Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Part I: Context

     A number of years ago, in response to an event of some political significance having lately taken place in the United States of America, this discussion series turned its focus upon the form, function, and origins of the Electoral College by way of an examination of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No,. 68. It proved an interesting examination, all told, ranging as it did from the state of political literacy in the late 18^th century United States to the tensions which always seem to exist within political society between principle and expediency. And while it surely offered little in the way of solace to those who took the aforementioned politically significant event as cause for a sense of deep and desperate apprehension, it did hopefully provide some means by which feelings of confusion and frustration could effectively be situated within a constructive context. As it happens, an event of similar significance has only just passed. Exactly four years later to the day, in fact, which is more than enough reason to give one pause. Has it been that long already? Are we really doing this again? Haven’t we all gone grey enough? Yes, yes, and apparently not, it would seem. And what of the Electoral College? Do we understand it any better this time? Are there more mysteries yet to uncover which might be of use to us as the present maelstrom continues to unfold?    

    Upon consideration, the answer to both of these questions would likewise seem to be, “yes.” The discussion presented herein by way of Federalist No. 68 – which, *hint, hint* you really should take a look at if you haven’t already – was quite thorough, for what it was. The likely rationale behind the existence of the Electoral College was explored, and its evolution between the 1790s and 1820s, and the role played by the states. Some degree of speculation was even given over to the evident contradictions between how people like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison claimed the system was supposed to function and the degree to which they nonetheless participated in leading it in the complete opposite direction. But the starting point for all that followed was always Federalist No. 68, written by Alexander Hamilton and first published in the New York Packet in March of 1788. The reason that this represents something of an issue – and the reason that the resulting discussion broadened out almost from the start – is that Hamilton was but one of fifty-five men who attended the Philadelphia Convention (1787) and whose input helped shape the completed United States Constitution. Certainly, he had a hand in forming the system which would shortly become known as the Electoral College. Certainly, he signed his name to the finished document, and could therefore speak with some authority as to the intentions of those present when the project in question was finally finished and sealed. But even at the best of times, and with the best of intentions, attempting to discern how the and why the Electoral College came to be by paying heed to statements made after the fact is a bit like trying to intuit the design history of the VCR by carefully reading the instruction manual. The aforementioned discussion series, to be sure, goes in some very interesting directions in its attempt to explain how the system for electing the American President as it now functions actually came to exist. But it never really gets into the nitty-gritty of how and why the thing came to be in the first place. It never quite explores “the room where it happened.” So, let’s do that. Let’s open the door and step inside. Let’s go back to 1787.

    The surest way to do that at present, it turns out, is to read and to consider the tremendously detailed transcripts recorded by the aforementioned James Madison and published several years after his death in 1835 as Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. Unsurprisingly, given Madison’s famously studious habits, the man attended nearly every session of the Philadelphia Convention, recorded every major speech, carefully tallied every vote, and even made sure to request copies of the various plans of government proposed therein from their various authors. And while it is also true that Madison spent quite a lot of time in his waning years editing his various papers for the purpose of conveying a more consistent record of his thoughts and convictions for later historians to draw upon – evidence, it would seem, that even men of great wisdom and intelligence can be alarmingly vain – the transcriptions he made of the debates in question remain wholly without equal. Perhaps they don’t represent, to a word, exactly what happened, but nothing else comes anywhere close. Bearing all of this in mind, what do the Notes have to say on the subject of the Electoral College? How did the delegates in attendance arrive at such an ostensibly arcane system of election, and what, if any, were some of the alternatives proposed? Weighty questions, to be sure, and perfect fodder for what is certain to be yet another fascinating discussion. But first, as ever, a word or two to set the stage.

    Because there were, of course, quite a number of people who participated in the debates in question. Fifty-five, in fact, as noted above. And while it is true that not every one of them was present for every discussion which took place over the course of the Philadelphia Convention – an event, recall, which stretched from May 25^th to September 17^th – a number of them seemed to make a point of being more often in attendance than not, and of making their opinions known to their colleagues as frequently as the latter would allow. To that end, without going into exhaustive detail on any count, it would seem to make sense to spend some amount of time discussing a few of the names which appear with the greatest regularity.

    Forgiveness is begged, as ever, if what follows appears to go on rather at length…

    There was James Madison, of course, who was recording the lot as it occurred and contributed more often to the debates than just about any other delegate. Born in Port Conway, Virginia, in 1751, Madison was the eldest of twelve children of James Madison Sr. (1723-1801), one of the wealthiest planters and largest landowners in the whole of the colony’s Piedmont region. In 1769, seeking to avoid the supposedly pestilential lowland climate of the Williamsburg region – young James having been a sickly child – he eschewed attending Virginia’s College of William and Mary and instead enrolled at the College of New Jersey in the small town of Elizabeth. There, under the close tutelage of Scottish Enlightenment scholar and college president John Witherspoon (1723-1794), he engaged in a rigorous course of study, completing a bachelor’s degree that was intended to take three years within the span of just two. In spite of the intensity with which Madison approach his studies, however, he was unsure, upon graduating in 1771, whether he wanted to pursue a career in the clergy or study further and join the colonial bar. In the end, after staying on another year under Witherspoon, he returned home to Virginia without having arrived at any particular conclusion. Thankfully, as fate would have it, the current of history would sweep up Madison soon enough.

    In 1774, he was appointed to a seat on his local Committee of Safety, the purpose of which was to regulate the county militia in light of increasing tensions with British colonial authorities. In 1776, he was chosen to sit as a delegate in the Fifth Virginia Convention and helped author the state’s first republican constitution. Later that same year he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates and the Virginia Council of State, the latter of which introduced him to later friend and ally Thomas Jefferson, then serving as the state’s second governor. And three years later, in 1779, he took up one of Virginia’s seats in the Continental Congress By the middle of the 1780s, having witnessed firsthand the weakness of the government delineated by the Articles of Confederation, Madison had become one of the most strident advocates for the creation of a more centralized national administration and a avidly seized the opportunity to promote and to organize an interstate convention for exactly that purpose.

    And then, of course, there was Alexander Hamilton, aforementioned author of Federalist No. 68 and the only delegate from the state of New York to stay for the duration of the Convention. As is by now rather more well-known than it used to be, Hamilton was born on the tiny Caribbean sugar island of Nevis in 1755 or 1757, was orphaned by the time he was eleven or twelve, lost his cousin and guardian by the time he was thirteen, and survived a major West Indies hurricane before the passing of his twentieth year. When an account which he wrote of the maelstrom found its way into an edition of the Royal Danish-American Gazette in the late summer of 1772, the leaders of his local community were so impressed that they raised a collection so that he might pursue his education in the Thirteen Colonies. He subsequently arrived in Boston in October of the same year, spent some time at a preparatory academy in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and finally began a course of study at King’s College in New York in the fall of 1773. In 1774, in response to the pro-British pamphleteering of local Anglican clergyman Samuel Seabury (1729-1796), he penned his first published political writings, A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and The Farmer Refuted. Shortly thereafter, having been forced to cease their studies as a result of the British occupation of New York City, Hamilton and a group of his classmates joined a local militia company known as the Hearts of Oak.

    Some years later, having seemingly caught the attention of the Continental Army’s Commander-in-Chief as a result of his participation in a number of key engagements in the New York/New Jersey theatre, Hamilton was accordingly offered the role of Washington’s chief of staff, which he avidly accepted. Four years under Washington gave him copious experience dealing with both Congress and the state governments, grappling with logistics, and handling issues with personnel, all of which he put to very effective use after the war with Britain was concluded. In 1782, Hamilton gained appointment to the Continental Congress; as of 1785, he was serving in the New York State Assembly. By 1787, at which time he tool his seat at the Philadelphia Convention, he probably had the most personal experience with the deficiencies inherent in the national government under the Articles of Confederation of anyone in America, save perhaps Washington and Madison, and was among the most eager to see the selfsame government wholly reformed or replaced.  

    Nearest in temperament and knowledge to Madison – and similarly vocal during the Philadelphia Convention – was probably the Scottish-born James Wilson (1742-1798). A native of Fife who had attended some of the finest universities in Scotland – and thus, by extension, some of the finest universities in all of Europe – without ever attaining a degree, Wilson emigrated to colonial Pennsylvania in 1765, where he subsequently became an instructor at The Academy and College of Philadelphia. In 1767, after reading the law under prominent Pennsylvania lawyer and man of letters John Dickinson (1732-1808), he next attained the colonial bar and established a practice in nearby Reading that soon proved quite successful. In 1774, having quite possibly been influenced by his former mentor Dickinson’s prior attempts to argue in favor of the rights of the American colonists against increasing encroachment by successive British governments, Wilson made his first foray into revolutionary politics, writing and publishing a tract under the title, “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament.” Therein, with customary prosecutorial rigor, he outlined the various legal precedents behind the American claim of legislative independence, establishing firmly that the authority claimed by Parliament to tax the American people could only be legitimately derived from a fair representation of the same. Two years later, in 1776, Wilson was sent by the government of Pennsylvania as a delegate to the Continental Congress, wherein he became a firm advocate for independence and for close cooperation between Congress and Britain’s customary European enemy, France. By the late 1780s, his efforts having helped make possible the independence of the United States of America and the establishment of its first national government, he was highly regarded among his peers and fellow citizens as one of the foremost lawyers of his era and a skilled theorist on the subject of politics and political philosophy. 

    Beyond this first tier of the most influential participants in the Philadelphia Convention as a whole were a number of delegates who made key contributions to the particular series of debates which eventually gave rise to the Electoral College. First among them was almost certainly Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), a New Yorker by birth who was then representing his adopted home of Pennsylvania. Scion of a wealthy landed family from Westchester County from whom The Bronx neighborhood of Morrisiana takes its name. He received a bachelor’s degree (1768) and a master’s degree (1771) from King’s College in New York City, and in the early 1770s he studied the law under William Smith (1728-1793), a prominent lawyer and judge who later became Chief Justice of Lower Canada in the 1780s and 1790s. In spite of his impressive pedigree, however, and the professed Loyalism of a number of his closest relations, Morris became an early advocate for American independence after his family dispatched him as their representative to the New York Provincial Congress in the spring of 1775. Convinced of the need to secure the liberties of the American colonists at the cost of a continued connection to the British Crown, he accordingly went on to serve as a delegate to the New York State Assembly and the Continental Congress, the latter of which eventually appointed him Assistant Superintendent of Finance under prominent Pennsylvania merchant and speculator Robert Morris (1734-1806). Thereafter selected as one of the Keystone State’s delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, Morris spoke often and ardently from his experience as one of the nascent American republic’s chief administrators of the need for a more centralized national government that could effectively command the obedience of the many and various states.  

    Representing Virginia, George Mason (1725-1792) had played a prominent role in his home state’s early moves towards independence and was the principle author of its first republican constitution in 1776. In spite of his radical intellectual bona fides, however, Mason was very much the product of an intensely aristocratic upbringing. His father, George Mason III, had been of the most powerful and influential planters and landowners in all of northern Virginia, with interests in agriculture, fishing, and ferry services as well as several hundred slaves and a host of small-scale rent-paying tenants. The younger Mason inherited all of this at the age of twenty-one, his father having died over a decade prior, and proceeded more or less on the exact course that was expected of a member of the colony’s landed gentry. As a matter of course, he was elected to his local assembly and made an officer of the county militia (1747), ran for office as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses (1748), and became a municipal trustee in the newly-incorporated town of Alexandria (1754), all before the age of thirty. In 1758 he ran again for a seat in the House of Burgesses, this time successfully, and by the early 1760s was serving on a number of powerful committees responsible, among other things, for supporting the colonial militia during the ongoing Seven Years War (1754-1763), administering and monitoring elections, and dealing with local grievances arising from things like migration, trade, and Virginia’s domestic economy. But while none of these experiences would seem to indicate that Mason was destined for a life in revolutionary politics, something changed in him between his departure from the Burgesses in 1761 and his return to the political scene – albeit in the background – in 1764.

    Having previously been something of a minor figure in contemporary public affairs, Mason quickly established a name for himself during the 1760s and 1770s as both an outspoken critic of successive attempts by Parliament to lay taxes directly upon the Thirteen Colonies and a canny strategist who was always ready with a practical solution to the impasse of the day. In the middle 1760s, this meant drafting legislation intended to subvert or defy British measures like the Stamp Act (1765) or the Townshend Acts (1767). In the early 1770s, it meant calling for a colony-wide boycott of British goods in the event that the so-called “Intolerable Acts” (1774) were not entirely rescinded and reorganizing the Virginia militia so as to be totally independent of the royal government in Williamsburg. And by the wars years beginning in 1775, it involved service in the Continental Congress, the drafting of a constitution and a declaration of rights for Virginia, a return to the House of Burgesses – now called the House of Delegates – and countless hours spent both raising money for the purchase of much-needed supplies for the state militia and seeking some means of avoiding an undue depreciation of Virginia’s wartime paper currency. As of the early 1780s, given this near-constant state of activity, frequent illnesses, and his responsibilities as a single father of nine children, Mason was understandably exhausted. At long last retired to his plantation in Fairfax County, and newly married, he accordingly stymied plans for his re-election to the House of Delegates in 1784. Shortly thereafter, however, he began to take on series of bureaucratic appointments, and in so doing very slowly became involved in discussions concerning the potential alteration of the Articles of Confederation. He entertained a proposal put forward during a visit by fellow Virginian James Madison for granting the Continental Congress the power of taxation, took part in the Mount Vernon Conference (1785), during which it became clear that inter-state cooperation outside the auspices of the Articles was an acceptable course of action, and attended the Annapolis Convention (1786), during which a handful of delegates from five states who had originally intended to discuss potential modifications to the existing national government instead laid the groundwork for another assembly to be held in Philadelphia the following year. Being among its early proponents – and having come to appreciate the need for a stronger national government than presently existed – Mason was accordingly chosen as one of Virginia’s representatives at the resulting convocation in the spring of 1787.

    Roger Sherman (1721-1793), as is by now hopefully a matter of common knowledge, had been one of Connecticut’s delegates to the Continental Congress in the 1770s and 1780s, during which time he most famously served on the Committee of Five – along with John Adams (1735-1826), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), and Robert Livingston (1746-1813) – whose efforts ultimately produced the Declaration of Independence (1776). The son of a farming family located in what is now Newton, Massachusetts, Sherman was in many ways the very model of modesty wedded to talent. His formal education, such as it was, was very scant, extending no farther than a few years spent at the local grammar school near Dorchester where his family relocated in 1723. All the same, he showed an aptitude for self-directed learning, and made ample use of his father’s personal library between time spent as a shoemaker and a second relocation – following his father’s death in 1743 – to New Milford, Connecticut, where he and his brother, William, opened the town’s first store. By 1745, owing to his skill in mathematics, he had become the surveyor for New Haven County. By 1754, though he had no formal legal training, he had been admitted to the colonial bar. And starting in 1755, he began a period of service in the Connecticut General Assembly. Thereafter, in 1765, he became a judge of the court of common pleas, and in 1766 he accepted appointment to the Governor’s Council, an office which he continued to hold into the middle 1780s. Having thus attained a reputation for diligence, sobriety, and piousness as a result of his service in these various offices, Sherman was accordingly an obvious choice as one of Connecticut’s delegates to the Continental Congress, wherein he represented “the Land of Steady Habits” for eight years between 1774 and 1784. Likewise, when Connecticut was invited to send a delegation to an assembly in Philadelphia in May of 1787 to consider amendments to the Articles of Confederation, steady, even-keeled, and dependable Roger Sherman was naturally given the nod.           

    Edmund Randolph (1753-1813), while not as well-known as some of his fellow Virginians like Thomas Jefferson or George Mason, was nevertheless a member of an exceptionally famous Virginia family. His uncle, Peyton Randolph (1721-1775), had served as Virginia’s Attorney General for almost twenty years between 1744 and 1766 and was the Speaker of the House of Burgesses between 1766 and his death in 1775. And his father, John Randolph (1727-1784), had been a lawyer of some renown who likewise served as the colony’s Attorney General and was elected as mayor of Virginia’s capital at Williamsburg on two separate occasions in the 1750s and 1770s. Even his grandfather, Sir John Randolph (1693-1737), had been a figure of outsized importance, holding both the speakership of the Burgesses and the Attorney General’s office while also being the only native-born Virginian to ever receive a knighthood. Doubtless with these illustrious examples in mind, young Edmund’s life and career followed a fairly predictable trajectory. Like all of the aforementioned Randolphs he attended the College of William and Mary. And like his father and uncle, he read the law and was admitted to the colonial bar as a lawyer in good standing. He differentiated himself somewhat, it’s true, when he chose to side with the Thirteen Colonies and against the Crown during the Anglo-American crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. His father remained an ardent Loyalist and was accordingly forced to abandon his post as Virginia’s Attorney General when the revolutionaries essentially took over the state government. In the interim, Edmund joined the Continental Army and became one of George Washington’s inner circle of trusted aides-de-camp. But when his uncle, Peyton, died in 1775, he returned home to Virginia, was appointed to his father’s – and his uncle’s, and his grandfather’s – former post as Attorney General, and thus essentially assumed his place as the Randolph family’s representative in Virginia public life. He served in the Continental Congress for a time after that, between 1779 and 1782, and in 1786 was even elected Governor at the tender age of thirty-three. Indeed, at the time he arrived in Philadelphia to take part in the Constitutional Convention, he was still serving as Virginia’s chief executive, making him one of only two delegates present – along with Benjamin Franklin, the sitting President of Pennsylvania – then possessed of such high office.

    John Rutledge (1739-1800), of Charleston, South Carolina, had probably the most in common, among his fellow delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, with people like Randolph and Mason in terms of his upbringing, education, and career experience. A member, as with these selfsame Virginians, of a prosperous southern planter family, his life was in many ways set out well before he lived it. Tutored at home for the first decade and a half of his life – in keeping with the customs of his class – he was thereafter sent to London at the age of seventeen to attend Middle Temple, alma mater of some of the most prestigious lawyers in the whole of the British Empire. While in Britain, he reportedly tried and won several cases in English courts, and upon his return, though most young lawyers tended to struggle upon establishing a practice, Rutledge rather quickly became one of the most prominent barristers in his hometown of Charleston. By the early 1760s, being married, successful, and very soon to be a father, he appeared to have already settled into a very comfortable, prosperous existence. As with so many of his generation then living and working in the Thirteen Colonies, however, his life would soon be wildly disrupted by a series of unforeseen events. Sent by his fellow colonists to represent South Carolina at a conference in New York City organized in response to the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, Rutledge there first found himself thrust into the role of helping to lead the emerging opposition to Britain’s increasingly heavy-handed attempts to impose its unquestioned authority upon the Thirteen Colonies. His life did revert to some semblance of normalcy upon his return to Charleston – his law practice continued to prosper, he was elected to the colonial assembly, he and his wife had several more children, etc. – but this, too, came in for disruption in 1774 when Rutledge was again chosen by his countrymen to represent their interests at an inter-colonial forum. In this case, the forum in question was the Continental Congress, in which he served until 1776. At that point, pursuant to the terms of South Carolina’s newly adopted constitution, he was made the state’s first post-independence chief executive. He resigned from this same post in 1778, largely in protest after the state legislature overrode his veto on a new constitution which he believed strayed too close to direct democracy, but was reelected under a revised version of that same charter in 1779. His second term of in office was somehow more tumultuous than the first, culminating as it did with the British siege and occupation of Charleston in the spring of 1782. All the same, by the end of the 1780s he had been once more appointed as a delegate to the Continental Congress and was seen as a natural choice to represent South Carolina yet again at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787.        

    Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), of Marblehead, Massachusetts, is undoubtedly best remembered as the namesake of the so-called “gerrymander,” a political cartoon first printed in 1812 in the Boston Gazette meant to draw attention to the practice of drawing awkward legislative district boundaries for the purpose of discouraging competitive elections. There was more to the man’s life and career, however, than just this distinctly unpleasant and unwarranted association. Indeed, far from being someone for whom political impropriety came naturally, Gerry made a name for himself among his contemporaries as being possessed of a particularly rigorous sense of personal and professional integrity. The son of a prosperous merchant family, he attended Harvard College - like most men of his class in Massachusetts – attaining a bachelor’s degree in 1762 and a master’s degree in 1765. After several years spent in the employ of his father, he then began to involve himself in colonial politics, first as a member of the local committee in Marblehead responsible for discouraging colonists from purchasing imported British goods in 1770, and then as a member of the Massachusetts General Court in 1772. When this latter assembly was first dissolved in 1774 by newly appointed Governor Thomas Gage (1718-1787) in an attempt to curb its supposedly radical tendencies and then unilaterally reconstituted as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Gerry was elected to this body as well, during which time he made ample use of his family’s mercantile connections to secure weapons and supplies for both the Massachusetts militia and the nascent Continental Army. In 1776, he became a delegate to the Continental Congress, wherein he became a strong advocate – alongside fellow Massachusetts delegates John Adams (1735-1826) and Samuel Adams (1722-1803) – for a formal declaration of American independence and was one of its hardest working members, serving on a variety of committees and participating vigorously in countless motions and their accompanying debates. This period of invaluable professional service was unfortunately interrupted for a period of three years beginning in 1780 when Gerry chose to absent himself from proceedings in protest of what he felt to be improper observance of parliamentary procedure. In the interim – until he was finally convinced to re-take his seat in 1783 – he successively refused appointment to the Massachusetts Senate and to a seat on his local county court. Of the latter, offered by Gerry’s old friend, Governor John Hancock (1737-1793), he reportedly thought it his duty to refuse what might have appeared to some to be a purely patronage position. Upon his return to Congress, he became a vocal advocate for significantly reforming the Articles of Confederation, and doubtless for this reason was appointed as one of the Massachusetts delegates to the Constitutional Convention. 

    One of the delegates from North Carolina, Hugh Williamson (1735-1819) differed from certain of his more prominent colleagues at the Philadelphia Convention in that his political career to that point had been comparatively rather brief. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he successively attended the College of Philadelphia, graduating in 1757, taught at the Philadelphia Academy, studied theology under Rev. Samuel Finley (1715-1766), future president of the College of New Jersey, moved to Connecticut and obtained a preacher’s license, returned to Philadelphia and gained a master’s degree, became a professor of mathematics at his alma mater, decided to pursue a career in medicine, and thereafter studied at both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Utrecht. By 1764, not yet thirty years old and already onto his third major career, Williamson returned once again to Philadelphia, opened a private practice, and became a prominent member of the local scholarly elite. Though not necessarily inclined towards politics by nature – indeed, the partisan disputes which were then roiling the Presbyterian Church in Connecticut were the primary reason he ultimately returned to academia – his interest in education nevertheless led him into adopting the radical views of the contemporary colonial opposition. The seed of this ideological awakening was a trip to Great Britain which Williamson undertook in 1773 in an effort to raise funds for a planned educational endeavor.

    First, the vessel on which Williamson booked passage made a stop in Boston in early December before putting out sea, thus permitting him to witness, firsthand, the events of the so-called “Boston Tea Party” (December 6^th, 1773). Then, upon reaching London at the beginning of the following year, he was summoned before the Privy Council as a representative of his fellow colonists to account for what he had witnessed in Massachusetts and to answer questions about the colonies more generally. In the face of the ensuing interrogation – conducted, by and large, by men who were already intent on punishing the residents of Massachusetts – Williamson found himself rising to the defense of his American countrymen, warning the Privy Councilors against a harshly repressive response, and avowing without fail that all the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies desired was the rights to which they were entitled as Englishmen. His testimony having thus been recorded – and his partisan hackles having effectively been raised – he thereafter formed close relationships with like-minded Americans also resident in Britain – Benjamin Franklin most prominently among them – lobbied sympathetic British merchants and statesmen to support the colonies, proceeded to the Netherlands to organize the printing of pro-American pamphlets, and then proceed straight home to Philadelphia upon learning that the Thirteen Colonies had declared their independence. In the immediate, his desire to serve was somewhat stymied by a lack of openings in the Medical Service of the Continental Army, but Williamson found ways to be of use all the same. Using his European connections, he set up a system for the importation much-needed medicines, and in the meantime moved his medical practice to the village of Edenton on Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. It was there that he was finally accepted into military service when the governor, Richard Caswell (1729-1789) sought to raise a new militia regiment and appointed Williamson to the post of Surgeon General. The years that followed were particularly grueling, defined as they were by British victories at Savannah (1779) and Charleston (1780), guerilla campaigns waged across the region’s abundant swamps and wetlands, and the ever-present threat of smallpox and dysentery, but Williamson’s efforts did much to keep the units to which he was attached healthy and disease-free. By 1782, the war in the South having largely wound to a close, he returned to his adopted home in Edenton and was rewarded for his service by being elected to a seat in the North Carolina state assembly. Partway through his service therein, he was chosen to represent his state at the Annapolis Convention in 1786. And the following year, having been convinced by his war service of the need for closer cooperation between the states, he attended the convention held in Philadelphia for the purpose of modifying the national government.

    By comparison to someone like the aforementioned Williamson, Charles Pinkney (1757-1824) was someone for whom politics seemed a natural avocation. A native of Charleston, South Carolina like his fellow delegate John Rutledge, Pinckney was likewise the son of a prominent planter and lawyer who was born into the elite, married into the elite, and took to the elite pastime of public service with great avidity and success. First chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress at the stunningly young age of twenty, he began practicing law in Charleston at the age of twenty-one, enlisted in the colonial militia in 1779, was captured at the aforementioned Siege of Savannah, and was held prisoner by the British until 1781. Two years later, following his return to Charleston in 1783, he was again chosen to represent South Carolina in the Continental Congress, where he served from 1784 to 1787 between two of what would ultimately be three non-consecutive terms in the state assembly. During this time, while by and large a nationalist, his primary policy concerns nevertheless tended towards the needs of his Southern constituents. For example, though very much in favor of the United States presenting a strong, united front in negotiations with European powers like France, Spain, and Britain, his overriding goal was to secure unfettered American navigation of the Mississippi River. Doubtless in recognition of his service in such matters, his fellow South Carolinians elected him time and again to political office, up to and including his appointment to the state’s delegation to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787.

    Massachusetts-born Rufus King (1755-1827) was another of the delegates in attendance at the Philadelphia Convention whose political career had theretofore been fairly short. A native of Scarborough in what is now the state of Maine, King was the son of a moderately wealthy farmer/merchant/sea captain whose personal loses at the hands of local mobs enraged by the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 led him to pledge his loyalty to the Crown. Young Rufus, however, asserted his support for Congress and for American independence when, following his graduation from Harvard College in 1777, he chose to put aside his law apprenticeship under Theophilus Parsons (1750-1813) to join the Massachusetts militia. Commissioned as a major, he served under General John Sullivan (1740-1795) at the Battle of Rhode Island (1778), then returned to his studies and established a legal practice in Newburyport in 1780. Three years later, he was elected to the Massachusetts General Court. One year after that, he was sent by his countrymen to the Continental Congress. And in 1787, he was chosen to serve as one of the Massachusetts delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

    The men described above were not the only attendees of the Philadelphia Convention, of course. Nor, indeed, were they the only delegates who participated in the debates which produced what is now known as the Electoral College. But they represent, between them, both the largest contributors thereto and a reasonable cross-section of contemporary American society. Some were very wealthy, had arrived at public service as the typical vocation of their class, and seemed to take to the task of modifying the union of states with the goal of better preserving what they already possessed. Others were less fortunate, had risen to prominence as a result of success in business or by military service, and sought to bind the various states closer together so that the people of the United States might more effectively feel their combined strength. And some, regardless of where they came from, had just the right kind of mind – and the personal inclination – for turning political theory into political fact. Naturally, these different groups did not always agree on the best means for reforming the union of American states. And almost none of them – it cannot be stressed enough – came out of the process wholly satisfied with what they had achieved. But they all agreed, going in, that something had to be done. And they all agreed, going out, that imperfect solutions were better than no solutions at all. Valorous, this kind of attitude arguably was not.  But, if nothing else, it does explain a fair bit about how and why the United States looks the way that it does.