The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ he was a quicker thinker than Madison. After the Connecticut Compromise had passed on July 16, Morris was the first to recognize that a congressional appointment of the president would weaken the national government. If senators were appointed by state legislatures, and small states were given equal representation in the senior branch of Congress, then a congressionally appointed presidency would empower the states. When Morris realized this, his nationalism trumped his fear of democracy, and he promptly began to argue for a popularly elected president.

      First he sidled up to the small-state delegates by opposing Madison’s pet project, a federal veto power over state legislation. He was “more and more opposed to the [federal] negative. The proposal of it would disgust all the States.”²⁴ Having thus positioned himself as a moderate on the issue of federal power, Morris then made his masterstroke in a speech designed to persuade the small-state delegates to support a popularly elected president as a means of combatting corruption. Two weeks earlier he had told the delegates that bribery of demagogues with loaves and fishes was to be expected, but now he presented himself as corruption’s implacable foe. He argued that a congressionally appointed executive would be “the mere creature of the Legis[lature] if appointed & impeachable by that body.” Instead, Morris said, the president “ought to be elected by the people at large, by the freeholders of the Country.” He acknowledged difficulties in this method, but noted that “they have been found superable” in New York and Connecticut, and he believed it would be likewise for choosing the executive of the United States.

      If the people should elect, they will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character, or services; some man . . . of continental reputation. If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction: it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals; real merit will rarely be the title of the appointment.²⁵

      This was catnip to the small-state delegates, with their aversion to corruption. But would the Virginia nationalists recognize that having a popularly elected president would mean a shift of power to the federal government? Not at first. When the matter was put to a vote shortly thereafter, only the Pennsylvania delegates voted with Morris, while Madison’s Virginia joined the other states in the majority. But then Morris returned to the fray on July 19 with new arguments for a popular election. As the country was large, he said, it would require a vigorous executive to govern it, and a president who was popularly elected would be more powerful than one who owed his election to Congress. Also, the government would be less corrupt with a popularly elected president. Were Congress to appoint him, it would become the dominant branch, and its members would be chosen from among the “Great & the wealthy.” Corruption would be the result, for “wealth tends to corrupt the mind & to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to oppression.”²⁶ That would be avoided with a popularly elected president, for he would be the tribune of the people, especially of the lower classes.

      The delegates weren’t buying this argument, but Morris succeeded in one thing: he turned Madison around. For Madison, the penny finally dropped on that day, and he was persuaded to support a popularly elected president. His speech on the subject is frequently quoted:

      If it be a fundamental principle of free Govt. that the Legislative, Executive & Judiciary powers should be separately exercised; it is equally so that they be independently exercised. . . . This could not be if [the president] was to be appointable from time to time by the Legislature. . . . Certain it was that the appointment would be attended with intrigues and contentions that ought not to be unnecessarily admitted.²⁷

      Of course, it wasn’t Madison’s idea that the separation of powers required a popularly elected president. It came from Morris, as did the idea that this measure was necessary to avoid the corruption that would follow upon a congressional appointment of the president.

      In following Morris’s lead, Madison abandoned the filtration theory he had brought to the convention. What changed his mind was realizing the implications of the way senators would be chosen under the Connecticut Compromise. If state legislatures chose senators, and then Congress chose the president, this would empower the states. For Madison, as with Morris, nationalism trumped filtration, and with it the dream of virtuous leaders chosen by Congress. Thereafter the nationalists from Pennsylvania and Virginia, the two largest states, would unite around the principle of a popularly elected president, though the other delegations still opposed it.

      On July 26 the delegates turned over a draft constitution, with an appointed president, to a Committee of Detail for fine-tuning, and then they adjourned for ten days. The committee reported back on August 6 with a new draft that had significant changes but retained a congressionally elected president.²⁸ That question, it was thought, had been settled. It wasn’t, though. A motion for a popularly elected president was brought forward once more, on August 24, winning only two votes against nine.²⁹ Then Morris spoke up again to warn of corruption if the president were to be chosen by Congress. “Cabal & corruption are attached to that mode of election,” he said.³⁰ His proposal for a popular election of the president did better, but still failed, with five votes against six.³¹ That was as close as the Philadelphia Convention came to giving us a popularly elected president. Not once did the delegates ever vote for it.

      On August 31 the delegates referred the question of presidential elections to the Committee on Unfinished Parts, with one delegate for each state. The committee was dominated by delegates who supported a popularly elected president, including Morris. Four days later, on September 4, they presented a plan for the president to be chosen by electors appointed in a manner determined by each state’s legislature. Today that means a popular election in every state, but in 1787 the delegates would have expected state legislatures to pick the electors. They also expected that presidential candidates after George Washington would usually not have nationwide support, and with no candidate winning a majority of electoral votes, the decision would be thrown to the House of Representatives (originally, to the Senate), voting by state. This is what would happen in the elections of 1800 and 1824, and most of the Framers thought it would almost always be that way. In essence, they thought they had agreed on a congressionally chosen president.

      The deliberations of the Committee on Unfinished Parts were kept secret, but the plan for selecting a president seems to have come mainly from the pen of Gouverneur Morris, who was the foremost advocate of a popular election and who had the strongest strategic sense of any of the delegates. He was also the committee’s chief spokesman in explaining the new plan to the other delegates. The new system for choosing a president was designed to address the possibility of corruption, he said. “The principal advantage aimed at was that of taking away the opportunity for cabal,” which the delegates would have taken as a reference to corruption. A legislative appointment would have introduced “the danger of intrigue & faction.”³²

      In accepting the new plan, the delegates did not anticipate the extension of the franchise to all adults or the direct election of senators under the Seventeenth Amendment. They didn’t think the presidential electors would be chosen by the voters, and they did expect that electors would exercise independent discretion in picking a president. Most of the delegates didn’t even realize they had effectively abandoned the idea of a congressionally appointed president, since they expected that few candidates would ever secure a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Nor did they think the nationalists had won. But over time, power shifted from the states to Washington, and in Washington it shifted to the executive office; and the cumbersome machinery of the Constitution’s Article II has given America its strong presidential form of government.

      All of this began with Morris’s little-known speech on July 17. And when his proposals were put to a vote, it was the fear of corruption that tipped the scales.

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