Was There a Correlation Between Delegates' Support for Centralization and Democracy?

So, back to the original thesis I proposed, was there any correlation between a delegate’s position on centralization and his position on democracy?  Once one distinguishes between old and new democracy, the question becomes more complicated, but the answer becomes simpler.

First and most obvious, the two extreme nationalists, Alexander Hamilton and George Read, were also among the top advocates of mixed government.  Moderate nationalists also included some mixed government men, notably Gouverneur Morris, Rufus King and, arguably, Charles Pinckney.  But they also included the leading new democrats – James Wilson, James Madison, Nathaniel Gorham and, yes, Edmund Randolph and George Mason.  

Indeed, some nationalistic positions were inherently new democratic.  All nationalists except Charles Pinckney supported popular election of the House, and most favored representation by population.  Granted, some of them (Hamilton, Morris, King) held these positions for nationalistic, rather than democratic reasons, to limit state power, but the effect was democratic whatever the intention.  Significantly, of all these nationalists, only Randolph and Mason took the core old democratic position that legislators should be absolutely ineligible to executive office.  Also significantly, it was these two nationalists, who had significant old democratic as well new democratic views, who refused to sign the Constitution in its final form, partly for old democratic reasons and partly out of concern for state sovereignty.  Randolph worried that Congress’s power to spend money for the “general welfare” and make all laws “necessary and proper” to carry out its other powers were too broad, while Mason reverted to an outright state sovereignty man during the ratification debates.  But neither raised any new democratic objections, such as that state restrictions of the vote remained, or that the President and Senate were not directly elected.

On the other hand, moderates on centralization like Elbridge Gerry and Hugh Williamson and compromisers like Roger Sherman and Benjamin Franklin tended to be old democrats.  Franklin, though he favored the new democratic positions of opposing property restrictions on the vote or office holding, was clearly an old democrat in his distrust of the executive and wish for the power of the purse strings (and, ideally, all power) to be in the hands of the lower house.  Oliver Ellsworth, John Dickinson and the South Carolina moderates do not classify as clearly.  Yet on the core old democratic issue of ineligibility to office, all but Dickinson favored an absolute ineligibility of legislators to executive office. (Dickinson did not weigh in).

As for advocates of state sovereignty, they generally said little on the subject of how the federal government should be organized, being more interested in limiting its power than in structural details.  When they did take a position on the structure of the federal government, it was not necessarily a democratic one.  Luther Martin (Maryland) wanted judges to be chosen by the Senate instead of the executive and favored a ceiling on the size of a peacetime army.  These are both old democratic positions, but in both cases he was more interested in limiting the power of the central government than in democratizing it.  He opposed the new democratic principles of direct popular election of the House or representation by population as threats to the powers of states.  Similarly, William Patterson (New Jersey) in order to maintain state sovereignty was willing to go against not only the new democratic principles of popular election of the House and representation by population, but also the old democratic principle of a numerous legislature:  

With proper powers Congs [i.e., the old Continental Congress] will act with more energy & wisdom than the proposed Nat’l Legislature; being fewer in number, and more secreted & refined by the mode of election.

One might expect advocates of state sovereignty to favor the old democratic principle of short terms for both houses to keep the national legislature under the control of the states, but even this does not appear to have been the case.  It was the New England states of Massachusetts and Connecticut who took the lead in calling for annual terms for the House and less than seven years for the Senate; New York, New Jersey and Delaware all voted for a three-year term for the House, while New York split on a seven-year term for the Senate with New Jersey and Delaware in favor.  

The New Jersey Plan was old democratic in favoring a weak, plural national executive elected by the national legislature.  Overall, advocates of state sovereignty favored limiting the direct agency of the people in the federal government.  They probably did not see that as undemocratic.  Most likely, they saw the central government as so large and remote as to be inherently beyond the people’s control and believed that giving people direct agency in it would simply create a false appearance of democracy.  Real democracy would be best served by limiting the power of this remote government and keeping it at the more manageable state level.  It would be safer to keep agency in the hands of the states than the people, because states would be better able than the people to keep the central government under control.