The Once and Future King. F. H. Buckley

Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris, might have welcomed this.⁵¹ Maryland’s John Mercer copied out a list of twenty delegates who, he laughingly said, favored an American monarchy. Mercer was an opinionated 28-year-old who saw monarchists under his bed, but some delegates took him seriously.⁵² As historian Gordon Wood noted, monarchy prevailed almost everywhere else, and “we shall never understand events of the 1790s until we take seriously, as contemporaries did, the possibility of some sort of monarchy developing in America.”⁵³

      The magnetic pull of parliamentary government may be seen in the constitutions the states adopted immediately after the Revolution. Save for Connecticut, all of the states reformed their governments, and in nearly every case the new constitution featured a governor chosen by the legislature. The most influential state constitution, and the first one to be adopted, was that of Virginia; it provided for a governor, or chief magistrate, to be chosen annually by joint ballot of both houses of the legislature.⁵⁴ Only in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were governors elected directly by the people.

      Many constitutions, like Virginia’s, formally provided that the legislative, executive, and judicial powers were to be separate, and that legislators could not serve as governors. This, however, was the thinnest kind of separation of powers, one that scarcely deserves its name. In every state but New York the legislature appointed an executive council that could countermand the governor’s decisions. “The Executives of the States,” noted Madison, “are in general little more than Cyphers; the legislatures omnipotent.”⁵⁵ For the Framers, then, parliamentary government was the default position.

      Some of the Framers wanted a parliamentary government for a reason that seems very dated today. If a president were to be popularly elected, would voters know much about a candidate from outside their state? “Of the affairs of Georgia,” said Madison, “I know as little as those of Kamskatska.”⁵⁶ That was an argument for a president appointed by Congress, said Sherman, since legislators would know the presidential candidates better than the voters would.⁵⁷ All this would soon change, and indeed was changing, with advances in transportation and communication technology.⁵⁸ On August 22, 1787, inventor John Fitch made the first successful trial of a steamboat on the Delaware River, in the presence of several delegates to the Convention. Nevertheless, the delegates did not foresee the rapidity of such change, or the rise of national parties, which would shortly address the problem of voter ignorance.

      There were two more important reasons why many delegates opposed a democratically elected president: First, they were fearful of democracy; and second, they were apprehensive of presidential power. Put the two together, in the form of a democratically elected president, and one had the fetus of monarchy of which Randolph had complained.

      Nearly all of the delegates mistrusted democracy, and given a choice between the popular election of the president and a congressional appointment, they preferred the latter. Like Madison, they liked the idea of a selection filtered by an intermediate level of elected officials. The defects of the Articles period could be traced, they thought, to an “excess of democracy,”⁵⁹ with its “turbulence and follies.”⁶⁰

      Because they kept their deliberations secret, it was easier for the delegates to express a contempt for democracy that at times made them seem like French aristocrats peering through their lorgnettes at la canaille. Elbridge Gerry, fresh from Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts, observed that “the worst men get into the Legislature. Several members of that body have lately been convicted of infamous crimes. Men of indigence, ignorance and baseness, spare no pains, however dirty to carry their point against men who are superior to the artifices practiced.”⁶¹ Roger Sherman agreed. “The people . . . immediately should have as little to do as may be about the Government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled.”⁶² For his part, George Mason thought that “it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for chief Magistrate to the people, as it would, to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.”⁶³

      Madison had spent the previous winter boning up on the republics of antiquity, a study that did nothing to reassure him about democracy. He feared “the transient impressions into which [the people] might be led,” and wondered whether they might propose land reform schemes like those of the Gracchi in Republican Rome.

       An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, & secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this Country, but symptoms of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarters to give notice of the future danger. ⁶⁴

      What were they thinking? we are tempted to ask. Without the support of the ordinary people they now denigrated, America would not have won its independence a few years before. But the patriot’s passionate attachment to absolute liberty during the American Revolution had led to lawlessness and violence, and while this was condoned (and even encouraged when directed against Loyalists), it was quite another thing when the mob turned its attention to the new American governments.

      Serious rioting broke out in many of the major American cities in the 1780s. The Revolution had clothed public protests in a mantle of legitimacy, and state authorities, who had relied on extralegal groups during the Revolution, were reluctant to resist the same groups when the war was over.⁶⁵ Knowing this, the delegates feared that what popular suffrage would produce would mirror the Massachusetts election of May 1787, when conservative Governor James Bowdoin had lost his bid for reelection because he had called up the militia to suppress Shays’s Rebellion. Madison told the delegates that “the insurrections in Massachusetts admonished all the States of the danger to which they were exposed.”⁶⁶

      In the midst of their deliberations, the delegates were treated to a vivid example of mob rule when an elderly woman was stoned not five blocks from their meeting place. Know as the “Widow Korbmacher,” she had first been set upon on May 5, before the delegates arrived, by a mob suspecting her to be a witch. On July 10 the crowd struck again, shouting insults, carrying her through the streets, and pelting her with stones. She died of her injuries on July 18,⁶⁷ the day after the delegates voted 9 to 1 against the popular election of the president.⁶⁸

      Some delegates knew mob violence at first hand. In 1779, lawyer James Wilson had narrowly escaped from a gang of rioters after he successfully defended Loyalists whose property had been seized. The mob had been whipped up by Pennsylvania’s populist governor, who himself lived in a confiscated Loyalist house. Wilson barricaded himself in his home, two blocks from Independence Hall, with twenty or so of his colleagues (including two delegates to the future Philadelphia Convention, Robert Morris and Thomas Mifflin). The mob was in the process of aiming a cannon at the house when it was dispersed by cavalry led by the military commandant of Philadelphia, Benedict Arnold. Six people died in the affair, but the rioters were afterward pardoned. Wilson had to flee Philadelphia for a few weeks, and his house came to be called “Fort Wilson.”⁶⁹

      The fear of democracy was especially pronounced when the subject of a popularly elected president arose. Roger Sherman thought that “an Independence of the Executive on the supreme Legislative, was . . . the very essence of tyranny.”⁷⁰ Similarly, George Mason argued that “if strong and extensive powers are vested in the Executive, and that Executive consists only of one person, the government will of course degenerate (for I will call it a degeneracy) into a monarchy.”⁷¹ What delegates feared was that a president elected by the people would threaten liberty more than would a hereditary monarch who lacked the legitimacy conferred by a popular election. “We are not indeed constituting a British Government,” said Mason, “but a more dangerous monarchy, an elective one.”⁷²

      Sherman wanted Congress to impose severe limits on a president’s authority. The president, he said, should be nothing more than the legislature’s agent. His job would be to execute the laws passed by the legislature, without exercising much (or any) discretion about how