James Madison Responds to Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz, Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University, just announced in a New York Times op-ed that he retracted his earlier opinion on the origin of the Electoral College.  In NO PROPERTY IN MAN: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, published by Harvard University Press in September 2018, Wilentz concluded “the evidence clearly showed the Electoral College arose from a calculated power play by the slaveholders.” Now Professor Wilentz asserts he was mistaken. “There is a lot wrong with how we choose the president. But the framers did not put it into the Constitution to protect the South.”
 
If I understand Sean Wilentz's new position on the origin of the Electoral College, it, like slavery, was an undemocratic element of the new Constitution endorsed by writers from the North and South who feared slave insurrection, democratic insurgencies like Shay’s Rebellion,  and popular government, who represented slave states (there was still slavery in most of the North) or commercial interests tied into the slave trade, and probably got a slaveholder elected President in 1800, but historians shouldn't conclude that they considered that the Electoral College, like the 3/5 clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the ban on banning the slave trade for 20 years, might protect slavery. 
 
I don’t consider myself equipped to debate either the earlier or later positions taken by Professor Wilentz, but I thought James Madison might be, so I decided to consult his Notes of the Constitutional Convention.
 
Hugh Williamson representing North Carolina seems to have first introduced the idea of an Electoral College in discussion of an Executive on June 2, 1787. On Wednesday July 25, 1787, the Constitutional Convention debated a series of proposals for selecting a national “Executive.” 
 
Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut moved “that the Executive be appointed by the Legislature." Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who later refused to sign the Constitution, argued that “an election at all by the Natl. Legislature was radically and incurably wrong; and moved that the Executive be appointed by the Governours & Presidents of the States.” James Madison of Virginia noted that “There are objections agst. every mode that has been, or perhaps can be proposed. The election must be made either by some existing authority under the Natil. or State Constitutions — or by some special authority derived from the people — or by the people themselves. — The two Existing authorities under the Natl. Constitution wd be the Legislative & Judiciary.” Madison opposed the judiciary and legislative options as  “liable to insuperable objections.”