Sunday, March 29, 2015

Old Democracy: The Baffling Elbridge Gerry


The strongest supporter of old democracy at the Constitutional Convention, and the strongest opponent of new democracy was Elbridge Gerry.  This combination is baffling if one does not understand the distinction. To understand Gerry’s position, imagine yourself in a convention drawing up a new constitution for a state or, better yet, an independent country.  Naturally you would arrive convinced of the need for universal suffrage, direct elections to major offices, representation by population and the other new democratic principles we consider essential to liberty.  Imagine further that other delegates started proposing old democratic features in the constitution – very short terms, annual elections for at least the lower house of the legislature, numerous representation pushed as far as it could be born, and a weak executive bound by a council not of his own choosing.  You would consider such proposals folly.  Add to them (in independent country) a proposal to forego standing armies and be defended by a citizen’s militia with officer elected by the rank and file and you would probably consider it madness.  You might take a somewhat undemocratic tone in opposing these features.  If the other delegates agreed that these features were dangerous combined with new democratic features, but proposed that they could be more easily born if the constitution adopted property restrictions on the vote and office holding, had the executive and perhaps the upper house elected by the legislature, and had one house of the legislature apportioned by wealth instead of population, you would denounce the system as a plutocracy and intolerable threat to liberty.   Gerry might be considered the reverse of such viewpoint.

 Gerry arrived from Massachusetts, which had just experienced Shays’ rebellion, an uprising by farmers facing dispossession from debts and taxes.  The experience had clearly shaken Gerry’s confidence in the common people and democracy.  He explained his position clearly.
The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.  The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Masst it had been daily confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions . . . He had he said been too republican heretofore: he was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levilling (sic.) spirit.  
Gerry’s statement that he was still a republican was no mere empty declaration, as it would turn out, but it was not immediately apparently.  He opposed popular election to the House of Representatives, wanting them to be nominated by the people with the final decision made by the state legislatures.  He also opposed the lifting of property restriction on the vote.  In England, he said, the people would lose their liberty from the smallness of their suffrage; in America the danger was from too broad a suffrage.  (Massachusetts required 60 pounds property to vote; the highest requirement in the country).  In the Massachusetts legislature, he said, “Men of indigence, ignorance & baseness, spare no pains, however dirty to carry their point agst men who are superior to such artifices.”    Likewise, he opposed popular election of the Senate, saying that among the people the landed interest (i.e., farmers) formed the majority and would oppress the commercial interest (merchants) unless election went through a “refining” process in the state legislatures.  And he feared having the Constitution ratified by conventions instead of legislatures, apparently regarding the process as too new democratic, saying that the people of Massachusetts had “the wildest ideas of government in the world” such abolishing the state senate and having a unicameral legislature.

 In all these opinions, he showed himself opposed to democracy, but specifically to new democracy.  When old democracy began to come under attack, he took quite a different tone.  When a three-year term was proposed for the House of Representatives, Gerry called for annual elections as the only defense against tyranny.  The people of New England, he said, would never give up annual elections, knowing that in England elections had been moved from every three years to every seven.  “He was as much agst a triennial House as agst a hereditary Executive.”  Gerry’s sudden switch from opposing popular elections to proclaiming himself the champion of the people is enough to give some people whiplash.  And, indeed, from then on Gerry begins sounding more and more like a democrat, but specifically like an old democrat.

 He continued to oppose new democratic positions.  He regarded popular election of the President as “the worst mode,” saying that popularly elected governors who did their duty, like Governor Bowdoin of Massachusetts, who suppressed Shays’ Rebellion, would be turned out for it.  He favored excluding public debtors and pensioners from office, on the grounds that “[I]f property be one object of Government, provisions for securing it cannot be improper”and would exclude all immigrants from office.  He also opposed admitting the Western states on an equal basis, but favored guarantying a permanent majority to the original 13 states or the Western states would oppress commerce.  On the subject of property representation, he had mixed opinions, at one point opposing property representation because it would include slaves, another time saying that both population and wealth should be included in representation.

On the whole, however, once Gerry called for annual elections, his overall tone was as an old democrat championing and showing confidence in the common people.  He opposed a long term for the Senate, saying that no more than one person in a thousand would tolerate any approach to monarchy.  (Presumably he did not include himself as the one in a thousand).  He even said that, although the majority will violate justice when it is in their interest, he did not think there was any such temptation here, and that he believed there was a sufficient sense of justice and virtue.  A far cry from his earlier statement that the people were “daily led into the most baleful measures”!  He also favored enlarging the House of Representatives because the people are “accustomed to & fond of a numerous representation, and will consider their rights better secured by it.” This was an opinion he shared, saying that liberty was not as safe in the hands of eight to a hundred men taken from the whole continent as in the hands of two or three hundred from a single state.  He also opposed allowing the Senate to originate money bills because the House was more immediately the representatives of the people and the people should control the purse strings.  He also had an old democrat’s distrust of standing armies, which he considered dangerous in times of peace (as well as thinking the people were jealous on the subject) and called for a ceiling to the size of army that the United States could keep up in time of peace, personally favoring two or three thousand troops, although he would keep an open mind on the number.  At a bare minimum, he wanted to restrict all military appropriations to one year, instead of the two years the Constitution ultimately allowed.   Gerry was also one of the few members of the Convention to favor a bill of rights.  He began by calling for a prohibition on bills of attainder (bills finding a person guilty of a crime without a trial) and ex post facto laws (laws punishing acts before the law was passed), saying that Congress was dangerous because of its few members.  He also proposed a bill of rights, a guarantee of freedom of the press and especially a guarantee of trial by jury in civil cases (it was already guarantied in all criminal cases). 

The one regard in which Gerry was not a complete old democrat was his eagerness to keep the executive independent of the legislature.  He opposed election of the executive by the legislature (or by the people), favoring election by the state executives.  If the legislature did choose the executive, Gerry would guarantee his independence by giving him a single, very long term of ten, fifteen or even twenty years.  He also favored a single, instead of triple executive, saying that a three-man panel would be like “a general with three heads.”    

            On the other hand, he generally wanted to limit executive power.  The President should be impeachable.  “[T]he maxim should never be adopted here that the chief magistrate could do no wrong.”  He also seconded a motion making “maladministration” as well as bribery or treason grounds for impeachment.  He agreed to an executive veto, but believed that its purpose was for the executive to protect his office, not to allow him to veto bad laws in general. He opposed including judges in the veto for fear it would make the veto too strong and preferred to allow 2/3 of the legislature, rather than ¾ to overrule the veto.  He also favored having the Senate, rather than the executive, appoint judges and was shocked at a proposal to allow the President to declare war alone.   And he favored making legislators ineligible to executive office to prevent executive influence over the legislature by patronage.  Indeed, the prospect horrified him and inspired him to say, “If men will not serve in the Legislature without the prospect of such offices, our situation is deplorable indeed.  If our best Citizens are actuated by such mercenary views, we had better chuse (sic.) a single despot at once.”  At this point, he even said that whatever evils existed in our current government were the fault of those in office, not the people.  Gerry apparently had more confidence in the people than his original remarks seemed to indicate.

 As the Convention abandoned one old democratic principle after another, Gerry became more and more alarmed by it.  At one point, he denounced the Senate as “as compleat (sic.) aristocracy as ever was framed.”  The aristocratic feature of the Senate was not that it was elected by state legislatures instead of the people directly which, as we have seen, Gerry favored.  No one at the time was likely to be alarmed by that feature; after all, the Continental Congress were also elected by state legislatures.  The traits of the Senate that Gerry objected to were the ways in which it differed from the Continental  Congress.  The Senate served six years and the Continental Congress served one; the Senate could not be recalled and the Continental Congress could; each state could have only two Senators while states could have up to seven representatives in the old Congress; and in the old Continental Congress major issues required the concurrence of nine states, while in the Senate a quorum was fourteen, so a mere eight* members could prevail.  “Is it to be presumed that the people will ever agree to such a system?”  Presumably Gerry is saluting the people’s wisdom here.  He also warned, “The People  who have been so lately in arms agst G.B. for their liberties, will not easily give them up.”  

            Gerry ultimately refused to sign the Constitution, citing as his reasons:

            (1)        The duration and reeligibility of the Senate;
            (2)        The power of the House to conceal their journals;
            (3)        The power of Congress over their places of election;
            (4)        The unlimited power of Congress over their pay;
            (5)        Insufficient representation for Massachusetts;
            (6)        Slave representation;
            (7)        Under the power over commerce, monopolies could be established;
            (8)        The Vice President as president of the Senate, which he considered to violate the separation of powers.

But these were minor objections; his biggest objections were Congress’s authority to make all laws “necessary and proper,” its authority to raise money and armies without limit, and to provide for civil trials without juries.  These are all old democratic objections.  Gerry sounded even more democratic when he publicly told the Massachusetts legislature of his reasons for refusing to sign; he gave as his reasons inadequate provision for representation of the people (presumably meaning too few representatives), no security for the right of election (presumably referring to Congress’ authority to regulate its own elections), some powers of the Legislature are ambiguous and some dangerous, too much power to the executive, oppressiveness of the judicial system (perhaps the absence of a guaranty of a jury trial in civil cases?), treaties that can be made by two-thirds of a quorum of the Senate, and the absence of a bill of rights.

            Yet there was also a strong tone of distrust in the people remaining.  His constant invocation of popular opinion may not just have been saluting the people’s wisdom, but also fearing their displeasure.  He warned that in Massachusetts there were two parties, on devoted to democracy “the worst of all political evils” and one in the opposite extreme and feared that controversy over the Constitution could lead to civil war.

            Gerry is a puzzling figure today if one assumes the delegates were debating merely the degree and not the definition of democracy.  His tone of concern for the people’s liberty seems totally at odds with his fear of popular elections.  But if one keeps in mind the distinction between old and new democracy, Gerry makes perfect sense.  It was because Gerry was so staunch an old democrat that he felt threatened by any increase in new democracy.  Or, perhaps more accurately, because Gerry considered old democratic institutions necessary to preserve liberty, yet had been frightened by Shays’ Rebellion and convinced that democracy could be taken too far, that he constantly tried to limit it by resisting new democracy. 

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