The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley
nine.29 Then Morris spoke up again to warn of corruption if the president were to be chosen by Congress. “Cabal & corruption are attached to that mode of election,” he said.30 His proposal for a popular election of the president did better, but still failed, with five votes against six.31 That was as close as the Philadelphia Convention came to giving us a popularly elected president. Not once did the delegates ever vote for it.
On August 31 the delegates referred the question of presidential elections to the Committee on Unfinished Parts, with one delegate for each state. The committee was dominated by delegates who supported a popularly elected president, including Morris. Four days later, on September 4, they presented a plan for the president to be chosen by electors appointed in a manner determined by each state’s legislature. Today that means a popular election in every state, but in 1787 the delegates would have expected state legislatures to pick the electors. They also expected that presidential candidates after George Washington would usually not have nationwide support, and with no candidate winning a majority of electoral votes, the decision would be thrown to the House of Representatives (originally, to the Senate), voting by state. This is what would happen in the elections of 1800 and 1824, and most of the Framers thought it would almost always be that way. In essence, they thought they had agreed on a congressionally chosen president.
The deliberations of the Committee on Unfinished Parts were kept secret, but the plan for selecting a president seems to have come mainly from the pen of Gouverneur Morris, who was the foremost advocate of a popular election and who had the strongest strategic sense of any of the delegates. He was also the committee’s chief spokesman in explaining the new plan to the other delegates. The new system for choosing a president was designed to address the possibility of corruption, he said. “The principal advantage aimed at was that of taking away the opportunity for cabal,” which the delegates would have taken as a reference to corruption. A legislative appointment would have introduced “the danger of intrigue & faction.”32
In accepting the new plan, the delegates did not anticipate the extension of the franchise to all adults or the direct election of senators under the Seventeenth Amendment. They didn’t think the presidential electors would be chosen by the voters, and they did expect that electors would exercise independent discretion in picking a president. Most of the delegates didn’t even realize they had effectively abandoned the idea of a congressionally appointed president, since they expected that few candidates would ever secure a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Nor did they think the nationalists had won. But over time, power shifted from the states to Washington, and in Washington it shifted to the executive office; and the cumbersome machinery of the Constitution’s Article II has given America its strong presidential form of government.
All of this began with Morris’s little-known speech on July 17. And when his proposals were put to a vote, it was the fear of corruption that tipped the scales.
What Corruption Meant to the Framers
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, with its presidential system and separation of powers, was sold as an anticorruption covenant, and that is how the convention delegates understood it. But just what did the Framers think corruption meant? The answer is several quite different things, but the simplest explanation is that it referred to how the British were governed.
The Framers may have recalled, for example, how James I plundered the Royal Treasury to give presents to his favorites. David Hume tells how James once observed a porter bearing £3,000 on his way to the Treasury. “How happy would that money make me!” said one of James’s handsome courtiers, whereupon the king gave it to him. “You think yourself very happy in obtaining so large a sum,” said James. “But I am more happy, in having an opportunity of obliging a worthy man, whom I love.”1 James subsequently ennobled the favorite as the Earl of Holland, a title he would bear until he died on the scaffold in 1649 at the hands of a vengeful Puritan Parliament.
Not all the gifts were so conspicuously without merit, however. One cannot read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets without being struck by how many of England’s greatest writers were sustained by the patronage of the king or the nobility. When he wrote The Old Bachelor, the twenty-three-year-old William Congreve was made one of the commissioners for licensing coaches, and soon afterward he was given places in the Pipe Office and the Custom House. Johnson himself held a pension from the king. Nor did contemporary Britons see themselves as especially corrupt. When George III ascended to the throne in 1760 promising a reign of virtue, free of corruption, no one thought he meant a government from which the tools of influence had been banished. Whig politicians, beginning with Robert Walpole (prime minister 1721–42) and continuing with the Pelham brothers (Henry Pelham, prime minister 1743–54; Thomas Pelham, 1st Duke of Newcastle, prime minister 1754–56, 1756–57), had perfected a patronage machine through which the government could rely on the support of a majority in the House of Commons. The king held important cards as well, in his control of the civil list of paid government appointees and his ability as the fount of honor to ennoble his supporters. With these instruments at his disposal, he could rely upon his allies in the House of Commons, the “King’s Friends.”
All sides thought it legitimate to offer plums to political friends and to feast on whatever was sent their way. “Men . . . no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity,” observed Sir Lewis Namier, “than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it.”2 David Hume thought the king’s patronage powers had even served a useful purpose in preserving the balanced British constitution, which had been undermined by the rising power of the House of Commons. Formally, the king could veto legislation, but his power to do so had fallen into abeyance and could not be revived. What he retained was the ability to rally the King’s Friends in Parliament through the favors he could grant, and this permitted him to shape ministries to his liking. “The crown has so many offices at its disposal, that, when assisted by the honest and disinterested part of the house, it will always command the resolutions of the whole; so far, at least, to preserve the ancient constitution from danger.” Call this “corruption and dependence” if you will, said Hume, but it was “necessary to the preservation of our mixed government.”3
In America, the Patriots weren’t buying this. They had read of British corruption from John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Cato’s Letters, 1720–23) and from Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), and they wanted no part of it. American visitors to Britain had brought back reports of the mother country’s appalling level of public vice. As John Adams saw it, both electors and elected in Britain had “become one mass of corruption.”4 John Dickinson, “the penman of the American Revolution,”5 was the strongest Anglophile at the Philadelphia Convention, but when he had visited England earlier he was shocked by how the British conducted their elections.
It is astonishing to think what impudence & villainy are practizd on this occasion. If a man cannot be brought to vote as he is desird, he is made dead drunk & kept in that state, never heard of by his family or friends till all is over & he can do no harm. The oath of their not being bribd is as strict & solemn as language can form it, but is so little regarded that few people can refrain from laughing while they take it. I think the character of Rome will equally suit this nation: “Easy to be bought, if there was but a purchaser.”6
It was bad enough that Britain was so corrupt, but worse still that the British were exporting their corruption to America through the officers they appointed. Royal governors such as Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts (Anne’s great-great-grandson) had created a system of dependents through their placemen, which John Adams thought amounted to a tyranny.7 “Cæsar, by destroying the Roman Republic, made himself perpetual dictator,” and likewise “Hutchinson, by countenancing and supporting a System of Corruption and all Tyranny, has made himself Governor.”8 Adams’s obsession with Hutchinson bordered on neurosis, but it wasn’t entirely divorced from reality. At one point Hutchinson was simultaneously the colony’s lieutenant