James Wilson: The Outstanding New Democrat

The outstanding advocate of new democracy at the Constitutional Convention, many these days would say the only true new democrat, was James Wilson.  Wilson supported new democracy on almost all points, sometimes even going beyond the Constitution we have today. 

He began by favoring popular election of the House, saying that he wanted to raise a high federal “pyramid,” and for that reason needed a broad base.  He also favored popular election to minimize the influence of states.  Government should possess not only the force, but the mind or sense of the people, and, indeed, representation was only necessary because it was impossible for the people to act directly as a legislature; a legislature should therefore be “the most exact transcript of the whole Society.”  Popular election of the House was the “foundation of the fabric” of the new government.  He also favored popular election of the Senate, the only delegate at the convention to do so, instead of election either by state legislatures or by the lower house.  In accordance with new democratic principles, favored dividing the states into districts of roughly equal population.  Election by state legislatures would introduce too many local interests and prejudices compared to election by the people in large districts.  If direct popular election was not practical, he proposed election of senators by special electors chosen for that purpose.  When the other delegates agreed on election by state legislatures, he opposed having state executives filling up unexpected vacancies.  Since many state executives were not chosen by the people, allowing them to fill up vacancies in the Senate removed appointment too far from the people. 

As for election of the executive, Wilson said he was “almost unwilling to declare the mode which he wished to take place, being apprehensive that it might appear chimerical,” but he wanted that, too, to be done by the people.  Why should it be “chimerical” (fanciful) for the President to be elected by the people directly?  Keep in mind that at the time of the Constitutional Convention, no one anticipated the two party system, or foresaw that the election of the President would be anything as simple as a choice between two candidates.  Any prominent figure would be a candidate, and under those circumstances direct popular election would be a hopelessly confusing hodgepodge.  Furthermore, the whole concept of tabulating votes from numerous electoral districts was a fairly new one at the time and not well established.  Considering direct popular election of the executive impractical, he proposed election by special electors chosen by the people.  Throughout the Convention, Wilson continued to call for popular election of the executive as a matter of principle, or at least for some alternative to election by the national legislature, which he believed would lead to intrigue and conspiracy.  As a desperate last resort, he was even willing to have fifteen members of the legislature chosen by lot to immediately adjourn and choose a President.  He made clear that he did not like this mode of election and preferred election by the people, but anything was better than election by the national legislature.

Wilson took the new democratic position on other positions as well. He opposed restricting the vote to freeholders, saying that people who were not freeholders might be allowed to vote in state elections but not national elections and would resent it.  He would also have given anyone qualified to vote for the legislature to vote for presidential electors as well.  Although he expressed his opposition to federal restrictions on the vote simply because it would be unpopular rather than on the merits, but he also appears to have opposed such restrictions on the merits, saying that he was, “agst abridging the right of election in any shape.  It was the same thing whether this were done by disqualifying the objects of the choice, or the persons chusing.”  Wilson also opposed most restrictions on who could hold office.  At times, he went even farther than we have gone today, as he opposed requiring members of the House to be over 25 (a provision eventually adopted), opposing disqualifying people with unsettled public accounts from office], and proposing that they drop a section allowing Congress to set property qualifications for members.*  When the issue immigrants came up, and how many years’ citizenship should be required to hold office, I was confident that I knew Wilson well enough to predict that he would favor an openness to immigrants, as, indeed he did.  What I did not foresee was how strongly he felt on the subject or the reason – he himself was an immigrant (from Scotland), so the matter had personal importance to him.  Besides, requiring too long a residence was “illiberal” and might exclude worthy immigrants.  He favored four instead of seven years’ citizenship for the House, seven instead of nine years’ citizenship for the Senate and the eligibility of all immigrants currently naturalized to office.  As an alternative he supported a proposal by Alexander Hamilton (another immigrant) simply to allow citizenship because Congress could require any number of years’ residence to become a citizen.

Finally, Wilson also took the new democratic position on representation by population and equal representation for the west.  In this regard, too, as we have seen, he pushed the new democracy farther than we have today in pushing for making the Senate proportional to population, favoring one Senator for every 100,000 people, and considering that to be essential to the principle of majority rule.  Representation should be by population rather than by wealth, partly because wealth was impractical to measure and numbers were the best measure of wealth.  Besides:

He could not agree that property was the sole or the primary object of Govern’t & society.  The cultivation & improvement of the human mind was the most noble object.  With respect to this and other personal rights, numbers were surely the natural & precise measure of Representation.  And with respect to property, they could not very much from the precise measure. 

This made Wilson the only delegate to actually dispute that property was the primary object of government, or to distinguish between personal rights and property.  As for the west, he said that since all men everywhere had equal rights and are equally entitled to confidence, the majority should rule wherever it might be.  If the Atlantic states denied the western states their fair share of representation, then just as the Atlantic states had rebelled against their colonial status, the west would rebel against its semi-colonial status.  On only one issue did Wilson differ from a perfect new democratic record.  When the Virginians and some others were calling for specific rule of regular reapportionment, Wilson said he had no object to leaving the legislature at liberty.

Impressive as Wilson’s record is in support of new democratic principles, he is almost as consistent in his rejection of old democracy.  He accepted a few old democratic ideas, favoring annual elections to the House to ensure “effectual representation of the people at large” and a three-year term for the executive.  With regard to a bill of rights, he opppose a prohibition on ex post facto laws, apparently fearing they would be too difficult to define and apparently saw not need ever to allow the suspension of habeas corpus, believing that it would be sufficient if judges were allowed to deny bail.  On the other hand, he never spoke in favor of a bill of rights, and during the ratification debates he was the first to offer what became the standard argument against a bill of rights – since the federal government had only the powers specifically given to it, there was no need to identify what powers it did not have.

In all other regards, Wilson opposed old democracy, sometimes even going too far by today’s standards.  He favored a nine-year term for the Senate, saying that the long term would give sufficient stability and wisdom to allow it to conduct foreign affairs.  Having one-third of the Senate up for election every three years would prevent them from serving for life or becoming hereditary.  He never worried that representation was too small to properly know that interests and wishes or its constituents; quite the contrary, he argued that large districts were the best way to avoid corruption and intrigue.  He saw no reason to give the House the sole authority to originate money bills, since both houses would ultimately have to approve them.  Nor did he see any reason to make legislators ineligible to executive office; the desire for such offices was an incentive to excel and an honorable form of ambition, not a dishonest or corrupt one.  Corruption could be prevented by making legislators ineligible to offices they create and by excluding them from any role in appointment to offices.

 But above all, Wilson opposed old democracy in favoring executive power.  Indeed, he considered the greatest risk of tyranny under a republic to be from excessive power and a strong executive as an essential protection for legislative tyranny.  He was the first to propose as single executive, a proposal controversial enough to lead to a “considerable pause” and opposed an executive counsel which he said “oftener serves to cover, than prevent malpractices,” although he did believe the executive should be impeachable, but not removable upon the request of the majority of state legislatures.  He even favored an absolute executive veto which he believed would be rarely used, the mere threat of a veto being sufficient to prevent improper laws, although he would add the federal judiciary to the veto.  He also favored executive appointment of judges, preferably without requiring the advice and consent of the Senate.  Indeed, Wilson appears to have favored giving the President complete, unilateral authority in appointments, with no check except the knowledge that he would be solely responsible for bad appointments, and impeachment of any truly scandalous appointees.  Indeed, he considered giving the Senate a role in appointments to be giving an improper executive power to the legislature and preferred a council of appointment, although he believed its advice should not be binding on the President.

Clearly Wilson was a democrat, indeed, to us he may appear the only true democrat in the Convention.  Yet Wilson belonged to the “conservative” party in Pennsylvania politics, which opposed Pennsylvania’s extreme old democratic constitution.  To much of the Pennsylvania “left,” the bare fact that Wilson supported the Constitution was reason enough to damn it as undemocratic.**  Wilson was a puzzling figure to his contemporaries, just as Gerry is a puzzling figure to us.  Just as Gerry’s tone sounds democratic, yet his positions seem undemocratic to us because we are used to thinking in new democratic terms, Wilson’s contemporaries could not recognize him as a genuine democrat because they were used to defining democracy in old democratic terms.

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*On the other hand, one of the reasons he gave for opposing such restrictions in the Constitution or in the hands of Congress was that it would exclude anyone else from placing restrictions on who could serve in Congress.

**Cf An Officer in the Late Continental Army:   "Mr. W[ilson] is a man of sense, learning and exten—sive information; unfortunately for him he has never sought the more solid fame of patriotism. . . . The whole tenor of his political conduct has always been strongly tainted with the spirit of high aristocracy;West or Peale, or the pen of a Valerius.And yet that speech, weak and insidious as it is, is the only attempt that has been made to support by argument that political monster THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION."  One wonders what Wilson’s opponents would have said if they had known his actual role in the convention.

Old Democrats: Hugh Williamson of North Carolina

Another leading but not total old democrat with some openness to new democracy was Hugh Williamson.  His main departure from old democratic principles was that he lacked the New Englanders’ fetish with very frequent elections.  He did not speak up on length of term for the House and favored a six year term for the Senate over seven years simply because six years were easier to stagger at two-year intervals.  In particular, he did not favor a very short term for the executive.  He proposed a six-year term, saying that too frequent elections were too expensive and discouraged the best characters. With a limit to a single term, he would even agree to ten or twelve years.  When the other delegates agreed to a four-year term, Williamson preferred six or seven years.

Otherwise, Williamson was generally an across-the-board old democrat, especially on the issues that did not greatly interest Sherman.  He spoke three times on behalf of enlarging the House.  He also strongly opposed allowing the Senate to originate money bills, saying that requiring someone in the House to propose them would allow the people to mark him.  He said that he agreed to equality in the Senate only in exchange for requiring the House to originate money bills,* seconded a motion forbidding the Senate from altering any bill for raising revenue, and urged people who considered the issue unimportant to “indulge” ones who did consider it important, adding that he could not agree to give the Senate any additional powers if it could originate money bills.  Closely related, in Williamson’s mind, was the issue of ineligibility to office.  At a time when the Senate was allowed to originate money bills, he likened it to a House of Lords that could originate money bills and said that ending ineligibility to office would allow legislators to cut out offices for each other.  “Bad as the Constitution has been made by expunging the restriction on the Senate concerning money bills, he did not make it worse by expunging the present Section [on ineligibility].”  Yet he later seconded a motion to make legislators ineligible only to offices they create.  

His record on a variety of other measures is mixed.  He did not support did not  a ceiling on the size of the army, saying that restrictions on the length of appropriations was the best safeguard and favored a ban on ex post facto laws and a guarantee of trial by jury in civil cases.

 With regard to the executive, Williamson favored election by the national legislature.  He considered the difference between election by the legislature and by the people to be like the difference between appointment by lot and by choice.  The people would not know eminent characters outside of their states and the winner would come from the largest state.  The independence of the executive could be protected by allowing him only one term.  If election was to be by the people, he favored requiring everyone to vote for three candidates because at least some of the three would be from another state.  Although he ultimately agreed to the Electoral College, he considered it too "aristocratic" for the Senate to break electoral deadlocks.  Williamson also generally seemed to distrust executive power.  He preferred a three-man executive to one-man, saying that different sections of the country had different interests that needed to be represented, and besides, a single executive would be too much like a king, and would try to remain in office for life and pass the office on to his children.  He also favored making the executive impeachable for “mal-practice or neglect of duty.” He originally opposed the executive veto, preferring to require a two-thirds vote of the legislature on all laws, although he later became reconciled to an executive veto and for a time even favored requiring a three-quarters vote to override a veto, although he later changed his mind back to two-thirds to avoid giving the President too much power.

            On new democratic issues, Williamson had a more mixed record.  He opposed restricting the vote to freeholders.  The national legislature should not be allowed to set its own qualifications, or they might limit membership to a “particular description” of men, such as lawyers, but he favored requiring nine, rather than seven, years’ citizenship to serve in the Senate.  He was also more ambivalent toward the West than Sherman.  He favored representation by population rather than by wealth, except for the Western states, which he would represent on an equal basis only if their property was equal to the Atlantic states.  He firmly favored requiring Congress to make periodic reapportionments, saying that he “was for making it the duty of the Legislature to do what was right & not leaving it at liberty to do or not do it.”  Yet he distrusted the West, saying that western states would be poor and unable to pay their share and should therefore be limited in power or they would try to shift too much of the tax burden onto commerce.  Williamson, by the way, though he represented North Carolina, was a native of Pennsylvania, who lived for some time in New England and ended his life in New York, and a merchant by trade.  He may therefore have been closer to the views of the commercial elite on the Western states than to the views of most of his follow Southerners.

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*Interestingly enough, when the proposal was originally made, Williamson dismissed requiring money bills to originate with the House as insignificant, saying that it would be better to require money bills to originate in the Senate, which would be more closely watched.

Old Democrats: Roger Sherman of Connecticu

Roger Sherman (who Madison sometimes spells "Sharman") was another leading old democrat, although not so completely across-the-board as Gerry, and also more open to at least some new democratic ideas, especially with regard to the western states.  

He opened by opposing one important new democratic principle; he wanted election to the House of Representative to be by state legislatures instead of by the people, with the comment, “The people . . . immediately should have as little to do as may be about the Government.  They want [lack] information and are constantly liable to be misled.”   His concern was not just distrust of the people, but fear for the future of states, which he believed would be weakened if not allowed to participate in the new government.  He also favored election of the Senate by state legislatures.  At the same time, he acted as an old democrat, calling for the House to serve annual terms, since “Representatives ought to return home and mix with the people.  By remaining at the seat of Gov’t they would acquire habits of the place which might differ from those of their Constituents.”  Given that it was also around the same time that Sherman was arguing that there was no need for “another” branch of the legislature, to be elected by the people, it is clear that there was nothing contradictory or paradoxical in Sherman’s position.  He favored a one-house legislature, elected to one-year terms by the state legislatures, with each state having an equal vote, in other words, he wanted to keep the same system as the articles of Confederation.  Yet, just as Sherman was one of the leading proponents of the Great Compromise, he also acceeded to popular election of the House and two-year terms so readily as to leave one wondering if he was showing statesmanship or spinelessness.

Sherman also opposed long terms for the Senate, regarding either seven years or nine as too long, although he would agree to four, five or six years.  It was in response to a proposal for a nine-year term that Sherman made his comment that, “Frequent elections are necessary to preserve the good behavior of rulers,” and adding that if rulers behaved well, they would be reelected and the government would be stable.  Connecticut was stable, and look how frequent elections were there!   He favored making members of the national legislature ineligible to executive offices as a source of corruption and undue executive influence.  He also showed at least some distrust of standing armies, with the comment that “He should himself he said like a reasonable restriction on the number and continuance of an army in time of peace.”  Yet he considered it safe to limit military appropriations to two years instead of one, since a legislature serving two-year terms might only meet every two years.  At the same time he considered “frequent” meetings of the legislature essential to liberty, presumably to keep the executive from becoming too powerful.

But above all else, Sherman showed himself an old democrat in his fear of executive power.  He went further than any other delegate in wishing to subordinate the executive to the legislature:  

MR. SHERMAN was for the appointment by the Legislature, and for making him [the chief executive] absolutely dependent on that body, as it ws the will  of that which was to be executed.  An independence of the Executive on the supreme Legislature, was in his opinion the very essence of tyranny if there was any such thing.*

Nor did Sherman originally even see the reason to specify how many members the chief executive should have.  Since the executive was “nothing more than an institution for carrying out the will of the Legislature,” the legislature should have the discretion to decide how many members there would be.  When James Wilson pointed out that all states had a single executive, Sherman agreed that a single executive was, after all, the proper choice, but that, just as every state had an executive council, and the national executive should have a council as well.  He favored a three-year term for the executive, with indefinite re-eligibility and giving the legislature authority to remove the executive at will.  He strongly opposed an executive for “good behavior,” saying that being reeligible was the best guaranty of the executive’s good behavior.  Significantly, almost everyone else at the Convention believed that if the executive were to be elected by the legislature, then he should be ineligible to a second term to ensure his independence from the legislature.  Although Sherman gave as his reason for making the President reeligible that we should not get rid of the best man for the job.  It seems likely that Sherman wanted to make the President reeligible in order to destroy his independence from the legislature.  He also opposed or at least a absolute veto.  “No one man could be found so far above all the rest in wisdom.”  He also opposed involving judges in the veto and opposed requiring the President to sign “every order, resolution or vote” except for votes to spend money.  He definitely preferred a two-third vote to a three-quarters to override a veto:

[T]he States would not like to see so small a minority and the President, prevailing over the general voice.  In making laws regard should be had to the sense of the people, who are to be bound by them, and it was  more probable that a single man should mistake or betray this sense then the Legislature. 

Sherman also wanted the legislature, not the executive to appoint judges, feared allowing the President to appoint military officers lest he use them to create a military dictatorship, and favored requiring the consent of the Senate for the President to issue pardons, as well as having the legislature instead of the executive appoint the treasurer.

            Unlike Gerry, however, Sherman did not support all old democratic principles.  He saw no need to increase the size of the House, preferring 50 to 65 members.  He also saw no need to prohibit the Senate from originating money bills, saying that the Senate was not a House of Lords, and that the Connecticut Senate to originate money bills without harm.  He saw no need for a bill of rights, regarding the state bills of rights as sufficient, no need to guaranty freedom of the press, since the power of Congress did not reach the press, and no need to forbid religious tests for office holding. 

            Sherman had mixed opinions on new democracy.  As we have seen, he opposed popular election of the House, Senate, or President.  He also opposed making currently naturalized foreigners eligible to federal offices, saying that it was the states, not the federal government, that had offered them citizenship.  On the other hand, he held a new democratic opinion toward the western states.  To the suggestion that the western states should not be represented on the same scale as the Atlantic states, Sherman said that the number of people was the proper basis for representation, and that if representation was to be by wealth, it would be measured by population.  Sherman favored treating the western states as equals at least in part because he believed they would never have more population than the Atlantic states or, if they did, it was too far in the future to consider.  But he also said that they were preparing a Constitution for posterity, who were as likely to live in the west as the old states and should therefore not be discriminated against.  Originally, Sherman opposed requiring Congress to make periodic reapportionments to match population shifts, but after listening to the arguments of the Virginians, he agreed that specific rules needed to be laid down.  This was a statesmanlike position for a New Englander to take, considering that they expected their region to be the loser from it.

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*This was very much a minority view.  The general view followed Montesquieu, that separation of powers was essential for liberty, and that combining executive and legislative powers was tyranny.