The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

July 16, 1787, the delegates voted for the Connecticut Compromise, under which the state legislatures would appoint U.S. senators, and the states would have equal representation in the Senate. There would be filtration, but the states would do the filtering. As a strong nationalist, Madison hated this plan. The next morning, the dispirited nationalists from the large states of Virginia and Pennsylvania met over breakfast to consider their options. Some thought they should make the best of the situation. Others argued for a walkout, and as Madison more than anyone else wanted to draw power from the states, he was likely of this number. The Connecticut Compromise had caused “serious anxiety,” he wrote,²⁰ but the group of nationalists came to no decision. “The time was wasted in vague conversation.”²¹

      Virtually all of Madison’s ideas had been rejected. He had lost, and he knew it.²² He must have wondered whether anything could still be rescued of the convention.

      That breakfast meeting was on July 17, arguably the most important day in American history. There would be no walkout, and the convention would produce a constitution. The delegates had settled on how to choose the House of Representatives and the Senate, but they had yet to decide on the executive branch, and that would turn out to be the most important question of all. The debate over how the president would be chosen is the most fascinating story of the convention, and it began with a speech about corruption that Gouverneur Morris made that day.

Choosing a Virtuous President

      Madison doesn’t tell us who attended the July 17 breakfast meeting. Morris was likely there, as a representative of a large state and as one who spoke more than anyone else during the convention. He must have argued against a walkout, for he had a fresh card to play, and later that morning he would deliver one of the most consequential speeches in American political history. Over the following weeks it would be Morris’s convention more than anyone else’s, as he rallied his side, stick-handled the puck, and polished the language of the text. The convention would have another two months to go, and during that time Morris returned again and again to the danger of corruption.

      By the time Morris made his speech, the structure of the new government had largely been agreed upon. The states would not be abolished, as Hamilton would have wished. Instead, they would retain broad powers in their internal affairs, and would be represented on an equal basis at the heart of the federal government, in its Senate. Seats in the House of Representatives would be allocated by population, and the members elected by the people. Still to be decided was how the president would be chosen. “This subject has greatly divided the House,” said James Wilson, “and will also divide people out of doors. It is in truth the most difficult of all on which we have had to decide.”²³ It was also the most consequential, for today we have a government that is dominated by the presidency.

      Over the course of the convention, the delegates voted six times for a congressionally appointed president, once unanimously, and they also voted once for a president chosen by state legislatures. (The convention didn’t follow strict rules of procedure, so the delegates returned again and again to matters previously voted on.) We would have a president appointed by Congress today, but for the way Morris cleverly turned the delegates by appealing to their fear of corruption. He had initially wanted a congressionally appointed president, for like Madison he was suspicious of democracy. Also like Madison, he was a nationalist who wanted to draw power to the new federal government. And 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,