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.The Senate was in52 | CHAPTER 3effect an upper chamber, with senators chosen by state legislatures.59The president was chosen by the electoral college.Thus both Senateand president were selected by a process that filtered popular influencethrough the more prominent men who were more likely to gain officeas legislators or electors.The influence of popular majorities was fur-ther blunted by staggering elections for these different positions.Finally,representation was sharply skewed away from the population in favorof the states who were guaranteed equal representation in the Senate.The electoral college was also weighted to favor states, and it would bealmost two centuries before the  one man, one vote rule was appliedto House districts.60The People s House was the House of Representatives, whosemembers were to be chosen by direct election every two years, a pro-vision that more nearly reflected the precepts of radical democracy.States retained control of the franchise here as elsewhere, but theConstitution specified that those with the right to vote for the mostnumerous branch of the state legislature were entitled to vote for mem-bers of the House.61 This was the main concession to democratic feel-ing.Even here, however, radical democratic principles were sharplycompromised.House constituencies were huge, where the radicaldemocrats had insisted on small districts, and these large constituenciesfavored aspirants of stature, wealth, and visibility.62Then there was the judiciary, which in short order claimed ultimateauthority in interpreting the Constitution and thus became a coequalbranch.63 Not only did the Supreme Court assume the authority to vetoactions by the other branches and the states, but  in the guise of review-ing the constitutionality of state and congressional actions or inactions,the federal judiciary would later engage in what in some instances couldalso only be called judicial policy making or, if you like, judicial leg-islation. 64 The judges who assumed this authority were simplyappointed, and they enjoyed life tenure.Over time, the decisions of theCourt were to become crucial in protecting the propertied from gov-ernmental interference in response to popular pressures.These limits on popular majorities were complemented by thefamous division of powers among the branches of this new govern-ment.Wood characterizes this as a design  to prevent the emergenceTHE MOB AND THE STAT E | 53of any  common passion or sense of oneness among large numbers ofpersons. 65 As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist PaperNo.60,  The House of Representatives.elected immediately by thepeople, the Senate by the State legislatures, the President by electorschosen for that purpose by the people, there would be little probabilityof a common interest to cement these different branches in a predilec-tion for any particular class of electors.The founders began the Constitution with the resounding words We the people. The success of the campaign they waged to secureratification at state conventions hung on their democratic rhetoric, onthe argument that not only the legislature, but all parts of this new gov-ernment, would somehow represent the people.They adopted  theradical theory of the sovereignty of the people; in the name of the peo-ple they engineered a conservative counter-revolution and erected anationalistic government whose purpose in part was to thwart the willof  the people in whose name they acted. 66 And although forced toconcede the Bill of Rights, which had not been intended, they mounteda heavy-handed campaign that Jackson Turner Main thinks secured theadoption of the constitution despite the probable opposition of a major-ity of the population.67Volumes have been written about the American Constitution andthe multiple ways that its provisions blocked or channeled popular influ-ence.Although Americans may think it was the model for other nations,many of the arrangements I have highlighted remained unique amongdemocratic nations.68 But my main point for now is not that popularpower was limited by constitution-making, which it surely was.Rather,my point is that the disruptive power challenges of the revolutionaryperiod could not be ignored either.At the outset of their deliberations,the gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia had considered proposals byHamilton to give lifetime tenure to senators and the president, the bet-ter to distance the new government from democratic currents.Underthe circumstances, they did not dare.Instead, they conceded a republi-can form of government with neither property nor religious qualifica-tions for its officials, whose terms were also explicitly limited.And in theexigencies of battling for their proposals, they also conceded key popu-lar liberties, including freedom of speech and religion; the right to54 | CHAPTER 3assemble peaceably and to petition for redress of grievances, freedomfrom unreasonable searches and seizures, and a series of protections inlegal proceedings. [T]he notion, writes Keyssar,  that a legitimate gov-ernment required the  consent of the governed became a staple ofpolitical thought; and a new, contagious language of rights and equal-ity was widely heard. 69Moreover, in the decades following the adoption of the Constitution,the suffrage expanded.The framers had forced the issue of establishingthe prerequisites for suffrage onto the states, and in the states, propertyrequirements largely collapsed, albeit not all at once.Property require-ments were at first replaced with taxpaying requirements, but these toowere gradually eliminated.By the 1830s, most white men had at leastgained the right to vote.70 At bottom, writes Barrington Moore, the Revolution  was a fightbetween commercial interests in England and America, and its  maineffect was to promote unification of the colonies and their separationfrom England.71 But this was not the whole of it.True, the Americannational government was the construction of elites, craftily arrangedto hold the colonies together.But it occurred in the aftermath of a warthat had required the mass mobilization of ordinary people and theencouragement of democratic ideas. It seems unlikely, writesEdmund Morgan,  that the political, social, and cultural changeswrought in the name of equality since 1776 could have occurred underBritish rule.It was the Founders who made them possible by defying aking and creating a republic. 72 The constitution registered these influ-ences as well.What was remarkable about these events was not onlythe intelligence and ambition of the elites, but that the mob had playeda large if convoluted role in the construction of a new state with at leastsome of the elemental features of democracy.73Once constructed, these new institutional arrangements did not sim-ply suppress future disruptive challenges.Rather, the politics of electoral-representative institutions sometimes encouraged future outbreaks ofdisruptive protest.And electoral politics became the arena in which theimpact of disruption was registered and measured, and responses to itmolded.I will examine these dynamics as they unfolded in the extra-ordinary nineteenth-century campaign for emancipation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]