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 this was done.73 This was a theory of separation of powers, though not one now familiar to us. The legislature would make the laws, but not apply them; the executive would apply them, but not make them; the separation of the two powers would preserve liberty and the rule of law.74
This was an old-fashioned view of executive authority. A hundred years earlier, a more modern John Locke had argued that the executive should have broader powers. Under the royal prerogative, the King had the discretion to interpret or even vary legislation when the public good so demanded; Locke thought this a valuable right, since legislators are not “able to foresee, and provide by laws, for all that may be useful to the community.”75 However, Sherman and other Framers hearkened back to even earlier fears of the prerogative originating with the English Civil War, and parliamentary jealousy of the use Charles I had made of the prerogative to dissolve Parliament and rule autocratically.
Sherman’s views about the dangers of such a prerogative were those of a member of a “country” party, in contradistinction to a “court” party, with the distinction between the two derived from the court and country parties of early modern British history.76 During the English Civil War, the court party favored the Crown prerogative, at the expense of Parliament; the country party sought to restrict the royal prerogative, and saw Parliament as the guarantor of English liberties.
The two parties also differed on the need for civic virtue in a republic. Country party members thought that republican government could not be preserved unless the citizens had a disinterested desire to promote the public good, shorn of any attachment to their private or factional interests. “Cabal,” “corruption,” and “faction,” where private interest trumped the public good, were seen as mortal ills for a state.77 By contrast, court party members scoffed at the idea of a special kind of republican virtue. With Hume they agreed that “all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary.”78
Apart from Sherman, country party members likely included Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts; John Lansing and Robert Yates of New York; Benjamin Franklin and Jared Ingersoll of Pennsylvania; Gunning Bedford and Richard Bassett of Delaware; Luther Martin, Daniel Jennifer, and John Mercer of Maryland; Virginia’s Edmund Randolph and George Mason; Hugh Williamson of North Carolina; Pierce Butler and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina; and Abraham Martin and William Few of Georgia.79 The court party was represented by Hamilton; Gouverneur Morris, Robert Morris, and James Wilson of Pennsylvania; and John Rutledge of South Carolina.80
Madison may also be counted as a member of the court party at the Convention. His Vices essay argued that self-interest would blind voters to the common good. “Place three individuals in a situation wherein the interest of each depends on the voice of the others, and give to two of them an interest opposed to the rights of the third? Will the latter be secure?” As an answer, Madison devised a constitutional regime whose purpose was to blunt the majoritarian excesses of an unconstrained democracy. In Federalist Paper No. 51, Madison famously expanded on the idea that republican virtue would not suffice. Men are not republican angels, he said, but self-interested seekers of private gain, and government should channel self-interest in such a way that it serves the public good. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” so that the overweening pursuit of advantage by one group is checked by other groups in the competition for power.
In general, country party members wanted a relatively weak executive and opposed a popularly elected president, while court party members preferred a president elected by the people, recognizing that this would clothe him with greater political legitimacy. But the distinction between the two parties blurs over an influential group of delegates, including Washington, who adhered to country party ideas about republican virtue, but who nevertheless wanted a strong national government—and who, sooner or later, saw a popularly
