Stephen Henderson

Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor

There’s a book on my shelf called “Negro President,” by historian Garry Wills.

It’s about Thomas Jefferson. That’s what some of Jefferson's critics called him after his election in 1800.

Why?

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Because his ascent to the presidency was powered, as one Boston newspaper put it, by a half-million slaves who had no more say in the election of 1800 than “New England horses, cows and oxen.”

The slaves counted for electoral purposes — each was good for 3/5 of a person in determining how many representatives each state had in Congress, and thus what power that state wielded in the electoral college.

But of course, slaves had no rights, and couldn’t vote. Their “will” was expressed by their owners.

Jefferson got 14 Electoral College votes that were apportioned to Southern states based on their slave populations. That margin put Jefferson over the top, and led to him, a slaveholder, being ridiculed as a “black” president.

Slavery, at that moment, defined the balance of power in the Electoral College and in the nation. It would do so for James Madison’s election, for James Monroe's, and for those of several other presidents before 1860.

The origins of inequality

One of the most confounding American qualities is our capacity to lie to ourselves about where things come from, or why that might matter today.

We’re really comfortable pretending that this nation’s most admirable ideals — especially the democracy that undergirds our system of government — is about freedom and liberty, and nothing else.

But of course, history intrudes, like a pest tapping you repeatedly on the shoulder, sometimes kicking you in the backside. And uncomfortable truths insist on rearing their heads, especially when it comes to the history of our democratic institutions.

The Electoral College is one of those institutions.

Its roots — and its profound influence on America's earliest presidential elections — sprouted from the South's determination to preserve its political power and the institution of slavery.

Southern states, outnumbered about 60-40 in population at the time of the Constitutional Convention, were panicked at the notion of a popularly elected president. They joined forces with other interests — those who wanted balance between large and small states, elites who feared popular ignorance, those who worried about urban domination of rural places — to design the Electoral College.

Slavery wasn’t the only impetus to dislodge popular democracy. But it was an important factor whose influence played out in dramatic ways in early America.

That history matters today, because it places the Electoral College pretty firmly along the spectrum of America’s struggle with inequality.

This is an institution that was born, in part, of a desire to preserve black oppression. (It also finds some roots in the elitism that looked down on less-educated popular voters.)

And so when we think about it, and especially if we think about changing it, we ought to have that inequality front of mind.

Balancing past and present

Politically, I respect some of the other, less racially freighted arguments for preserving the Electoral College, or some other mechanism to leaven the majority's unrestrained will.

We ought to worry about large, urban states marginalizing small rural ones. One of the most powerful ideas behind a constitutional republic is the check on naked majoritarian will, especially where it might smother the interests or rights of significant minority populations.

But we also ought to recognize how the very bigotry and extreme partisanship that gave rise to the Electoral College plays out today, in anti-majoritarian ways.

For a century after the end of the Civil War, for instance, Southern states enacted laws that prohibited or illegally discouraged black voting, reserving the South's electoral power for the purposes of white voters.

Now that black voting is finally expanding in the South, we see express efforts to suppress it. North Carolina legislators were smacked down by the federal judiciary this year for adopting voting restrictions that were expressly designed to disadvantage black voters.

Or think of the partisan gerrymandering that takes place in states like Michigan, which is designed, in part, to blunt the electoral power of minority voters (who tend to be Democrats) in places like Detroit.

In last week’s congressional elections, for instance, Democratic votes outnumbered Republican ones by a narrow margin. But because Republicans drew the congressional map, they were still able to maintain a 9-5 advantage.

If we’re going to talk about Electoral College reform, it can’t take place outside the context of the other anti-democratic dynamics that play out in electoral politics. Is there a balance that can be struck that makes things fairer?

Maybe.

We ought to be willing to indulge the conversation. We ought to be open to thinking through alternatives to the Electoral College.

But the path to a just result leads through our past — and an honest reckoning of how it matters today. Our penchant for deflection, for fantasies that feel good but crumble under the irrefutable weight of historical fact, is what stands in our way.

Contact Stephen Henderson: shenderson600@freepress.com.