Thoughts on Democracy in 1787

Charles Pinckney of South Carolina

According to Madison's Notes on the Constitutional Convention, on this day, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina moved, "'that the first branch of the national Legislature be elected by the State Legislatures, and not by the people.' contending that the people were less fit Judges in such a case, and that the Legislatures would be less likely to promote the adoption of the new Government, if they were to be excluded from all share in it."

This is yet another example of how concerned many of the founders were about democracy. On the second day of debates Roger Sherman of Connecticut said that he "opposed the election by the people, insisting that it ought to be by the State Legislatures. The people he said, immediately should have as little to do as may be about the Government. They want [lack] information and are constantly liable to be misled."

Of course Pinckney and Sherman did not get their way. It was decided that members of "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People...", but this was not so for members of the Senate. Originally, Senators from the States were, "chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years...". This would be the case until 1913, after the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified. All of this flies in the face of the idea that these men we call founders wanted to establish a democracy in this nation. Looking at what some of "the People" think about government these days it makes one wonder if Pinckney and Sherman weren't wrong.

The Grand Federal Convention (a.k.a. The Constitutional Convention) Washington Admits He is Human

The Grand Federal Convention began yesterday (That's when I meant to post, ah well...); General George Washington was nominated to preside over the convention. He accepted. Here is James Madison's account of what happened:

General Washington was accordingly unanimously elected by ballot, and conducted to the Chair by Mr. R. Morris and Mr. Rutlidge; from which in a very emphatic manner he thanked the Convention for the honor they had conferred on him, reminded them of the novelty of the scene of business in which he was to act, lamented his want of better qualifications, and claimed the indulgence of the House towards the involuntary errors which his inexperience might occasion.

Now there is something you don't hear from today's politicians, an admission that they are human and that they might make a mistake; or an apology when they do. It reminds me of the other George W, George W. Bush who could never admit he made a mistake, even during a presidential debate. That is what separates great men from the the lousy ones...

From: Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

On such fundamental issues - representation and consent, the nature of constitutions and of rights, the meaning of sovereignty - and in such basic ways, did the colonists probe and alter their inheritance of thought concerning liberty and its preservation. To conceive of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and their voices as mechanically exact expressions of the people; to assume, and act upon assumption, that human rights exist above the law and stand as the measure of the law's validity; to understand constitutions to be ideal designs of government, and fixed, limiting definitions of its permissible sphere of action; and to consider the possibility that absolute sovereignty in government need not be the monopoly of a single all-engrossing agency but (imperium in imperio) the shared possession of several agencies each limited by the boundaries of the others but all-powerful within its own - to think in these ways, as Americans were doing before Independence, was to reconceive the fundamentals of government and of society's relation to government. (230)