August 9, 1787: Should Immigrants Serve in the Senate?

James Wilson by James Barton Longacre, after Jean Pierre Henri Elouis, 1825. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

"Mr. WILSON said he rose with feelings which were perhaps peculiar; mentioning the circumstances of his not being a native and the possibility, if the ideas of some gentlemen should be pursued, of his being incapacitated from holding a place under the very Constitution which he had shared in the trust of making."
— James Madison's notes

Thursday, August 9, 1787

How long a citizen?

The draft required senators to have been citizens for at least four years. Gouverneur Morris (PA), seconded by Charles Pinckney (SC), moved to make it fourteen. A lively debate followed.

Against a long wait: Ellsworth (CT), Madison (VA), Franklin (PA) and Randolph (VA). They recalled how many foreigners had helped the United States in the Revolution, and hoped talented people from abroad would settle here and serve in the government.

• Wilson (PA), an immigrant from Scotland, spoke of the "discouragement and mortification" immigrants must feel at "the degrading discrimination now proposed" — and found it "grating and mortifying" that the Constitution he had worked so hard on might bar him from the Senate.

For it:

• Butler (SC), himself an Anglo-Irish immigrant, said foreigners bring attachments to other countries and ideas of government so different as to be dangerous. Had he entered public life soon after arriving, he admitted, his foreign habits and loyalties would have made him unfit.
• G. Morris said he "would not trust" immigrants in the Senate: people who can shed their love of their own country can never love another, and those attachments are "the wholesome prejudices which uphold all governments." Seat a Frenchman, he warned, and he'll push French commerce; an Englishman, English.

The votes

• Fourteen years: failed 4–7 — New Hampshire, New Jersey, Georgia and South Carolina in favor.
• Thirteen (Morris) and ten (Pinckney): both failed by the same vote.
• Rutledge (SC) argued the Senate, with more power, needed a longer wait than the seven years set for the House. Williamson (NC) agreed: with senators chosen by state legislatures — a few men — bribery and intrigue would be easier than in House elections by the people.
• Nine years, proposed by Randolph: passed 6–4–1 — Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Maryland against, North Carolina divided.

The Convention also briefly revisited the federal government's power to regulate elections, but made no significant changes.

In short

• The day's main argument: whether immigrants could make good senators.
• The Constitution would require senators to have been U.S. citizens for at least nine years.

Around the Convention

• Johnson (CT) dined at his boarding house, paid Matthew Cary nine shillings, and spent sixty shillings on wine.
• Washington (VA) dined at John Swanwick's and spent the rest of the day in his quarters reading letters from home.
• Blount (NC) wrote to his brother in Washington, North Carolina. On his way from New York he had inspected Robert Morris's (PA) iron works near Trenton (at Morrisville, Pennsylvania), paid close attention to its nail works, and suggested the Blounts might profitably put some of the people they enslaved to work in a similar business.
• Elbridge Gerry (MA), forty-three, wrote to his wife of a year and a half, Ann Thompson Gerry, twenty-one, telling of his return to Philadelphia with Hamilton (NY) and how he missed her and their infant daughter.

Philadelphia today

• Clear and warm until afternoon, then showers and an evening thunderstorm.
• Samuel Magaw, chairman of the American Philosophical Society's building committee, asked the directors of the Library Company to meet: would they buy the Society's unfinished building on the State House Yard, or share it? Behind the offer: the Society had run badly short of construction money.

The series: The Constitutional Convention: A Day-by-Day Account for August 1 to 15, 1787 · previous: August 8, 1787: Slavery and Representation · next: August 10, 1787: Qualifications and Quorums

Sources

Based on "August 9, 1787: Immigrants as Senators," The Constitutional Convention: A Day-by-Day Account, Independence National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The 1825 portrait is in the public domain.