-year term, with the possibility for continual reelection. He would be chosen by electors under rules decided by each of the state legislatures. This could include direct election by the people if the state so chose. The number of electors would be determined by the total number of representatives
in Congress; each elector would vote for two candidates, one not from his state. If no candidate had a majority, the Senate would choose the president from the five top vote-getters.
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