Some men at the Convention were ahead of their times. Mr. Pinckney of South Carolina was already thinking democratically along the lines of Andrew Jackson a generation later. Mr. Wilson was anticipating the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Wilson was one of the lesser known Pennsylvanians present. (Franklin, of course, was the best known man in the world.) Wilson took seriously the idea that all power derived from the people. Toward the end of the Convention when the delegates began addressing the means of electing the president, Wilson decided to pitch his idea of direct popular vote to Madison. He invited "Jemmy" over for dinner.
Wilson set a goood table, and afterwards he took Madison out to his back yard where he had installed a putting green. Wilson had come from Scotland as a boy and still spoke with a Scottish burr. He was an avid golfer, but with Philadelpia lacking a good golf course, Wilson contented himself with the little green in his back yard.
He put a club in Madison's hands and attempted to teach him a good golf swing, all the while keeping up a one-sided conversation about his plan for electing the president by popular vote. (Wilson was tall while Madison was quite short, so I see a comical Mutt-and-Jeff image in this scene.)
Madison was polite, but he knew he would never be able to sell Wilson's idea. Hamilton, the lead Nationalist, viewed the people as "the mob" and would oppose it adamantly. The States' Men would never buy it because it de-emphasized the role of the states and pushed toward a consolidated union, something that had killed Hamilton's grand design on Day One.
Wilson's idea was a non-starter, and in the final days of the Convention, the Electoral College was cobbled together from a number of different plans. No one was happy with it, but it was the best that could be done.
In 1829, Jackson picked up where Wilon had left off.
(Headed for bed.)
In any event, upon researching my GGGGG Grandpa who sat in the PA Assembly, I came across a letter that he and two others wrote to one B. Franklin expressing their concerns about the upcoming vote at the Constitutional Convention.
They expressed grave concern regarding the fact that the document left too open the possibilities that:
The American people would one day suffer an egregious tax burden.
And, that press might coagulate into a "cabal" that would attempt to undermine the country.
Go figure.
Apologies, I slipped. I should have written "via an electoral college". But I didn't realize that the term was limited to 7 years.
Reading the primary source it is now clear to me that there is much myth about what Hamilton believed, or at least what he publicly presented as his platform.
His "grand speech" was apparently his version of how the Constitution should read. In it I could find no evidence of some of the proposals ascribed to him and found some new ones:
1.) There is no proposal in his platform to dissolve states or eliminate their sovereignty to govern. Non-sovereign provinces would have, by definition, made him a *non* federalist.
2.) Likewise, nothing to have the 'president' appoint State governors. He only stated that they shall be "appointed by authority of the United States"; leaving the exact mechanism not Constitutionally prescribed.
3.) He proposed a two-tiered electoral college
4.) He advocated requisite qualifications for Senators as land-holders.
5.) He was more liberal about letting Congress determine details now explicit in the "Madisonian" Constitution. Example: he prescribed 6 to 12 Justices for the Supreme Court and offered no fixed number.
Still reading