On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.”The room was full of political elites from around the country, painfully aware of recent advances against the interests of the wealthy by what Randolph called democracy. Far from opposing ordinary people’s agitation for political equality, some state legislatures had even been active on the people’s behalf, devaluing revolving high-interest loans and thus hurting merchants and big landowners. Nor were the wealthy being paid an anticipated 6 percent interest on their financial investment in the War of Independence. Shays’ Rebellion, an armed uprising against taxing ordinary citizens to bail out the lending and investing class, had frightened the Massachusetts legislature so badly that it repealed the taxes and pardoned the rebels.
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania assembly, once the most august in America, was now full of representatives of the formerly disenfranchised. In the very building where Randolph was addressing the convention, that assembly had shut down a Philadelphia bank on the grounds that it financed only its partners’ speculations and denied small farmers credit, calling the bank’s charter the property of the people, not the bankers; it was also contemplating a war-debt payoff that would erase profits for investors. There were similar movements all over the country. Nervous elites worried that private property would eventually be seized and redistributed. They could do little about it. Such were the “imbecilities,” as Randolph put it to the delegates, of the Articles of Confederation that united the states.
But he had a solution. Dispense with the confederation, Randolph urged the room, and form a national government. General George Washington, chair of the convention, agreed; so did James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and many more. Some of the delegates disliked certain specifics of the solution that Randolph proposed. Others were leery of forming a national government at all. Famous debates proceeded, but the delegates never debated the nature of the danger they faced. It was democracy. They’d gathered in Philadelphia to defeat it.
What the delegates meant by the word democracy could vary. People sometimes used the word to mean “the mob,” short for mobile vulgus, an excitable crowd: protest, riot, and violence by people denied legal access to power. But sometimes democratic referred to nothing more violent or radical than lawmaking by an elite legislative body that was overly sensitive to the desires of its elite constituents. There are only a few examples of the term’s having positive connotations. Patrick Henry once said that he was coming around to becoming a John Adams–type democrat, yet nobody more harshly disparaged what he labeled “democratical” schemes than Adams himself.