CW, 1:450
Patrick W. Tompkins, a Kentucky-born Whig congressman from Mississippi who lived in the same boardinghouse as Lincoln during his one term in Congress, shared with his fellow Whig a letter he had received from Josephus Hewett, a mutual friend. Ten years earlier, Hewett had practiced law in Springfield, Illinois, and Lincoln used the correspondence to renew their acquaintance. What moved Hewett to consider rejecting the electoral college system of holding national elections is unknown. Lincoln admitted to having once agreed with his correspondent, but came back to the formulation conceived by the Founding Fathers to balance the three parts of government. He did so in part, as this letter makes clear, because direct elections would actually decrease the power of the slave states, since they could no longer count three-fifths of the black population as specified in the Constitution. A master strategist in the mold of Henry Clay, Lincoln rejected proposals that would upset the power relationship between free and slave states. According to Lincoln, Hewett, another transplanted Kentuckian, had not considered the unintended consequences of his idea. “Have you ever reflected on these things?” he inquired.
Whig Ticket showing Lincoln’s first run for the Congress in 1846; he served only one term as an Illinois U.S. representative. Courtesy, Chicago History Museum.
Washington, Feb. 13. 1848. |
Your whig representative from Mississippi, P. W. Tompkins, has just shown me a letter of yours to him. I am jealous because you did not write to me. Perhaps you have forgotten me. Dont you remember a long black fellow who rode on horseback with you from Tremont to Springfield nearly ten years ago, swiming [sic] your horses over the Mackinaw on the trip? Well, I am that same one fellow yet. I was once of your opinion, expressed in your letter, that presidential electors should be dispensed with; but a more thorough knowledge of the causes that first introduced them, has made me doubt. Those causes were briefly these. The convention that framed the constitution had this difficulty: the small states wished to so frame the new government as that they might be equal to the large ones regardless of the inequality of population; the large ones insisted on equality in proportion to population. They compromised it, by basing the House of Representatives on population, and the Senate on states regardless of population; and the executive on both principles, by electors in each state, equal in numbers to her senators and representatives. Now, throw away the machinery of electors, and the compromise is broken up, and the whole yielded to the principle of the large states. There is one thing more. In the slave states, you have representatives, and consequently, electors, partly upon the basis of your black population, which would be swept away by the change you seem to think desireable. [sic] Have you ever reflected on these things? . . .