Strange Political Bedfellows

Before 2000, the possibility that the winner of the popular vote would not become president felt like a novelty — after all, it had not happened since 1888. In 2024, after seeing this phenomenon occur in the 2000 and the 2016 elections, such an outcome would not be much of a shock. The uncertainty has rekindled arguments about whether the Electoral College should be abolished altogether and why the mechanism was invented in the first place. 

This essay focuses on the latter topic, as previous scholarship has neglected critical details about the Electoral College’s origins. In turn, understanding these details allows for not only a more informed conversation about the Electoral College’s past but also its future. 

Recent years have featured frequent scholarly debates about whether the Electoral College exists because of slavery. This dispute is aptly characterized by dueling op-eds in the New York Times published in April 2019 by scholars Sean Wilentz (“The Electoral College Was Not a Pro-Slavery Ploy”) and Akhil Reed Amar (“Actually, the Electoral College Was a Pro-Slavery Ploy”), with an additional retort by Sean Wilentz for the History News Network (“The Electoral College and the Myth of a Proslavery Ploy”). 

Amar and Wilentz’s disagreement, as well as other work on the topic, centers on whether the existence of a system of electors in the Constitution proves a connection between the Electoral College and slavery. We contend that this is the wrong focus. The most prescient slavery-related issue when delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 were writing the Constitution and determining the mode of presidential election was not whether there would be an Electoral College. Rather, it was how presidential electors would be chosen. 

Entering the debate over how to elect the president, delegates assumed that Congress would choose the executive — an idea shared by the Virginia and, later, New Jersey plans. On June 1, Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson suggested instead that the president be elected via a national popular vote. At the time, no other delegate spoke up for Wilson’s idea, but Virginia delegate George Mason suggested that Wilson “have time to digest [the proposal] into his own form.” That evening, Wilson did exactly that, and on June 2, he introduced his alternative proposal for an election via popularly-chosen electors from each state.*

Although Wilson’s Electoral College proposal was rejected on June 2 (leaving Congress as the de facto selector of the executive), it was resurrected in mid-July by his fellow delegate from Pennsylvania, Gouverneur Morris. When several other delegates spoke in support of the Electoral College, Wilson “perceived with pleasure that the idea was gaining ground, of an election mediately or immediately by the people,” according to James Madison’s notes from the Philadelphia Convention. 

If the Electoral College had been adopted by the Philadelphia Convention as proposed by Morris right then and there, the argument for connecting slavery and the Electoral College would be weak. After all, Morris was one of the most vehemently anti-slavery delegates at the convention, as was Wilson. Accordingly, supporting a system of electors did not by itself signify a pro-slavery stance.

While the idea of an Electoral College had more support in July as proposed by Morris than it had won in June as proffered by Wilson, it still lacked support from a majority of state delegations present — and did not receive the necessary backing to make its way into the Constitution until September 1787. 

To understand how the Electoral College became palpable to the full Convention between July and September, and the special role played by slavery, requires following the making of legislative sausage at the committee level. 

On September 4, the Pennsylvania delegates’ Electoral College proposal appeared in the report of the Committee on Postponed Matters, which was tasked with resolving outstanding questions related to the separation of powers and the mode of presidential election. But there was a catch: while the original proposal called for the popular election of presidential electors in each state, the committee’s report gave each state legislature discretion over how its electors would be chosen.

This change was primarily the work of two delegates: Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth and South Carolina’s Pierce Butler. On July 19, Ellsworth had motioned that state legislatures be empowered to select presidential electors. The following week, Butler, who made it clear throughout the convention that his top priority was protecting slavery in the Constitution, endorsed Ellsworth’s plan, convinced that it would protect South Carolina’s elite slaveholding interests more than leaving the choice of the executive to the people (either by direct popular vote or popular selection of electors). In a May 1788 letter, Butler claimed credit for the compromise that would push Ellsworth’s plan over the finish line: state legislatures would have the option of selecting presidential electors themselves, or delegating that power to the people of their states.

With this glimpse of the sausage making, we can begin to see how pro-slavery concessions brought the Electoral College, as we know it, to fruition. But while Amar and others have contended that this antidemocratic outcome was a case of the South getting its way, the evidence suggests that New England delegates assisted at every step. 

On July 19, the same day Ellsworth made his Electoral College motion, James Madison made a note often cited as evidence of a connection between the Electoral College and slavery: 

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.

In an often overlooked edit to this quoted statement, Madison crossed out “Eastern &” and replaced it with “Northern than.” The exact timing of Madison’s edit, as with other changes to his Convention notes, remains unclear. At a minimum, the change suggests that, as elsewhere in his Convention notes, Madison struggled in labeling different regional blocks of delegates. By attributing the Electoral College solely to Southern interests, Madison overlooked the complex coalition between New England and the lower South that negotiated the details of the presidential election system. 

The Electoral College was not the only joint project related to slavery between the two regions. The three New England states that sent delegates to the Philadelphia Convention (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire) also faithfully provided the lower South with decisive votes to limit Congress’ ability to ban and tax the slave trade. Many scholars have attempted to portray these votes as reluctant ones that resulted from a kind of “horse trade” for other regulatory measures that would benefit New England. But when we look more closely at timing and vote counts, this argument falls flat.**  

As historian Paul Finkelman has argued, New England delegates were not so much reluctant accomplices as they were enthusiastic stalwarts of the effort to protect the slave trade in the Constitution. On August 21, Ellsworth asserted that “the morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the States themselves — What enriches a part enriches the whole, and the States are the best judges of their particular interest.” Just as Ellsworth had predicted, the Connecticut state legislature took advantage of the opportunity to protect its interests five years later. In 1792, legislators dropped registration requirements for slaveholders in the state’s slave trade ban, making it easier to participate in the illegal slave trade undetected.

For over a century prior to the Philadelphia Convention, New England’s economy had profited handsomely from participating in the slave trade. Few industries went untouched. New England brewers made the rum in their distilleries using molasses harvested by enslaved laborers in the Caribbean. New England slave traders then carried that rum to Africa on ships built using timber from New England lands, insured by New England brokers, and paid for by New England stockholders. In Africa, New England’s slave traders exchanged rum and other goods produced by New England residents for enslaved individuals, which they then carried back to the Caribbean or the South and sold for an 800 to 1,000% markup. These handsome profits were then invested back into New England’s economy. In 1785, a correspondent for the Charleston Evening Gazette lauded the commercial acumen of the New England traders, writing that “such enterprising geniuses are the New Englanders, that I expect to hear of their sending vessels for slaves round the Cape of Good Hope.”

By 1787, the enslaved population in the upper South, particularly Virginia, had increased naturally for more than a generation. Accordingly, Virginia’s leaders favored a federal ban on the international slave trade, which would allow it to control the national slave market by selling its surplus enslaved laborers to other regions. At the same time, elites in states like South Carolina and Georgia believed that their economic independence depended on being able to continue importing enslaved Africans directly from Africa and the Caribbean, through a continued alliance with New England shipping interests. Their common economic dependence on the slave trade, if for very different reasons, made New England and the lower South strange political bedfellows.    

By moving to empower state legislatures to select electors, New England delegates were effectively adding an extra layer of protection for slavery and, particularly, the slave trade. 

Like their counterparts from the lower South, New England delegates saw state legislatures as a more reliable protector of those interests than the federal government. South Carolina’s David Ramsay said as much in January 1788, when he wrote to Massachusetts’ Benjamin Lincoln that “your delegates never did a more political thing than in standing by those of South Carolina about negroes” at the Philadelphia Convention. Historians have missed this connection, in part, by reading abolitionism, which barely existed in America in 1787, backward in time. 

What did New England gain for allying with the lower South over the Electoral College and other pro-slavery provisions in the Philadelphia Convention? At best, the record is mixed, with short-term protections of the slave trade in exchange for the dominating influence of slavery and Southern political interests in the early American republic. We need only to look at the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, who owed his victory over John Adams to the Electoral College, to see this mixed picture.

As president, Thomas Jefferson backed, and ultimately signed, the statute banning the external slave trade in the first moment allowed by the Constitution, January 1, 1808. Before then, New England’s slave-trading interest reaped modest benefits from Jefferson’s election. Contrary to John Adams, Jefferson appointed customs officials connected to Northern slave-trading interests. In slashing the Navy’s budget, combined with other measures, Jefferson also ensured that the U.S. slave trade ban would have toothless enforcement. Most significantly, though, Jefferson and nearly every president who followed him until the Civil War protected the broader institution of slavery — a position eventually out of step with New England’s values and political interests.

The lower South benefitted the most from its partnership with New England. The record of South Carolina highlights the particular connection between slavery and how states chose presidential electors. In 1800, Charles Pinckney, who had served as a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention from South Carolina, lauded “the exclusive direction to the State Legislatures in the mode of choosing Electors” in alluding to the “immense power of the President … [over] foreign connexions of the Union,” including the slave trade. By 1832, every state opted for the popular election of electors except for South Carolina, which continued its practice of having its state legislature choose electors until the Civil War. Given that the state had the most ardently pro-slavery delegation at the Philadelphia Convention and secured, with New England allies, state control over presidential electors, it is fitting that South Carolina’s legislature exercised the right until becoming the first state to secede from the Union. 

If we are to have an intelligent discussion about the Electoral College, we must acknowledge the paradoxes of its origin. The idea of electors was not by itself pro-slavery. However, the committee decision allowing state legislatures to decide how electors would be chosen clearly reflected slaveholding interests. Nor was this provision a simple Southern political coup; it required an active alliance of Northern and Southern delegates. Both the North and South bore responsibility for a presidential election system that buoyed the slave power for the next seven decades and continues to wield antidemocratic influence on our politics to this day.       

* All the records cited from the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 are from the first two volumes of Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911).

** For example, in return for protecting the slave trade, New England supposedly received the removal of the two-thirds requirement for navigation acts from the Constitution on August 29, 1787. The two-thirds navigation requirement first appeared in the report of the five-member Committee of Detail, which was tasked with writing the first draft of the Constitution. Two of these five members, Ellsworth and Massachusetts’ Nathaniel Gorham, were from New England. If Ellsworth and Gorham had wanted to strike the two-thirds navigation requirement from the committee’s draft without making concessions on the slave trade clauses, they could have done so. Their fellow committee member and Pennsylvanian James Wilson, who also opposed such a requirement, would have happily provided them with the third decisive vote. Accordingly, something other than “commercial regulations” must have been at play in New England’s decision to go along with the slave trade provisions in the committee’s report.