The People as Constituent Power 173
tine, as shown in the Massachusetts convention of 1780, which had been followed
by a New Hampshire convention, and new constitution for New Hampshire in
- The Philadelphia convention went beyond the existing constituted bodies,
that is, the state governments and the Congress under the Articles, by appealing
for support directly to the people, who in each state elected, for this purpose only,
conventions to discuss, ratify, or refuse to ratify the document proposed by the
convention at Philadelphia. The authors of the proposed federal constitution
needed a principle of authority; they conceived that “the people were the fountain
of all power,” and that if popularly chosen conventions ratified their work “all dis-
putes and doubts concerning [its] legitimacy” would be removed.^22 In each state, in
voting for ratifying conventions, the voters voted according to the franchise as
given by their state constitutions. No use was made of the more truly revolutionary
idea, still alive in Massachusetts in 1780, that on the acceptance of a government
every man should have a vote. In some states the authorized voters were a great
majority; in none were they a small minority. The actual vote for the ratifying
conventions was light, despite protracted public discussion, because most people
lost interest, or never had any, in abstract debates concerning governmental struc-
ture at the distant federal level. Eleven states ratified within a few months, and the
constitution went into effect for the people of those eleven states. The remaining
two states came in within three years. The whole procedure was revolutionary in a
sense, but revolution had already become domesticated in America. The idea of
the people as the constituent power, acting through special conventions, was so
generally accepted and understood that a mere mention of the word “convention,”
in the final article of the proposed constitution, was thought sufficient explanation
of the process of popular endorsement.
Nevertheless, men of popular principles, those who would soon be called demo-
crats, and who preferred the arrangements of the Pennsylvania constitution, with
its single- house legislature to which the executive was subordinated, found much
in the new federal constitution not to their liking, at least at first sight. The new
instrument reproduced the main features of the Massachusetts constitution of
1780: the strong president, the senate, the house of representatives, the partial ex-
ecutive veto, the independent judiciary, the separation and balance of powers. In
fact, the longer tenure of offices—four years for the president, six for senators, two
for representatives, in place of the annual terms for corresponding functionaries in
Massachusetts—shows a reaction away from revolutionary democracy and toward
the giving of more adequate authority to those entrusted with public power. The
president was not popularly elected, like the governor in Massachusetts; but nei-
ther was he designated by the legislative assembly, like the president in Pennsylva-
nia and governors in the Southern states. He was elected by an electoral college,
with each state free to determine how its own share of these electors should be
chosen. Although as early as 1788 almost half the states provided for popular elec-
tion of presidential electors, it was not until 1828 that this became the general and
permanent rule. In the federal constitution the unique feature, and key to the main
compromise, was the senate. Not only did large and small states have the same
22 Quoted by Brown, op.cit., 140.