The Founder’s Striking Difficulty of Negotiation | Dr. Nicholas Cole | Constitutional Conversations

0:00 very good and would you say that this process of negotiation where where you’re dealing with people from very different points of view you know you know famously north south but big states small states but just different cultural milieu ‘s Saves where you know there’s

0:20 religious freedom and and in states where you know there’s an established church and different economic points of view and so forth so you know how does this process of negotiation facilitate this idea of e pluribus unum out of many out of many different opinions than either from background we get one we get

0:43 this more unified view and understanding of the kind of government that they want and one that’s what the National Union you know out of these many different people I think it’s it’s striking how much behind all of the sorry sorry about

1:06 that how to edit that out um I think it’s striking that behind so many of the debates there is a sense that the the the states that are going to form part of the Union are so different that some things are simply impossible you know at one point James Wilson suggests that the

1:29 president should be elected directly by the people of the United States and that that suggestion doesn’t really go anywhere not I think because the convention were anti-democratic but because of an issue that also occurs when they’re thinking about how the

1:50 electorate for the House of Representatives should be constructed which is this it would be very very awkward for the federal government to involve itself in running elections where not only some states had slaves and some didn’t but states had different property qualifications and for the federal government to impose itself on

2:12 the state and tell them who their electorate was going to be for the House of Representatives would have been a very awkward thing indeed and so the convention finds a number of creative ways round that for the president of course they invent the Electoral College which is one way around this problem and

2:33 for the House of Representatives they say well the electorate for the House of Representatives of the United States must be the same as the electorate for the most numerous part of the state legislature so they sort of tie the tie

2:54 the federal electorate to the state Electro’s and say well you can’t have a more restricted electoral electorate for therefore the federal offices um without getting themselves involved in the question of defining who has the right to vote and that is frankly a way of respecting the fact that the states are

3:17 still converging even in the bits that we think of as the north and the most democratic and republican parts of the Union they were still converging on the idea of universal male suffrage in this period and and the the Federal Constitution has to respect the fact that that even northern states had

3:38 different views on who could vote and it by large the tempers at the convention tended to remain calm there are there are some exceptional moments but they tended to respect the fact that some language was going to work for some states and not work for others