Gordon Wood
Creation of the American Republic
Nature of Representation
The Representative Legislature
• Legislature most important part of any
government
• “it is in their legislatures that the members of a
commonwealth are united and combined into
one coherent, living body. This is the soul that
gives form, life and unity to the commonwealth.”
• Significant even revolutionary shift of power from
executive to legislature (esp. in foreign affairs)
• In all but 3 states, legislatures bicameral
The idea of representation
• “great English discovery”
• Saxon?
• Impossible for whole people to govern,
therefore needed representation
• “feet on which government stands”
• John Adams—
– Legislature “should be in miniature an exact
portrait of the people at large”
Failure of English representation
• Commons had become unequally, irregularly and
inadequately representative
• Should have free and frequent elections
• “Dependence on the people”
• Long terms = big bribes
• State constitutions generally failed to include
frequent elections
• [“Inventing the people” Edmund Morgan]
A large electorate
• Representation and suffrage expanded by state
governments
• The fuller the house, the more difficult to corrupt
[Whig political science again]
• Suffrage expansion not so much because most
white males owned property and so already
voted
• Right to vote set on path of becoming “very
essence of American democracy”
Who should get to vote?
• Independent men, free of “temptation”
• Iredell – otherwise “lowest and most ignorant” would get
involved in public business
• [but cf. Condorcet jury effect]
• “For poor, shiftless spendthrifty men and inconsiderate
youngsters that have no property are cheap bought (that is)
their votes easily procured Choose a Representative to go to
court, to vote away the Money of those that have Estates.”
– Samuel Adams
• But growing dissatisfaction with this view
Tax liability 2009
How to protect from corruption
• State framers worried about corruption from
rich & powerful
• How to protect
• Laws against bribery
• Secret ballot
Equality of Representation
• Most important [ideal]
• “equal interests among people should have
equal interests” in the legislature
• England’s rotten borough system perpetuated
dominance by aristocrats and Court party
• Rotten boroughs were depopulated areas
over-represented under antiquated system
Virtual representation
•
Burke – Parliament a deliberative body representing one nation, not a collection of
local interests
•
Not bound to take advice of constituents
•
Colonists decisively rejected idea that Parliament virtually represented them
•
But did not completely reject virtual representation among themselves
•
Because British and Americans were not one people
•
Whether they realized it or not, Americans reaffirmed and strengthened Burke and
Blackstone – representative must represent the interests of the common weal
•
But virtual rep tended toward elitism (Why?) and in tension with replication ideal.
•
Nearly all states had property qualifications to be assembly members, higher than
that for suffrage.
Representation, Political obligation
and consent
•
If you take actual representation to logical conclusion, people bound only by laws to which
they consent via their representative (agents)
•
Medieval practice – corporate representation and consent – town must consent to be taxed
•
[virtual representation of small organic chunks]
•
[Who or what gets represented?
– Towns, townships, communities?
– Individuals? Selves?
– Social classes? Estates?]
•
Americans had not sorted all this out.
•
“In the years after 1776, without necessarily or clearly grasping the implications of what they
were saying, many Americans would increasingly press for a fuller realization of these
characteristics of actual representation and thereby threaten not only to undo the
intellectual foundations of their theory of politics and their republican experiments but also
to expose the whole representational process for the fiction that it was.” (188)