Today the 538 electors in the Electoral College, whom we chose on November 4, meet to select the next president and vice-president. Most of them probably know that the Constitutional duties that they carry out today date from 1787’s Constitutional Convention. But how many of them know that what they do today is one of the remaining vestiges of slavery?
The taint of slavery not only played a part in rejecting direct election of the president, but also was a factor in how today’s Electoral College proceedings are being conducted in 51 cities around the country. From Findlaw:
The biggest flaw in standard civics accounts of the Electoral College is that they never mention the real demon dooming direct national election [of the president] in 1787 and 1803: slavery. ...
James Madison suggested that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: "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 Negroes."
In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote.
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Of course, the framers of the Constitution disagreed from the start of the convention on the role of the nation’s executive and on the method to select him, once they decided it would be a single person. That debate regarding direct national election of the president took place at various times during July and August, 1787, and the result did not take its final form until September 4, in the final days of the convention as the delegates sought to conclude things.
Before the direct election debate, the Founding Fathers wrestled with the problem of slavery throughout much of the first half of convention, and in particular, with the question of whether to include each state’s slave population in the calculation of the number of its representatives in the "national legislature," finally settling on each slave being 3/5 of a person.
By mid-July, 1787, the Grand (or Three-Fifths) Compromise had been hammered out. "The deal allowed the South to keep the three-fifths count for representation that had been used under the Articles [of Confederation] for calculation of state levies, as long as they also had a three-fifths count for calculation of taxes."
From an essay by law professors Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar, The Key Role of Slavery in the History of the Electoral College:
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the President. But in a key speech on July 19, the savvy Virginian James Madison suggested that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: "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 Negroes."
In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote.
Ditch Rickety Old Electoral College:
The real sticking point against direct election came from Southern states who feared being at a disadvantage since part of their population, slaves, was forbidden from voting.
Deadlocked between direct election and election by Congress, the convention referred the issue to the Committee on Detail, which revived Wilson's compromise proposal to have the president be "chosen by Electors to be chosen by the people of the several States." That last-minute compromise was how the Electoral College was born. It clearly is an artifact produced by deadlock. It is not a venerable institution to be saved at all cost.
Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law:
It was the end of a long, sweltering summer at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Delegates were anxious to finish, but a looming question remained: How would the new office of president be filled? Some delegates wanted Congress to choose. Others wanted popular election. That idea was overwhelmingly voted down—it would be "unnatural," warned one foe.
Southern states had extra representation in Congress because slaves were counted in the population, under the grand compromise that allowed the Constitution to move forward; a popular vote would wipe out that advantage, since slaves didn't vote. The delegates referred the mess to the Committee on Detail,
Richard E. Berg-Andersson, "The Green Papers":
[On] 20 July, there emerged a consensus for a system of the "electors" being appointed by the State legislatures (the devil was in the details as to how to allocate them among the States and this forced the issue to be put aside for the time being). ...
the whole kit n' kaboodle- like other thorny issues still outstanding- was simply dumped into the lap of the Committee on Detail.
[In August, t]his committee reported out that the President ... would be chosen "by ballot by the legislature"; ... but there was still strenuous objection to the election of the President by the national legislature at all. Gouverneur Morris was very much opposed to choice by the national legislature, but his attempt to have the President chosen by "electors to be chosen by the people of the several States" was voted down. The whole issue would now go to the Committee on Unfinished Portions (of which Gouverneur Morris was a member).
What was reported out of this committee on 4 September was quite different from what had gone in with it a little over a week earlier- essentially, the basic Electoral College system pretty much as it appears in the body of the original Constitution was presented to the Convention that day: each State would be assigned a number of Electors equal to the number of Senators and Representatives that State had in Congress; ...
So Electors, your numbers and to some extent the existence of your offices are the result of our nation's ignominious history of slavery. The Electoral College is a "last-minute compromise," "an artifact produced by deadlock," a flaw of "the real demon dooming direct national election of the president," a vestige of slavery that is still enshrined in our Constitution to this day.