Over in this thread, the claim was made that:
The “valuable purpose” it [the Electoral College] was created to serve was to keep the slave states in the union.
Rather than continue the hijack of a thread about Hillary Clinton’s campaign, I would like to invite the participants of that debate to hash things out here.
From the evidence I saw over in that other thread, I can’t see how the affirmative in this debate can be supported, but let’s see how it goes.
It was created as a form of checks and balances. If the President was elected by the Legislature, then there is the risk that he would hold that position due to horse trading within the Legislature, and so be their puppet. Similar, if he was elected by the state governments. However, popular election makes him a force for the aims of the largest factions, and the purpose of government is to diminish faction and protect minorities.
The Electoral College was the only thing they could come up with that no one could make a strong argument against. The random citizens who were chosen by the states would not have anything they want in trade, the state would certainly elect intelligent and non-partisan electors, and so everything would be wonderful.
Proposition 1: Slaves could never be alloed to vote
Proposition 2: Slave states would never match the free population of free states
Proposition 3: One (free) man, one vote could not be directly or openly put aside.
Proposition 4: Free states could not be fully trusted to protect to protect slave interests.
If those propositions hold, then slave states would need to insure that they had control or near control of both the President and one house of Congress. Amazingly, and surely coincidentally, the structure of the Senate and the electoral college gave them that.
Not proof, but it logically follows from conditions at the time.
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Yes, it is puzzling that the proposition is considered by anyone to be controversial. But then this is the Dope.
I’m no historian but this sentiment from Madison certainly does not reference small states vs large states when talking about how to elect the president:
“There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”
sauce
Was the concept of “slave state” the same in 1790 as it was in 1860? I’m wondering if this complicates things for folks used to thinking in Civil War terms.
But they forgot to spell it out in the Constitution so the state governments were quite free to select the electors themselves under the wording. Originally, a quick look tells me 6 states did just that. Let’s you know how much people at the time did not give a crap about “original intent” of the Founding Fathers.
Thought I’d steal this from the other thread:
Which is strong evidence for me that it wasn’t really a slave issue. My only questioning is: how much of those numbers were slaves and how many of those slave states were on the cusp of abolition? There were slave states and then there were SLAVE STATES!
Are you ever going to try to defend your position? This “it’s so obvious if you use your decoder ring” is getting mighty tedious.
I suspect many New Yorkers would find the idea of New York as one of the original ‘slave states’ to be extremely distasteful.
Because we have notes on the debates that took place. Granted, we don’t have a full transcript, but I have written what we understand the discussions that took place to have been.
And which states do you figure are extremely happy about being one of the originals?
It’s probably fair to say that the question of how to apportion representatives by state (e.g., the House vs. Senate divide) was based on population and so that discussion would have included considerations on slave populations, since slave count was part of the math for calculating representatives.
By extension, the Electoral College is based on the count of representatives in the Legislature, but adding both together. And so in that smallest of senses, you could say that slavery has a small impact on the Electoral College discussion. But, by the time they got to this point in the discussion, they were getting restless. I don’t think they spent much time on the question of how many people to put into the Electoral College, let alone going back to re-litigate the population count hullabaloo. They simply added the two numbers together, because it was quick and easy, and moved on.
But, ultimately, that was purely a question of how to implement the EC. It has no bearing on the decision to create an Electoral College to begin with. If they had gone, for example, the more Parliamentary route and had the Legislature elect someone, then the same math would have come into effect since that’s how the Representatives are chosen.
Probably none of them, but for most Georgians “you live in a former slave state” is probably significantly less of a surprise.
The 3/5ths compromise certainly benefited slave states, but to say that’s why the electoral college was created just doesn’t follow. The electoral college represented a compromise, and thus that means it had benefits (and negatives) for basically all involved.
I mean just as one historical fact–the Virginia Plan, proposed by a Virginia delegate and promoted by all of the Virginia delegates, stipulated the President would be elected by the legislature. That the lower house of the legislature would be elected by the people, the higher house would be elected by the lower house (from a slate of nominees put forward by the states.) The lower house membership would be apportioned based on “number of free individuals” or “quotas of contribution”, which meant basically assessed property values, i.e. wealth got a vote. This wasn’t that crazy relative to the political systems of the time, particularly since under the Articles of Confederation, contributions (voluntary) to the national government were based on assessments of material wealth in the respective states.
Note that the “quotas of contribution” would actually be based on real estate (and not, slaves), so under the original Virginia plan slaves wouldn’t be part of a State’s power in the legislature (and by extension in the election of the executive), at all. Madison’s writings indicated he expected that the small states would not like things being apportioned by population, but that they would accede to it with enough pressure because basically “it’s the right thing to do.” Madison found that the small states were actually much more resistant to the idea–which significantly undermined their power versus their standing in the national government under the Articles of Confederation.
Now, it may have been the case if the Virginia Plan had gotten further along, it too would’ve incorporated a form of the 3/5ths compromise–not all of the slave states were equivalent in outlook on the matter. Virginia in the late 18th century was already imagining a time when slavery would not be a major part of its economy. Virginia’s slave economy was based on tobacco farming which for various reasons was declining in profitability in the state. It’s actually a common refrain among a lot of the late 18th century Virginia founding fathers that there’s a general expectation of slavery being “on the way out” in some sense (no doubt because many Virginia founding fathers were deeply indebted slave holders whose personal books were often quite bad–Washington being an exception in that he was a much better businessman than most of the Founders). What ended up happening in the real world is there was a great migration of sorts, where large numbers of Virginia slave plantations wound down, and the slaves were sold into the Deeper South where different cash crops existed and had higher demand for slaves (particularly since importation of slaves from outside the country became illegal after a set point in time.)
Just saying simply that it’s obvious the electoral college was decided on to appease slave states doesn’t match actual historical writings, or the fact that at least one of the large slave states proposed a system disadvantageous to slave holders. In Virginia’s case, they had so many more people (even just free people) than most of the other states. It also doesn’t jive with the fact that Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey were major proponents of 1 state 1 vote schemes and none of those states had large numbers of slaves in 1789 (I think Connecticut may have done away with it entirely by then, but New Jersey and Rhode Island had very few slaveowners at that point.)
It’s worth noting Madison and at least some other slave owning Founding Fathers actually did not envision a system in which state sovereignty would be enshrined. Madison actually believed the best interests for small states was for states to be weak generally, and for the national government’s power to derive from the people and to administer states akin to how states administer their counties. The simple reality is small states were unpersuaded. Madison envisioned a future in which weak states meant people identified as American and not Virginian, and he felt that would better protect New Jerseyans than any other scheme, because it would dilute the concept of a “big state” if what “state” you lived in didn’t really matter.
Madison wrote a letter to Washington in 1787 outlining in which he said,
, in said letter Madison goes so far as to say that a national-legislature empowered with a veto over State laws is necessary,
James Madison lived until 1836, and was not ignorant of, nor quiet concerning, the controversies of America up until his final years. He wrote a letter in November of 1819 to one Robert Walsh in which he actually clarified some of the compromises in the constitution as they relate to slavery. For example, the banning of slave importation c. 1808 was a compromise. Many of the Southern States had already independently banned the African slave trade, a few had now. Under the Articles of Confederation, and theoretically even under the new constitution, any one state refusing to ratify would’ve been able to block things. The constitutional convention really didn’t want even one state not to ratify, and the southern states that did still allow the African slave trade were adamant that no constitution could prohibit it. The delayed implementation of a ban on it was acceptable enough to get the constitution ratified.
Note this passage from that 1819 letter:
The reality is, a few of the slave states were very recalcitrant on all issues related to slavery, but most of the slave states were not–also note that even still Madison in 1819 is saying it is the small states that pushed for equality in the Senate (which directly correlates with the electoral college situation.)
At the end of the day–while I don’t doubt that a 3/5ths compromise likely would have been required of the Virginia plan, the fact that the first big hanging point was an unwillingness by a coalition of small states to give up 1 State 1 Vote (without significant compromise), was what actually lead to equal representation in the Senate, did away with legislative election of the President etc was a push by the small states, it just doesn’t hold that the electoral college was a creature of slavery. The 3/5ths compromise, obviously so–but that was something that was hammered out once the rest of the plan of government already largely in place (and it really just followed precedent–a similar agreement had been decided for purposes of assessing taxes in 1783 in the Confederation government.)
I suppose. It does touch on my earlier question though of how slave loving those states listed as “slave state” actually were. New York was passing laws that chipped away at slavery in the 1780s and 90s.
So it’s reasonable to doubt they were battling hard for slavery during Constitution negotiations.
Absolutely not. In most writings from the late 18th century South Carolina and Georgia are outliers as “extreme” defenders of slavery. Slavery was struggling economically in the late 18th century, a lot of prominent Virginia families were going bust. Many of them ultimately were able to delay it by selling off large numbers of slaves to the Deep South and piddling on with loans and semi-profitable ventures. A lot of famous Virginia slave owners in the mid-19th century for example inhabited plantations that were markedly smaller in number of slaves than their late 18th century forebears.
By the mid-19th century slavery had become extremely important to the economies of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi–and it was “philosophically” important throughout the South for political reasons that evolved over time (and that weren’t present in the late 18th century.)
The conception of “States rights” was also different in the late 18th century. The open idea that States should have minimal rights (for example–that they should lack the freedom even to pass their own laws free of potential Federal veto) was being bandied about in the constitutional convention. It wasn’t a “winner” idea, but by 1850 it was unthinkable. No politician in the 1850s for example, no matter how radical, would have even suggested such a thing. In a sense, the compromises made in 1788 lead to an actual entrenchment of the power of the states, that actually magnified over time. It wasn’t until the expansion of commerce clause legislation some 130-140 years later that it started eroding.
That’s a major issue a lot of people overlook. Back in 1790 a lot of people, even in the south, thought slavery was in decline and would inevitably end. They didn’t foresee that cotton cultivation was about to undergo a major revival and make slavery profitable.
Just to be clear, even if the Electoral College were intended solely to pander to slave states (I don’t think it was), that would have no bearing on whether the the EC should be eliminated today. You can support the Electoral College for entirely benign and non-racist reasons, regardless of what it was originally intended for.
You have that backwards. It benefited and was proposed by the non-slave states in order to reduce the slave states’ House delegations (as non-voting slaves were to be counted in the population for the purpose of apportionment).
Not sure why we should assume your second or third proposition. Nor why we should assume all the free states were hoodwinked and just gave up control of the presidency and senate.
