American founders’ words help us understand the importance of Nov. 3 election
Having experienced the abuses of monarchy, the framers and ratifiers of the U.S. Constitution had a healthy fear of unchecked power in any one branch of government, and so they created a government with multiple branches designed to check each other.
Future second President John Adams stressed this principle in his “Thoughts on Government” pamphlet, which guided delegates at the Constitutional Convention, and future fourth President James Madison made it central to his framework for the document those delegates drafted. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote in Federalist Paper 51.
Yet both Adams and Madison realized that these internal checks were insufficient to secure liberty, establish justice or promote the general welfare.
Madison referred to them as “auxiliary precautions” in Federalist 51. Instead, he maintained, “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government,” which is why the Nov. 3 election matters.
Madison argued that ‘people will have virtue’
“The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy,” Benjamin Franklin warned in his closing speech at the Constitutional Convention. Yet, having secured some provisions designed to check executive power and protect voting rights, Franklin urged delegates to support the Constitution because, under future first President George Washington, he believed that the government “is likely to be well administered for a course of years.”
He trusted Washington’s much vaunted republican virtue to restrain executive abuse. In his state constitution for Pennsylvania, Franklin strictly limited executive power and included populist checks on legislative power. Like Adams and Madison, he thought free, fair and frequent elections served as the bulwark of liberty.
These issues came to a head in convention debates over approving the U.S. Constitution by Virginia, the final key state for securing its ratification. Madison and his Federalist allies went toe-to-toe with anti-Federalist skeptics led by Patrick Henry over the question whether the Constitution would enhance or endanger individual liberty and the public good.
Relying on the standard checks-and-balances answer, Federalist delegate George Nicholas responded to Henry, “Can we trust, he says, our liberty to the President — to the Senate — to the House of Representatives? We do not trust our liberty to a particular branch: One branch has not the whole power. One branch is a check on the other.”
Henry and his allies saw their opening. What if the branches did not check each other, they asked. What if they were complicate in the abuse of power?
Here Madison returned to the first principle of representative government that had guided the founders from the outset:
“But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”
Will we retain our republic after 250 years?
Madison’s first principle of representative government highlights the importance of Nov. 3. Voters are the first and last line in the defense of liberty. Voting stands as the ultimate check in our constitutional system. We should trust ourselves, not our leaders. The only assurance of their virtue lies in our choice of members of the House of Representatives and Senate who will preserve the internal checks inscribed in the Constitution and not be complicit in abusing power.
Using language likely to resonate with puritan New Englanders, Adams echoed Madison’s warning when he later wrote, “Avarice, Ambition, and Revenge … would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.”
Similarly, Franklin predicted in his closing speech at the Convention that the Constitution would “end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government.” For each of these founders, voters and voting mattered.
When asked by Elizabeth Powell as he exited the Convention on its last day what form of government the delegates had crafted, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
That “you” is us, and his “when” is now. Vote as if our republic depends on it.
Former head of the University of Georgia history department and holder of the Talmadge Chair in Law, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Edward J. Larson is the author most recently of “Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters.”
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