IIRC, it was a compromise. The non-slave states proposed 0/5 and the slave states proposed 5/5. They met in the middle* at 3/5.
*Well, almost the middle. Slightly closer to the slave states’ proposal.
Ah, okay. I misunderstood your meaning before.
Not really. Slaves were property and counting them towards your population count for the purposes of political weighting is pretty outrageous. It was a compromise because the free states would have undoubtedly preferred counting slaves as 0/5ths of a person for the purposes of apportionment.
You respond to Martin Hyde, before. Not me.
That’s astoundingly unpersuasive. Since most of the posters seem to disagree with you, if that doesn’t make you reconsider your position, does it at least make you realize you have to actually support it and not just assert it?
Damn! All we have to do is say everything which we’re against is because slavery! Who knew it was this easy!
Proposition 1: There were extensive debates surrounding the adoption of the Constitution and enormous volumes of historical evidence exist.
Proposition 2: If this was indeed a motivating factor for establishing the EC, someone would have made the argument.
If these propositions are true, you would have evidence to support the claim.
I just posted this in another thread:
Actually, the EC is a vestige of an era before universal suffrage. It was a way for one handful of wealthy landowners to weight their state’s vote against the vote of another handful of wealthy landowners. The fact that it used a formula based on population instead of acreage or capital meant that it survived the transition to more general suffrage. And of course it means that a state’s dominant political party can get more ‘representation’ ‘for the state’ from the state’s populace, including the disenfranchised ones.
There’s definitely an appeal in that system to political factions that keep much of their state’s population in bondage. They get lots of extra voting power for themselves without having to share that power with the poor slaves and prisoners that gave it to them.
Was there any faction of founders advocating for direct, popular election of the president? That is to say, deliberately and completely keeping the states out of the process of electing the president?
This is a very complicated issue, and in order to understand the whole thing, we have to take into account a bunch of important criteria: small versus large states (in terms of population); states with many slaves versus states with few; states that relied on slavery versus those that did not; and the question of representation based on population versus the question of the electoral college (because those are not exactly the same thing).
It is worth dealing with the issue of state populations, and the percentage of those populations that were slaves. Let’s look at Damuri Ajashi’s post from the other thread, which CarnalK quoted above, in this thread:
CarnalK is asking the right questions here, and Damuri Ajashi’s use of total population without considering the percentage of the population that was enslaved is, at best, misleading and historically and analytically problematic.
I’m not sure where Damuri Ajashi got his figures, but if you look at the US census numbers from the first national census, in 1790 (just a few years after the Constitutional Convention), you can get a better sense of the total population of each state, as well as the slave population. Here’s a link to an image, and below i’ve given a breakdown of some of the key figures:
State Slaves Total % Slave
VT 16 85539 0.02
NH 158 141885 0.11
ME 0 96540 0.00
MA 0 378787 0.00
RI 948 68825 1.38
CT 2764 237946 1.16
NY 21324 340120 6.27
NJ 11423 184139 6.20
PA 3737 434373 0.86
DE 8887 59094 15.04
MD 103036 319728 32.23
VO 292627 747610 39.14
KY 12430 73677 16.87
NC 100572 393751 25.54
SC 107094 249073 43.00
GA 29264 82548 35.45
The last column, showing slaves as a percentage of the total population, is my own calculations, designed to give a sense of the importance of slavery within each state.
And this question of the role of slavery is crucial to our understanding of this issue. Damuri Ajashi blithely refers to any state that had any slaves as a “slave state,” and in some sense that’s true. I certainly don’t advocate ignoring the history of slavery in the North. But the numbers show how much more important slavery was in the Southern states, and historians of the period also make very clear that the Revolutionary period saw a growing sectional divide over the future of slavery in the United States. New England states like Massachusetts were abolishing slavery, often using judicial measures to do away with it, and many of what we now call the mid-Atlantic states were moving in the direction of gradual abolition, whereby slaves would not be freed immediately, but the institution of slavery would not be allowed to persist generationally. Some states did this more quickly than others.
More generally, historians also draw a distinction between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves,” and this distinction is relevant is discussions of the United States during the Revolutionary and early National period. You can see it in the numbers: no Northern state had more than 6.5% of the population enslaved, and most were under 2%; no Southern state had less than 15%, and most were over 25%
In “slave societies,” as understood by historians, slaves are crucial to the central productive economic processes of the society, and the society would collapse economically without the labor done by slaves. Those central economic processes are also, usually, made up of large-scale commodity agriculture - plantations of various sorts. Such societies also tend to be dominated, in terms of political and economic power, by slaveholders. It was pretty rare in places like Virginia or South Carolina for a rich and powerful person NOT to have wealth based, in considerable measure, on the institution of slavery.
In “societies with slaves,” slaves often perform important economic labor, but the central productive processes of the society do not rely on slavery just stay afloat, and also tend not to rest on large-scale agricultural commodities. Slaves in such societies more commonly did non-agricultural labor, such as working on docks as part of the mercantile economy. If all the slaves disappeared from such societies, they could survive economically with some relatively minor adjustments. Also, “societies with slaves” are not politically and economically dominated only by those whose wealth rests directly on the institution of slavery.
This is obviously something of an oversimplification of a pretty complex set of social and political economic phenomena, but it gives a sense of the way that historians think about the ideas implicit in CarnalK’s earlier post: “There were slave states and then there were SLAVE STATES!” Many Americans at the time understood this distinction, and it played a key role in the debates over slavery and the American political system.
Not that I am aware of, and there is a lot of evidence that in fact controlling the power of popular vote was intentional.
https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10
Just to be clear, the reason I asked that question is that it seems that something like the EC was the only consideration on the table. That is, the president would be elected by the states, not by “the people” and it was just a matter of how the states apportioned their votes. If we apportioned the votes by population, that would be pretty much the same as electing the president by popular vote, so the fact that we ended up with the EC as it is seems most likely:
- A desire for the states, not “the people”, to elect the president
- A desire by the small states to not get swamped out by the larger ones.
There were no states that refused to join the Union if the popular vote was used, because no one was considering that anyway.
Democracy was looked upon very poorly by all or nearly all of the founders:
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History101/ConstitutionalConvention.htm
The fact that they mentioned it all possibly indicates that someone was bringing up suggestions of direct elections for various roles. Though, it’s just as possible that it was just mentioned to dismiss the idea out of hand, before launching into the real recommendations. Either way, the strong indication is that it was effectively ruled out from all discussions early on and so, while probably not expressly suggested for the Presidential, we can say that it was already off the table by the time they got to that point in the discussion.
There were a few in the Constitutional Convention who argued for an election of the Executive by the people. One of the strongest advocates for a popularly-elected President was James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who was, with the exception of James Madison, probably the political theorist most responsible for the final form of the Constitution. It was Wilson who was the primary author of the three-fifths clause.
If you look at Madison’s notes on the Convention from June 1, 1787, you’ll find stuff like this:
Then, on June 2:
Wilson obviously didn’t get his way, but there was some discussion over a President elected by the people, without any sort of state-based system.
They spent a lot of time, too, on other issues such as the length of a President’s term (as low as three years, to as many as seven); the question of whether the President should be named by the Legislative branch alone; the issue of whether a President should be term-limited; and even the question of whether the Executive ought to be represented by a single person, or by a sort of council or two or three people.
There have been some fairly good posts, but some of the better ones have actually included too MUCH detail, and I think, lost some of the most accurate answers.
Here’s my alternate take:
the fights about how to count slaves, and the idea of using an Electoral College to elect Presidents, were almost entirely unrelated.
The fight over counting slaves, had to do with relative power in the national LEGISLATURE. Everyone wanted to maximize their own representation, naturally. The slave states wanted to count all their slaves as full people, for the purposes of who gets the most Representatives in the House. The non-slave, and smaller states didn’t like that idea from a standpoint of sheer voting power, and there was a lot of resentment against the Slave States, for wanting them to count, while refusing to allow them to be considered human beings in any other way.
The consideration of electing the President, had nothing to do with that. It had everything to do with the almost universal opposition of the Founding Fathers to Democracy. If you look at the rest of the Constitution, as originally written and passed (before the amendments that gave us what we have now), the ability of the masses to directly control the Federal government was watered down again, and again, and again.
It started right at the State level. Not everyone was allowed to vote, even for their State representatives, whose total number was decided by the size of the population. Not all of the NON-SLAVE people who were counted in order to determine how many Representatives you had, were allowed to vote directly for them.
Then, Senators were not elected directly by the People at all. They were chosen by the State legislators. Same thing with the Electors.
There was a strong belief in those days, as there still is in the Republican Party in particular, that poor people can’t think of anything but greed, while rich people are both better educated, and more thoughtful. It’s always been false, of course, but it’s not hard to understand why at least the rich people (who were in the majority in representing their states in the Constitutional conventions) would think that way.
A sort of sub element of that, which is again still running in the veins of the more old school proponents in America, is the idea that no one who doesn’t have a lot of PROPERTY, has any sense of personal risk in making decisions about how to guide the country. It’s so fundamental to a lot of people. You can find that idea popping up in lots of simple social situations, wherever a decision has to be made about a small group. When you get together with friends to decide what to do at a party, the people who put the most money into the general fund, tend to want to have the greatest power to decide how it’s spent, and the people who have the least to offer up, tend to accept that idea.
Anyway, that’s it really. The electoral college is all about arranging for the President to be chosen by the essence of the Propertied Classes alone. The 3/5th compromise deal, was all about making sure that national budgets (controlled to this day by the Congress) wouldn’t be controlled by people who wanted to count non-citizens as being citizens, for the purpose of getting EXTRA voting power in the House.
Good post mhendo and ty for the flattering mentions.
I am still leaning “EC wasn’t to support slavery” but the question has got some complications.
Right, i think there’s a lot of truth to what you say here. I wouldn’t separate the two things out quite as severely as you do, but i do agree, as i said in my previous post, that we need to distinguish
We could have had representation based on population without the EC, and we could have had the EC while choosing a different solution for the problems of representation. I didn’t really get to that question in my post, because i was concerned, first, to make some clear distinctions regarding the extent and importance of slavery in different groups of states.
I think that the answer to the OP’s resolution in this thread is, essentially, that no, the electoral college was NOT created to keep the slave states in the union. Replace “electoral college” with “the three-fifths clause” in the thread title, and you probably come a bit closer to an affirmative answer, but it was still an issue that requires something more complicated than a yes or no answer.
Your second para here gets at some important issues, but i think that your first one is far too simplistic and overdrawn, especially with respect to modern parties. Yes, the Republicans sometimes seem to worry about an excess of democracy, especially among the poor, but they also recognize that some poor Americans help maintain the Republican base, and they cultivate these “everyday” people while deriding “Eastern elites” and “ivy leaguers” and “lawyers” and even “Wall St.”
When John Jay said that the people who own the country ought to govern it (or something very similar; i don’t have the exact quote here), he was discussing the issue of property ownership and the way that it conveys personal independence and a sense of investment in the common good. It was not simply an issue of rich and poor, but a broader question about what independence truly meant, and what type of characteristics were required in order to make responsible decisions. A lot of this was tied up in a Jeffersonian idea of the yeoman farmer as the true expression of the American ideal; a man of virtue and independence, removed from the corruption and filth of the city, who would not be swayed by selfishness or venality. James Kent made a similar point in his address to the New York Constitutional Convention in 1821, when he argued against the idea of electing the universal (white manhood) suffrage in electing the New York Senate:
Kent contrasted these fine folks with the growing urban working classes, but it wasn’t so much that they were simply poor; it was that, as wage workers who relied on someone else for a living, they did not have the spirit of independence and virtue found in the farmers. He described them as:
As more immigrants came to America, the anti-democratic tenor sometimes also took on a nativist tone, especially with respect to Catholics.
Well, sort of. But you can’t just leave out slavery here, because the three-fifths compromise did, in fact, ensure that Congress was, in some measure, “controlled by people who wanted to count non-citizens as being citizens, for the purpose of getting EXTRA voting power in the House.” The compromise, by counting “three fifths of all other Persons” (i.e., mainly the slaves) handed the states with large slave populations a level of power in the House disproportionate to their free white population. So southern whites effectively had more power in Congress, on a per capita basis, than Northern whites. This had implications not only for the budgetary issues you mention, but for many other things besides.
God, I hate stuff like that. The article is replete with an insane underlying assumption: it’s acreage, not people, that should determine our leaders.
Look at this quote from Reagan, offered as if it’s some sort of wisdom:
Instead, we have a system where candidates are criticized for campaigning in the states with the most people. One in eight Americans lives in California, so any reasonable system is going to encourage candidates to campaign there far more than in Ohio, where only one in thirty Americans lives.
The article also talks extensively about how the EC avoids mob rule, since a bare majority can’t take over the country. The solution, apparently, is to allow a bare minority to take over the country.
It’s an insane system, and the arguments for it in the 21st century are profoundly weak.
Well, that doesn’t really tell the whole story. Candidates are criticized for campaigning in states where they have a lock on the vote, independent of how many people they have. If CA were a battleground state (like the 3rd largest state), then no one would criticize a candidate for campaigning there. But it should also be noted that candidates are free to campaign wherever they want, and if they can’t handle some criticism for what they do, they probably shouldn’t be running for the office in the first place.
So, yeah, as things stand currently, a candidate can be criticized for campaigning in CA. So what?
And, speaking as a Californian, I consider the current system eminently reasonable for discouraging rampant campaigning in our state. 
You’re right I guess compared to fully counting slaves. I’ll repeat that the 3/5ths compromise was actually a product of Congress under the Confederation government, passed in 1783. Some of the early government plan proposals did not envision directly apportioning representatives with any respect to slaves, some envisioned only “free persons” and some envisioned a mixture of free persons and material wealth. So compared to the early provisions bandied about, the slave states were able to get the 3/5ths compromise incorporated into the Constitution and continue the practice (roughly) started in 1783.
It’s also worth noting that Madison wrote a defense of the 3/5ths in several private letters and one of the Federalists (I think 53 or 54), although he took on the position of defending something from the “perspective” of someone who was a vigorous supporter of the compromise (Madison wasn’t.) Madison made the argument that some states were much freer than others throughout the country, for example in some states property requirements for voting were very strict, while others even in the 1780s had already liberalized the franchise. Madison’s argument was if slaves were not to be counted, why should we count all non-enslaved persons in states like New York which had more strict property requirements for voting at that time than many other states. I.e., those “free” men who couldn’t vote weren’t enjoying the full liberties of citizenship, so you could make the argument if slaves shouldn’t count for apportionment than neither should they. Madison I think did a decent job defending the matter in a logical way.