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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.
*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.
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