Note 115 — Chapter VIII

I understand Mr. Madison to have voted for this proposition, and that his view of it was, that it might be a necessary expedient to prevent a dangerous union of the legislative and executive departments. He said that the propriety of the plan of an executive during good behavior would depend on the practicability of instituting a tribunal for impeachments, as certain and as adequate in the case of the executive as in the case of the judges. His remarks, of course, were predicated upon the idea of a final necessity for retaining the choice of the executive by the legislature. In a note to his "Debates," appended to the vote on this question, it is said: "This vote is not to be considered as any certain index of opinion, as a number in the affirmative probably had it chiefly in view to alarm those attached to a dependence of the executive on the legislature, and thereby to facilitate some final arrangement of a contrary tendency. The avowed friends of an executive 'during good behavior' were not more than three or four, nor is it certain they would have adhered to such a tenure." (Madison, Elliot, V. 327.) By "the avowed friends of an executive during good behavior," I understand Mr. Madison to mean those who would have preferred that tenure, under all forms and modes of election. I can trace in the debates no evidence that any other person except Gouverneur Morris was indifferent to the mode in which the executive should be chosen, provided he held his place by this tenure. Whether Hamilton held this opinion, and adhered to it throughout, is a disputed point. In a letter to Timothy Pickering, written in 1803, he says that his final opinion was against an executive during good behavior, "on account of the increased danger to the public tranquillity incident to the election of a magistrate of this degree of permanency." In proof of this view of the subject, he remarks: "In the plan of a constitution which I drew up while the Convention was sitting, and which I communicated to Mr. Madison about the close of it, perhaps a day or two after, the office of President has no longer duration than for three years." (Niles's Register, November 7, 1812.) In this he was probably mistaken. (See Hamilton's Works, II. 401. Madison, Elliot, V. 584.)