Federalist No. 68, et al, Part II: Trust and Abhor

            Bearing in mind the skewed Electoral College outcomes discussed in last week’s entry – those of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 – and the related assertion that the system was not intended to produce such strange contortions of the popular will, the question remains as to what precisely its designers thought they were up to. Federalist No. 68, also mentioned previously, provides in itself a fairly clear answer. Spun from the pen of the indefatigable Alexander Hamilton, this polemic essay was intended, along with the rest of the Federalist Papers, to convince the people of New York that the proposed national constitution then up for ratification represented a viable way forward for the nascent American republic. Its specific subject matter concerns the Electoral College itself, the logic behind its creation, and some of the benefits it offered the American people in facilitating their choice of chief executive. Hamilton, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 from New York, had helped to design many elements of the proposed constitution, and seemed to take particular pride in the power, firmness, and responsibility ultimately delegated to the executive branch. No. 68 very much reflects this sense of satisfaction and confidence, while also giving insight into some of the assumptions harbored by Hamilton and his contemporaries about the value of democracy, the dangers of populism, and the prudence of the average American citizen.     

Because the Federalist Papers were intended for popular consumption – the first seventy-seven of them were published originally in New York newspapers The Independent Journal and The New York Packet­ – and because the discussion they were a part of was about a document that had already been widely circulated, Hamilton did not go into very much detail in No. 68 when he discussed the Electoral College­ and the logic behind it. If his audience was interested in digging into the finer details of the system as described in the Constitution they were perfectly free to do so, and those for whom the document itself was too dense and legalistic doubtless appreciated having matters neatly summed up. The text of No. 68, therefore, tends to talk around the particulars of how the Electoral College was supposed to function. That being said, its intended purpose – as Hamilton conceived it – can quite easily be discerned from some of the strengths and benefits he ascribed to it. Consider, for example, a passage from the second paragraph of No. 68 in which Hamilton expressed his desire that the choice of President should in some way reflect the, “sense of the People.” This was best accomplished, he wrote, “By committing the right of making it, not to any pre-established body, but to men chosen by the People for the special purpose, and at that particular conjuncture.” From these words, several assumptions may be deduced.

Taking Hamilton’s wish that “the People” be involved in the choice of President at face value, it is significant that he also believed the selection of chief executive was best left to “men chosen by the People [.]” As important as the general citizenry were to the practice of republican government – and no American statesman of the period would have argued otherwise – the Framers of the Constitution evidently did not believe they were the ideal constituency to elect a president. Thus, by way of conclusion, it would seem fair to say that one of the purposes the designers of the Electoral College likely intended it to fulfil was for it to reflect the popular will while maintaining some degree of distance from it. At the same time, as Hamilton expressed, the selection of the American republic’s head of state should not have been left to a “pre-established body.” Presumably either of the houses of Congress would have fallen into this category, each possessing a set of responsibilities and an electoral timetable distinct to their intended purpose within the government of the United States. Hamilton seemed to conversely desire an association of men called into existence solely to elect the President, and as near in time to that event as was feasible. In consequence, a second assumption to be drawn from Hamilton’s words is that he and his fellow Framers desired the choice of chief executive to be made by men without any other official responsibilities who could be called to assemble, make their decision, and disband as quickly as made practical sense.

Echoes of these two assumptions recur again and again across the length of No. 68, lending further credence to the assertion that they represent the actual intentions of the architects of the Electoral College. Paragraph three, for instance, contains passages which strongly attest to the aforementioned desire on the part of the Framers to maintain an appropriate distance between the American electorate and the individual ultimately chosen to serve as their chief executive. In part, the approach was phrased as a question of suitability. Rather than leave the decision to the voting public at large, Hamilton asserted that,

The immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.

Taken at face value, this would seem to indicate that Hamilton and the other Framers did not believe that “the People,” to whom they nonetheless asserted the President ought to be beholden, had the ability to adequately analyze “the qualities adapted to the station [.]” Nor, it seemed, did they think that the average citizen of the United States in 1787 was possessed of the “Information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” This is where the Electoral College stepped in. Its members, chosen by the people and embodying the combined wisdom, discernment, and knowledge of their generation, would independently select the best candidate for President. Once more bearing in mind that Hamilton’s interpretation of the Electoral College may fairly be considered the closest to what its collective architects originally intended, it appears that the system was designed to delegate the final choice of President to the Electors themselves.

Granting that this sounds somewhat undemocratic by modern standards – reserving the responsibility for filling the highest office in the land to a small group of specially-qualified individuals – there were a number of practical reasons for the Framers to prejudice quality of elector over quantity. Even the relatively small percentage of the American population entitled by state electoral laws to vote at the time Federalist No. 68 was published were by and large not particularly well-educated. A large portion of the men that met the various property qualifications were independent farmers who had little need for higher education – their literacy, if they possessed it at all, was most likely of religious origins, or the product of home schooling, or was self-taught. Advanced education, of the kind that might instill a person with “information and discernment [,]” consequently remained the privilege of a small elite group within the larger American social body. The Framers, incidentally, were members of this same group nearly to a man, and doubtless harbored a high estimation of its collective analytic and deliberative abilities. Restricting the final selection of President to an assembly of men composed solely of members of this small subset of the general population was thus likely a practical admission to a very real problem – i.e. that the individuals perhaps best qualified to make the choice were so marginal in number that their expertise might easily be swamped if the vote were left to the general electorate. Gather these people together, however, and place them in a situation so that they might make full and effectual use of their knowledge and their cultivated rationality, and the entire nation may serve to benefit from their particular expertise.

In the fourth paragraph of No. 68, Hamilton shifted from talking about the qualifications necessary to elect a President to the broader social value of keeping the ultimate decision-making body as small as possible. “It was also peculiarly desirable,” he wrote, “to afford as little opportunity as possible for tumult and discord.” The Presidency, he asserted, was too important, and too powerful to allow the process of selecting its occupant to be marred by “mischief” of any sort. The Electoral College accordingly served to keep the process of electing the nation’s chief executive stable and secure by first taking the ultimate choice out of the hands of an easily exited multitude, and then by ensuring that the much smaller cohort actually tasked with casting the final vote were both disseminated across the various states and sequestered from the easily-inflamed passions of the general population. The former was made necessary, Hamilton wrote, because,

The choice of several, to form an intermediate body of Electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community, with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.

What this meant, essentially, is that it appeared to Hamilton and his fellow Framers that asking the voting public to choose a small number of Electors was far less likely to result in widespread tension and turmoil than would asking them to decide upon the single individual ultimately responsible for leading the nation. Knowing that only one man would ascend to that highest office, and recalling the power that would be at their disposal, the people might easily become aroused to a destructive kind of enthusiasm in an eagerness to see the elevation of their preferred candidate. Ask them to choose a slate of Electors, however, none of whom would occupy a position of permanence or power, and the stakes of the election would accordingly appear that much lower to the average American voter. Inflamed popular tensions thus circumvented, the choice of President could be made in the scouring light of reason and rationality. Or so Hamilton and his cohorts at the Philadelphia Convention evidently believed.

            The other remedy to social unrest that Hamilton believed the Electoral College offered pivoted upon the provision that the collective body of Electors would at no point meet at one place and at one time. “As the Electors,” he accordingly declared,

Chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the People, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.   

It would seem that the Framers feared the emergence of heated tempers from within the Electoral College in much the same way that they did concerning the larger electorate. The Electors, after all, would be tasked with deciding amongst themselves which single person was to occupy perhaps the most powerful public office in the United States government. Small though their number were intended to be, an accurate representation of the American people would surely create a group sufficiently large to be subject to the same kind of ferments that were so feared among the general population. But unlike with the general population, the decision could not further be delegated from the Electoral College to some higher, more exclusive body – a “Super Electoral College,” if you will – without sacrificing all sense of practicality. No, the decision could not be put off indefinitely; at some point, someone would have to actually elect a President.

            The solution Hamilton offered in No. 68 was quite simple, almost elegant. Rather than call the whole number of Electors together in whichever city was serving as the nation’s capital – in 1787 it was New York City, by 1790 it would be Philadelphia, and after 1800, Washington, D.C. – instead compel them to meet in their respective states and cast their votes for President there. Once each state’s Electors had made their voices heard, the results would be combined and a winner declared. This would serve to reduce the scale of the debate from more than one hundred Electors – the combined total as of the 1790 census – to just over twenty – the number assigned to the largest state, Virginia – thus providing for an atmosphere more conducive to reasoned discussion and less prone to the emotional volatility often seen in large-scale public assemblies. This arrangement also had the potential to prevent some of the “heats and ferments” that a thorough discussion of the best candidate for President was bound to generate from being communicated by the Electoral College to the general population. Specifically, by isolating the state delegations from one another, even someone with inside knowledge – a newspaper editor, say, in New York, or Virginia, or Maryland – would be more-or-less incapable of reporting on the whole of the debate taking place. The citizens of Boston might perhaps, through the ineffable power of gossip, discover how the Electors chosen by the people of Massachusetts were inclined to vote, but neither they nor those same Electors could know which candidate for President was the most likely to succeed until the votes of every state had been recorded and tallied. Doubtless a particularly enterprising individual with contacts in many states and access to several fast horses could cobble together a reasonable guess, but for the most part a divided Electoral College would help prevent what was supposed to be an informed and reasoned decision from devolving into popular turmoil.

            If the reasons Hamilton put forward in No. 68 for keeping the general population isolated from the final choice for President thus far seem somewhat patronizing, further discussion of the same will do little to alter that perception. Taking what is written at face value, it would seem that the Framers of the Constitution – and thus, the architects of the Electoral College – were of two minds as to the proper relationship between the American people and their chief executive. On one hand, they seemed to think that it was absolutely necessary for the general population to be the only body to which the President ought to have been held accountable. The passage quoted above from the second paragraph of No. 68 attests well enough to that. At the same time, however, Hamilton and his cohorts seemed to consider the American people as a whole too easily led by their passions to be trusted with electing the President themselves. Their perception of the aforementioned “tumults” and “convulsions” from which the general electorate needed to be shielded speaks to this rather paternalistic attitude, whereby the voters were viewed as something like children who possessed neither the judgement not the emotional maturity to cast the final vote themselves.

This almost paradoxical sensibility – that the American people were at once the sole legitimate source of authority in the republic and not at all to be trusted – in many ways mirrored the logic of the Constitution itself. In response to the “democratic excesses” of many state governments in the post-Revolutionary 1780s – the free reign given to populism, the disregard paid to certain types of private property, the widespread usage of unstable paper currency, etc. – a collection of statesmen, scholars, and private citizens determined to erect a system in place of the existing Articles of Confederation that would more effectively check and balance the energy and vitality of the American people against the needs of a stable and effective national government. The Electoral College formed a vital part of this response, and so its logic – as explored by Hamilton in Federalist No. 68 – embraces a seemingly contradictory respect and horror of the average American citizen.

Both sides of this dualistic understanding are further evidenced in No. 68 in the seventh and ninth paragraphs therein. Hamilton sought to explain in the former that, in addition to the advantages already discussed, the Electoral College also served the purpose of preventing a sitting President from feeling as though they owed their office to any constituency but the American people themselves. Were it otherwise, he cautioned, the chief executive might be, “Tempted to sacrifice his duty to his complaisance for those whose favor was necessary to the duration of his official consequence.” Consider, in this vein, a scenario in which the House of Representatives elected the President. Because the House would continue to exist throughout the chief executive’s term in office, it could presumably continue to exert some degree of influence over the direction and tenor of their administration (in the way of an ongoing quid pro quo). This would doubtless become particularly problematic during the months and weeks leading up to a prospective presidential re-election, when surely none but the most steadfast and unwavering individual could bear to resist the promise of a continued possession of the reigns of executive power.

The Electoral College could never exert this kind of influence on an American President because its membership was to be, by law, dispersed upon the performance of its sole official duty. Thus nullified, the Electors would be effectively powerless to cajole, pester, force, or otherwise direct their chief executive to do anything of consequence. The only remaining constituency to which any President could thus be considered beholden was that which had chosen the Electors themselves – i.e. the American people. This, Hamilton seemed assured, was only right and proper, both because he and the Framers believed that the citizen was the sole legitimate source of sovereignty in the American republic, and because the general population were ostensibly incapable of organizing to the degree of being able to extort favors from a sitting President. In this sense, the Electoral College further served the purpose of establishing a bond between the President and the people without unduly relying upon the expertise or deliberative skill of the latter. The collective knowledge and expertise of the Electors stood in for whatever the general population lacked, while the temporary nature of their appointment prevented them from becoming a power in their own right.

Hamilton gave voice to the other half of the dualistic “Constitutional formula” – in this case the Framer’s reticence to trust the American people too freely with consequential questions of state – in the aforementioned ninth paragraph of Federalist No. 68. Therein, while once more touting the virtues of the Electoral College, he casually made known his rather low opinion of the sense of discretion nurtured by the majority of his fellow countrymen. Delegating the election of President to an intermediate body, he first declared, all but guaranteed that the office, “Will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications [,]” because no candidate could succeed unless they had managed to cultivate the, “Esteem and confidence of the whole Union [.]” No more explanation was given than this as to precisely how the Electoral College facilitated this end. Presumably Hamilton was referring to the fact that the existence of an intermediate constituency between the people and the Presidency, and the fact that that constituency was divided into state delegations, ensured that a candidate could only ascend to the highest office in the land by appealing to the common interests of all – or at least the majority – of the constituent political communities within the United States. That is to say, he seemed to believe that the Electoral College ensured candidates would have to earn the support of the states – rather than the people – in order to be successful.   

Hamilton was somewhat clearer, however, in describing approximately what kind of individuals the Electoral Colleges was intended to screen out. Whereas he asserted that a successful candidate for President would require talents and qualifications enough to garner the esteem of the majority of the states, “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors of a single State” With this offhand reference, No. 68 substantiates the Framers’ evident contempt for the judgement of the average American citizen. After all, intrigue and popularity were values much despised by those men living in the late 18^th century Anglosphere who considered themselves to be of a gentlemanly persuasion. The classical republicanism that underpinned the American Revolution, along with the philosophical values of the Enlightenment prized by many of the Founders, took a similarly dim view of such low arts as deception and conspiracy, and of such base personal motivations as ambition and fame. It was therefore understandable for the Framers of the Constitution – as esteemed an assembly of self-conscious gentlemen and scholars as one is like to find – to have desired the office of chief executive to devolve upon someone who could honestly and openly appeal to the interests of the United States as a whole rather than rely upon cunning political strategy or personal reputation.

And yet, Hamilton opined in No. 68 that such base stratagems could potentially reward their practitioner with “the first honors of a single State [.]” Evidently he believed that while he and his scholarly cohorts were capable of seeing through and countering the appeal of flattery or fame, his fellow countrymen remained susceptible. Whether this was a judgement upon their lack of education, or their close-mindedness, or their credulity, the conclusion is essentially the same: Hamilton and the Framers did not wholly trust the American people to decide who ought to occupy the office of chief executive. This was perhaps another reason that the architects of the Electoral College chose to forego a strictly popular vote. Whereas a victorious candidate who had appealed to the discontents, fears, or ambitions of a particular social or economic class among the general population may well have been able to claim that they spoke for a sizeable percentage of their fellow Americans, their success could potentially have come at the cost of alienating entire states, or state government, or economic sectors, or social strata.

By the terms of the Constitution, the President was the only officer of the federal government who could claim anything close to a national mandate – rather than represent the states, or the law, they would represent the citizens of the United States. The legitimacy of this role would be much reduced, however, if the citizens they claimed to represent were spread inconsistently throughout the nation. To put it another way, the Framers – through the lens of Hamilton and Federalist No. 68 – seemed to think that the President of the United States could not simply claim to represent the working classes, or the farmers, or the merchants living in the various states. Consider, for instance, that merchants represented a major economic force in New England but were much less influential in the South. A President who rose to power on the back of supporting open trade policies, or making credit more freely available, or encouraging the growth of manufacturing might thus have enjoyed widespread support in the Northeast and almost none at all below the Mason-Dixon Line. While a potentially successful strategy, this hardly represented a national mandate.

Involving the states in the presidential election process – in the form of Electors – theoretically helped prevent such an outcome by ensuring that candidates for President would need to reach beyond particular demographics or economic communities and find the common ground between the nation’s integral political jurisdictions. The Electors – designated representatives of their state’s various social and economic communities – would facilitate this by meeting in their respective state capitals and bringing forth their issues, or concerns, or desires in open discussion. The fruit of these discussions would be the final vote for President, shaped by the input of Electors speaking for their neighbors, and their colleagues, and their co-religionists, and themselves. Thus, rather than appeal only to the merchants clustered in New England, or the planters on their estates in Virginia and Maryland, or the workingmen of New York, or only the city-dwellers, or only the country-dwellers, a prospective president would need the support of whole states, each one a mix of these and other communities and interests.