a portion of our calamities.”41 Nevertheless, the structure of the Virginia Plan would not lead one to expect this to happen very frequently, for the reasons Madison gave in his Vices essay. Pro-debtor factions would be weaker in an extended republic than in state governments, and the appointed Senate would wisely constrain immoderate measures from the House in an application of Madison’s filtration theory.
If Madison wanted judges on the Council of Revision, it was because he saw the veto more as a judicial than a political act, to be employed when the legislature overstepped its constitutional bounds. Maryland’s Luther Martin recognized that the courts would rule on the constitutionality of legislation,42 but the doctrine of judicial review lay in the future, and what Madison saw in its place was the Council of Revision.
Madison’s Council of Revision was not adopted. Instead, the delegates compromised on a full veto power, exercisable in any case of political disagreement, but one that a supermajority in Congress could override. Nevertheless, the president’s veto power was understood in constitutional terms for much of the nineteenth century. Madison gave an example of this in his last act before leaving the presidency, vetoing legislation for internal improvements because he thought the federal government’s commerce power did not include the power to build roads and canals.43 Similarly, near the end of the century, Grover Cleveland vetoed a farm relief bill for which he said he could find no warrant in the Constitution.44
In sum, the Virginia Plan would have created a chief executive very different from the one we know today. Appointed by Congress, the president would be its creature, charged with doing its will but seemingly with little discretion about how to do so. He would have a veto over legislative acts, but this would be shared with members of the bench, and for the most part limited to passing on the constitutionality of bills. The crucial power would be vested in the House of Representatives, Mason’s “House of Commons,” which would appoint the members of the Senate, and which, with the Senate, would appoint the president, who would thus be doubly insulated from the people. If anything, Madison’s president would have lacked the power of a modern prime minister, who typically dominates his party and Parliament.
The fear of executive misbehavior led some delegates to propose an extraordinary variation on the office: a three-man presidency. The Virginia Plan contemplated a single president, but Edmund Randolph argued that a troika could better represent what were then the three sections of the country: New England, the middle states, and the South. Besides, said Randolph, a single executive is “the foetus of monarchy.”45 Madison opposed the idea, and the Convention voted it down, but George Mason agreed with Randolph, as did another ten delegates.46 At the end of the Convention Mason and Randolph refused to sign the Constitution, in part because they feared the power it vested in the executive.
WHY DID THEY WANT PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT?
Presidential government is taken for granted by Americans. Why then were the Framers so taken with parliamentary government? The simplest answer is that this was the system they knew best. They had lived under a form of it during the colonial period, with royal governors and elected assemblies, and saw it from afar in Britain. And while they might have abhorred government from Westminster before the American Revolution, once it was over they fell over themselves in praise of the government of Westminster.
Conservatives such as Hamilton, Dickinson, and South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney confessed their admiration of Britain’s constitutional monarchy,47 and even their opponents saw the virtues of the British system. “There is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government,” observed Franklin.48 Only a republican system of government would do for the United States, said Randolph; otherwise, he said, he might well be prepared to adopt the British system in America.49 North Carolina’s Hugh Williamson saw an American monarchy as inevitable,50 and some delegates, including 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
