Mixed Government: Alexander Hamilton

Of all the advocates of mixed government, Alexander Hamilton presented the most systematic program.  As we have seen, Hamilton presented a systematic program for extreme centralization.  That same proposal was also a system of true mixed government on as near as possible to the British system.  As Hamilton knew very well, his views were extreme and likely to be rejected by the others.  “In his private opinion he had no scruple in declaring . . . that the British Gov’t was the best in the world: and he doubted very much whether any thing short of it would do in America.”  State senates, even the Maryland Senate that served for five years and was chosen by an electoral college instead of the people directly, were too weak to stand against the popular branches of the state legislatures.  He favored something more like the House of Lords. 

Having nothing to hope for by a change, and a sufficient interest by means of their property, in being faithful to the national interest, they form a permanent barriers agst every pernicious innovation, whether attempted on the part of the Crown or of the Commons. 

Nor was he much impressed with state governors:

As to the Executive, it seemed to be admitted that no good one could be established on Republican principles.  Was not this giving up the merits of the question: for can there be a good Gov’t without a good Executive.*

What Hamilton proposed was as near an approximation of the British system of a King, Lords and Commons as could be done without hereditary offices.  The lower house would be elected by the people to three year terms, the upper house would be chosen by electors chosen by the people and serve for good behavior, and the chief executive would be chosen by electors and also serve for good behavior.  “Good behavior” meant for life, unless impeached; he would allow impeachment for misconduct.  The executive would have an absolute veto, absolute power of appointment of the heads of the departments of war, finance and foreign affairs, and the authority to pardon all crimes except treason.  The Senate would have to approve all other appointments and all pardons for treason and would have the authority to declare war and approve treaties. 

Furthermore, Hamilton not only favored an executive and Senate for life, just like in Great Britain, he also defended the British practice of executive influence in the legislature by offering offices to legislators, widely seen as a form of corruption.  He defended “influence,” defined as “a dispensation of those regular honors & emoluments, which produce an attachment to the Gov’t” as an alternative to government by force.  Likewise, he opposed making members of the national legislature ineligible to executive office, saying that influence by the crown through dispensation of offices was not corruption, but “an essential part of the weight which maintained the equilibrium of the Constitution.”  He thus went on record, not only as defending the British system of government, but what were widely seen as the worst corruptions and abuses in the system.

Yet there is another side of Hamilton’s vision of mixed government that needs to be pointed out.  Hamilton favored true mixed government.  This meant that although he wanted the President to be as near as possible to a monarch and the Senate to be as near as possible to House of Lords, he also believed that the lower house should be genuinely democratic.  As he put it, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few.  Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.  Both therefore ought to have power, that each may defend itself agst the other.”  Interestingly, his conceptions of democracy were almost entirely new democratic. 

Hamilton was a firm supporter of direct popular election of the House; when General Pinckney proposed allowing each state to choose how to elect its own Representatives as an attempt to transfer the election from the people to the state legislature.  (Admittedly, this was probably more an expression of nationalism that democracy; Hamilton wanted to limit the power of states).  He was also a strong advocate of representation by population in both houses.  He moved for representation by free population rather than quotas a contribution and favored representation on the same principle in the Senate.  It was in opposition to giving each state equal representation in the Senate that Hamilton made his democratic pronouncement, “[A]s states or a collection of individual me which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or the artificial beings resulting from the composition” and argued that it was no loss of liberty for each citizen of Delaware to have an equal vote to a citizen of Pennsylvania.  Giving equal representation to states of unequal population “shocks too much the ideas of Justice, and every human feeling.”  Hamilton was absent when the delegates debated who should be allowed to vote.  He did make a short speech on suffrage, saying that different states had different standards, some states allowing it where others did not, some having different qualifications to vote for different branches of the legislature and all disqualifying some people altogether because they lacked sufficient property.  Hamilton’s point is not altogether clear, but he appears to have been accepting each state’s right to set its own voting qualification.  As we have seen, this was the new democratic position at the Convention; the undemocratic position being to set federal restrictions on the vote.  Hamilton was also absent during debates on property qualifications for office, but he took the “liberal” position on immigrants.  Himself an immigrant from the Caribbean, he opposed requiring any number of years’ citizenship to hold office; citizenship should be sufficient since Congress could set any number of years’ residence to qualify for citizenship. 

Hamilton took a decidedly un-old democratic position on the term of the House; he favored three years, saying that “there ought to be neither too much nor too little dependence, on the popular spirit,” and that if elections were too frequent people lost interest in them.  On the other hand, he supported at least one old democratic principle; he favored enlarging the House from 65 members “with great earnestness and anxiety” or the popular branch of the government would be on so narrow a scale as to be dangerous to liberty.  He also appeared to believe that enlarging the House would prevent improper combinations between the President and Senate.

Hamilton was absent from the Convention between June 29 and August 13.  During that time, he developed his plan in greater detail, which, although he did not discuss in the Convention, he did privately show to Madison.  His more detailed version of the plan added a number of democratic features, old and new.  Realizing that his proposal to give the national legislature authority to pass “all laws whatsoever,” he included at least a partial bill of rights in his plan.  Since his Senate would serve for life and be almost a House of Lords, he gave the lower house sole authority to initiate money bills.  He would assign 100 members to the House and 40 to the Senate (both of which would reassure people who feared too small a legislature) and have both apportioned by population.  No property qualifications to office were specified.  Most significantly, however, were the qualifications he proposed for voting.  He would allow all free males over 21 to vote for the House, with no requirements for race, property or even taxpaying, a broader suffrage than even Pennsylvania.  He would require land ownership to vote for Senatorial electors and fairly stiff property requirements to vote for Presidential electors.**  His lower house, in other words, is elected by universal manhood suffrage, proportional to population, large enough to be on a broad base, and with sole authority to originate money bills.  Yet it might not seem as democratic to his contemporaries as it does to us because of that old bugaboo, three-year terms.

Hamilton is generally considered an opponent of democracy and, as we have seen, this reputation is largely accurate.  But this reputation is, perhaps, exaggerated by his opponents who opposed not only his aristocratic outlook, but also his nationalism, and assumed that every increase in centralization could only mean oppression.  Hamilton, on the other hand, recognized the creative and, yes, democratic possibilities of an increase in centralization.

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*Compare this with Hamilton’s comment for public consumption in Federalist Paper No. 70.. “There is an idea which is not without its advocates, that a vigorous executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. The enlightened well-wishers to this species of government must at least hope that the supposition is destitute of foundation; since the can never admit its truth, without at the same time admitting the condemnation of their own principles. Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Compare also to John Lansing's quote from his own notes, "It is admitted that you cannot have a good executive upon a democratic plan."

**Hamilton: Writing, Copyright 1993 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, New York, pp. 1062-1063.

Guess Who Favored a Federal Expansion in Suffrage (Hint: This is a Trick Question)

Here I must acknowledge a debt to Alexander Keyssar's The Right to Vote, a history the right to vote and its restrictions throughout our country's history.  On page 23 he discusses the right to vote as it came up during the Constitutional Convention.  Gouverneur Morris proposed to limit the vote to freeholders.  In this he met strong opposition from many delegates who said that non-freeholders were allowed to vote in many state elections and would be angered at being denied a vote in federal elections.  The proposal was defeated and instead the rule was set that whoever could vote in the least restrictive elections in a state could also vote for the House of Representatives.  In other words, the federal government would restrict the vote no further than the states.  At the same time, Keyssar points out, no one proposed a suffrage broader than the states.

Keyssar attributes this outcome to the absence of some of the revolution's most democratic leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine.  We can make short work of Jefferson and Henry.  Both men were southern slave holders.  They feared federal power in general, and a federal expansion of the vote in particular lest it give greater power to black people (slave or free).  So much for the Virginians.  Samuel Adams would have had no such fear, but he shared the basic Anti-Federalist viewpoint that all expansion of federal power was inherently oppressive.  He thus seems like an unlikely candidate to press for a federal broadening of the suffrage.  That leaves Thomas Paine as one of those rare leaders of the day who was both a nationalist and a democrat, favoring both a stronger and a more democratic federal government.  He also came out against the Constitution.  (Cannot find link, alas!)  However, his main objections were to a single executive and a six-year Senate.  If he had any objections to the Constitution leaving in place existing restrictions on the vote, he did not say so.

The only other real democratic nationalist of the day was present at the Convention.  I refer, of course, to Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin opposed the restriction of the vote to freeholders and appears to have been the only one at the Convention to recognize that non-property holders nonetheless had legitimate interests and needed the means to protect them.  But not even Franklin who, in addition to being a democratic nationalist, showed a utopian tendency lacking in any other delegate, never proposed a federally-mandated expansion in suffrage.

Reading over Bernard Bailyn's collection of some 2000 pages of debate on ratification,* not once does anyone propose anything so radical as a federal expansion in the right to vote, although the issue was a hotly contested one at the state level.  Yet, although I have not seen any evidence that anyone proposed anything so radical in public debate, at least one person appears to have privately favored such a thing -- ALEXANDER HAMILTON!

The next post will explore how so odd a result could have come about.

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*The largest compilation of debate on the Constitution runs to some 50,000 pages, making Bailyn's collection a mere 4% of what is extant.  However, the same talking points get repeated often enough to give the impression that it accurately shows the mainstream views at the time, and a few oddball ones as well.