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The Making of an American House of Lords: The U.S. Senate in the Constitutional Convention of 1787*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Elaine K. Swift
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College

Extract

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution saw the Senate as their paramount creation. To James Madison, it was “the great anchor of the government,” and in his seminal plans for a new national government, the Senate figured as the most prominent and powerful institution, to be endowed with a potent combination of legislative, executive, and judicial prerogatives that were greater and more wide-ranging than those of either the House or the president. In the four months that the Framers met in Philadelphia, they spent more time and energy deliberating on the Senate than on any other single institution or issue, devoting most of the first seven critical weeks to the upper house, and thereafter, though more scattered, the equivalent of another week or two of consideration. In contrast, they focused on the House, executive, and federal judiciary for a few weeks each at most, and spent even less time on such vital issues as sectionalism and slavery. By the end of the Convention, the Framers had created an imposing chamber, possessing far more power and autonomy than any other upper house heretofore created in independent America. Small wonder, then, that in assessing the work of the Convention, the influential delegate from Connecticut, Roger Sherman, pronounced it “the most important branch in the government.” Smaller wonder still that the Framers would comprise over half the membership of the first Senate.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

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56. Madison, “Federalist No. 38,” in ibid., 238.

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58. Hamilton, “Federalist No. 15,” in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 107.

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64. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 288.

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69. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 159.

70. Ibid., 1: 20.

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72. Hamilton, Federalist No. 36, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 217, and Hamilton, Federalist No. 35, in Ibid., 214.

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75. Ibid., 1: 20.

76. Ibid..

77. Ibid., 1: 24.

78. Ibid., 1: 25.

79. Ibid., 1:21.

80. Ibid.

81. Phillips Payson, “A Sermon,” 1778, in American Political Writing, eds. Hyneman and Lutz, 1: 531.

82. Madison, Federalist No. 10, in Hamilton et. al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter. 82.

83. Wood, Creation, 483, 411. Emphasis in original.

84. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 562.

85. Madison, Federalist No. 48, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 308.

86. Madison, Federalist No. 51, in Ibid., 320.

87. Hamilton, “Federalist No. 71,” in Ibid., 433.

88. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 179.

89. Of the other two small states, Rhode Island refused to send a delegation to the Convention, while the delegation from New Hampshire would not attend the Convention until July 23, 1787.

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95. Ibid., 1: 167.

96. Ibid., 1: 461.

97. Ibid., 1: 49, 1: 50.

98. Ibid., 1: 155–156.

99. Voting at the Constitutional Convention was conducted on the basis of state delegations. The position of a majority of a state's delegates determined the delegation's vote. If the delegates were evenly divided, the delegation's vote was also recorded as a division.

100. Ibid., 1: 201.

101. Ibid., 1: 449.

102. Ibid., 1:447 Emphasis in original.

103. Ibid., 1:316:449.

104. Ibid., 1:448, 1:449

105. Ibid., 1:428; 1:490.

106. Ibid., 1:428; 1:406; 1:154; 1:490.

107. Ibid., 1:167

108. Ibid.m 1:578

109. Ibid., 1: 259. Emphasis in original.

110. Ibid., 1: 321.

111. While New York was a large state, its delegation often took the same position as most small-state delegations. As Zagarri explains in The Politics of Size, p. 65, New York “had prospered under the Confederation, and they resisted any strengthening of the national government at the state's expense.”

112. Ibid., 1: 468.

113. Ibid., 1: 468–469. Emphasis added.

114. Ibid., 1: 522. Emphasis in original.

115. Ibid., 1: 524.

116. Ibid., 2: 7.

117. I applied factor analysis to a transposed matrix with roll-call votes as cases (rows) and states as variables (columns), estimating the factor solution with unweighted least squares (ULS), using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). As the first step in the factor analysis, I identified those Convention votes related to the creation of the Senate as watchdog. Because of the difficulty in judging the substantive implications of procedural votes to postpone, adjourn, and so forth, I excluded them from consideration. I identified watchdog votes as those that dealt with the state legislative election of senators and the equal apportionment of Senate seats to each state. Because the mode by which House members would be elected and apportioned was decided during the same time, and was from the start closely linked with decisions on Senate selection and apportionment, I also included votes on this topic. All together, I analyzed 49 of the total 569 roll call votes cast at the Convention. They were votes 3, 4, 5, 7, 29, 32, 37, 40, 41, 65, 67, 71, 72, 87, 105, 106, 108, 110–112, 115, 118, 120, 122–129, 134, 136–145, 147, 149–152, 154, and 156. These numbers are the same as those contained in the Journal portion of Records, ed. Farrand.

Second, I prepared the database on these questions using the voting data that Jillson, Calvin C. has conveniently assembled in Appendix A of Constitution Making: Conflict and Consensus in the Federal Convention of 1787 (New York: Agathon Press, 1988)Google Scholar. However, where Jillson excluded those votes by state delegations in which they divided, I included them on the grounds that they supply valuable information on that state's issue positions. I assigned them a value of 1.5, halfway between aye, with a value of 1, and no, with a value of 2. The inclusion of divided votes follows Arend Lijphart's treatment of abstentions in bloc votes in the U.N. General Assembly. See Lijphart, , “The Analysis of Bloc Voting in the General Assembly: A Critique and a Proposal”, American Political Science Review bl (12 1963): 910Google Scholar. On factor analysis generally, see Kim, Jae-On and Mueller, Charles W., Introduction to Factor Analysis (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1978)Google Scholar and Kim, and Mueller, , Factor Analysis: Statistical Methods and Practical Issues (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1978)Google Scholar. For an important application of factor analysis to the work of the Constitutional Convention as a whole, see Jillson, Calvin C., “Constitution-Making: Alignment and Realignment in the Federal Convention of 1787”, American Political Science Review 75 (09 1981): 598612Google Scholar, which is incorporated in his larger work, Constitution Making.

118. Factor scores are ranked by absolute values. The sign of the factor score reflects direction, not magnitude.

119. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 423.

120. Ibid.

121. Ibid., 1: 373.

122. Ibid., 1: 372–373.

123. Ibid., 1: 427.

124. Because it preserved the intermediate position of divided votes, city block was the measure of distance chosen. The use of this measure of distance ruled out those methods of cluster analysis based on Euclidean distance. Of the cluster methods still viable, the average linkage between groups was selected because it provided a solution between the extremes produced by single linkage and complete linkage methods.

On cluster analysis, see Alderderfer, Mark S. and Blashfield, Roger K., Cluster Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1985)Google Scholar; Everitt, Brian, Cluster Analysis, 2nd. ed. (New York: Halsted Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

125. Those votes analyzed were: 58, 59, 60, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, and 103. Numbers used are those in Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention.

126. Madison, James to –, 03 1836 [sic], in Records, ed. Farrand, , 3: 538Google Scholar.

127. Records, ed. Farrand, 2: 5.

128. Ibid., 2: 94. Emphasis in original

129. Ibid., 2: 94.

130. The members of the committee of detail were chair John Rutledge of South Carolina, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and James Wilson of Pennsylvania.

131. Records, ed. Farrand, 2: 290.

132. Ibid., 2: 292.

133. Ibid., 2: 292.

134. The following roll call votes were analyzed: 205, 206, 207, 255, 268, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 292, 293, 558. They are numbered as they are in Records, ed. Farrand.

135. Main, Upper House, 225.

136. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 287.

137. Roy Swanstrom, The United States Senate, 1787–1801, 162. Following ratification, state legislatures did issue instructions and during the Senate's first two decades of existence, Senators often obeyed them although they were under no legal obligation to do so. After this period, while legislatures continued to issue them, Senators increasingly ignored them and the practice died out. See Swift, Elaine K., “Reconstitutive Change in the U.S. Congress: The Early Senate, 1789–1841,” Legislative Studies Quarterly XIV (05 1989): 175203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

138. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 112.

139. Ibid., 1: 150.

140. Ibid.

141. Ibid.

142. Eidelberg, The Philosophy of the American Constitution, 91. Emphasis in original.

143. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 426–427; 2: 291. Property requirements were also dropped because many Framers thought a national standard difficult to formulate and potentially a bar to the service of those whose wealth was otherwise invested. See Ibid., 2: 121–124.

144. John Jay, Federalist No. 3, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 43.

145. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 298; Debates, ed. Elliot, 2: 298.

146. Jay, Federalist No. 64, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 391.

147. Madison, Federalist No. 63, in Ibid., 384.

148. James McClurg to James Madison, August 5, 1787, in Hutson, James H., ed., Supplement to Max Farrand's The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 205Google Scholar; quoted by Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, June 2, 1787, in Records, ed. Farrand, 3: 33; William Pierce, ”Character Sketches of Delegates to the Federal Convention,” in Ibid., 3: 89; Madison to William Short, June 6, 1787, in Ibid., 3: 37.

149. George Mason to George Mason, Jr., June 1, 1787, in Ibid., 3: 32; William Pierce, “Character Sketches,” in Ibid., 3: 90 and 3: 88; James McClurg to James Madison, August 5, 1787, in Supplement, ed. Hutson, 205.

150. Jay, Federalist No. 64, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 395; Phillips Payson, 1778, “A Sermon,” in American Political Writing, eds. Hyneman and Lutz, 1: 528.

151. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 428; 2: 204. Might wealthy Senators nonetheless be tempted to aggrandize themselves and their colleagues of more modest means to make their fortunes? In The Federalist Papers, Madison anticipated this obvious objection. Because the Framers were ever aware that men were not “angels,” and “[e]nlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” the Constitution, the country's territorial expanse, and other conditions all provided numerous checks and balances to prevent such an abuse of power (Madison, Federalist No. 51, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 323; Madison, Federalist No. 10, ibid., 80). While The Federalist Papers, which soft-pedaled the Constitution's elitist nature, emphasized the importance of checks and balances, behind the closed doors o the Convention, the Framers discussed their primary reliance senators would be primarily drawn from the landed, manufacturing, and commercial interests, they would not thereby be ‘the tools of opulence and ambition.’ Rather, they would be committed to quashing ‘symptoms of a leveling spirit,’ yet willing to forego ‘illicit advantage’ or ‘artful misrepresentations’ to champion the greater good (Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 423; Madison, Federalist No. 63, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, p. 384).

152. Madison, Federalist No. 52, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 329.

153. Records, ed. Farrand, 3: 454.

154. Madison, Federalist No. 62, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 380.

155. Hamilton, Federalist No. 71, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 434.

156. Debates, ed. Elliot, 2: 302.

157. Ibid., 2: 319. Emphasis in original.

158. Ibid., 2: 319; 2: 317. Emphasis in original.

159. Ibid., 2: 320.

160. Hamilton, Federalist No. 30, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 188. While the House alone would possess the power to originate “[a[ll Bills for raising Revenue,” Madison observed that “[e]xperience proved” that this afforded the lower chamber no advantage over the upper. “If seven States in the upper branch wished a bill to be originated,” he explained, “they might surely find some member from some of the same States in the lower branch who would originate it (Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 527).”

161. Madison, Federalist No. 63, in Ibid., 384.

162. Hamilton, Federalist No. 66, in Ibid., 403. Emphasis in original.

163. Hamilton, Federalist No. 70, in Ibid., 423.

164. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 66.

165. Madison, Federalist No. 48, in Ibid., 309.

166. Hamilton, Federalist No. 70, in Ibid., 423.

167. Madison, Federalist No. 47, in Ibid., 302.

168. Hamilton, Federalist No. 70, in Ibid., 430.

169. Madison, Federalist No. 63, in Ibid., 383.

170. Records, ed. Farrand, 1: 156; 1: 151.

171. Ibid., 1: 87.

172. Madison, Federalist No. 63, in Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 389.

173. Webster, Noah, “An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution,” 1787, in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Ford, Paul Leicester (Brooklyn, NY: n.p., 1888), 3738Google Scholar.

174. Madison, Federalist No. 63, in Ibid., 390. Emphasis added.

175. Swift, “Reconstitutive Change in the U.S. Congress.”

176. It was this reconstitution of the Senate from an American House of Lords to a distinctively American kind of upper chamber that saved it from the fate of the institution on which it was based. Unlike the Senate, the British House of Lords responded too little, too late to the same kind of pressures for change. Faced throughout the nineteenth century with successive waves of suffrage expansion, popular demands for greater governmental activism, and other democratic forces, it refused to reconstitute itself, preferring to conserve its aristocratic form and functions as long as possible. In the early twentieth century, of course, the House of Lords was finally forced to reconstitute. Under the government's threat of creating numerous new peers to break the impasse, the chamber passed the Parliament Act of 1911, thereby approving the removal of its primary power of absolute veto. This reconstitution effectively consigned the Lords to the wholly ancillary place it now occupies in British government. See Southern, David, “Lord Newton, the Conservative Peers and the Parliament Act of 1911,” in Jones, Clyve and Jones, David Lewis, eds., Peers, Politics and Power: The House of Lords, 1603–1911 (London: Hambledon Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

177. See, for example, Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), chapter 2Google Scholar.

178. See, for example, White, Leonard D., The Federalists (New York: Free Press, 1948)Google Scholar.