Some down-in-the-weeds founding U.S. history for you.
I made an error in my forthcoming book THE HAMILTON SCHEME. I said that James Wilson, delegate from Pennsylvania to the Constitutional Convention, and one of the major legal minds behind the resulting document, opposed the creation of what we now call the Electoral College and argued that the executive should be chosen instead in an unmediated election by the qualifed voters throughout the country: a popular vote.
Those of you who know some constitutional history may be saying, “No, that’s not an error, you’re fine, Wilson did oppose the Electoral College,” because the false impression that he did is all over the literature. I know enough about Wilson that I’ve had to strain, for years, to reconcile this seemingly democratic impulse regarding presidential elections with the anti-democratic nature of so much else he did. I could have saved myself the trouble, just by looking more skeptically at the widespread sense that Wilson opposed the creation of the Electoral College.
He didn’t oppose the creation of the Electoral College. And the reasons for saying he did are revealing.
For one of many popular examples of this mistaken notion about Wilson opposed the Electoral College, see Akhil Reed Amar, “The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists.” As Amar puts it there:
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: ‘The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes’.”
The same idea can be found in more detail in Amar’s book America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2006): an approach to presidential elections at once democratic and anti-slavery, put forth by Wilson, was overcome by Madison’s opposition on behalf of the slavery states. Today’s version of the institution, not only manifestly anti-democratic, is thus tainted by origins that make it first, foremost, and essentially racist, beginning as a prop for the institution of slavery.
But Amar is misreading the exchange he quotes. Wilson and Madison were in fact fully aligned.
And that’s by no means surprising. It’s widely understood that Wilson, Madison, and others caucused privately in an effort to achieve certain shared results at the convention. Differences occurred within that group—but less on policy than on what to say when, and this Electoral College issue was not one of them.