Maryland Senate

The Maryland Senate is presented by James Madison as a practical test of the claim that an indirectly elected, relatively durable upper chamber would threaten republican liberty. Its record, he argues, offers no symptoms of the tyranny critics feared: initial jealousies faded as the institution operated, and its reputation grew from that experience.

Structure and constitutional design

The Maryland Senate was elected indirectly by the people, in a manner Madison compared with the proposed federal Senate. Its term was only one year shorter than the federal chamber’s contemplated six-year term. The Maryland body also possessed a notable power absent from the federal design: it could fill its own vacancies during its term. Nor was it subject to the rotation provided for the proposed federal Senate. These features, Madison observed, made Maryland’s Senate a stronger test of the charge that an indirectly chosen, comparatively insulated senate might become dangerous.

The comparison was not exact. Madison acknowledged other differences that could furnish colorable objections to the Maryland arrangement but did not apply to the proposed federal chamber. His argument therefore relies on the Maryland example as relevant evidence, not as a claim that the two institutions were identical. Indeed, the federal Senate’s rotation rule and its lack of the Maryland Senate’s vacancy-filling prerogative supplied distinctions that, in his reasoning, made the proposed institution less exposed to the alleged danger.

The experiment and its reception

Critics of the proposed Constitution had loudly warned that its Senate could become a vehicle for aristocratic power. Madison answered that if this danger were real, the Maryland Senate should by then have shown at least some signs of it. He reported that no such symptoms had appeared. Instead, suspicions initially held by people who feared the federal Senate’s corresponding features had gradually disappeared as Maryland’s arrangement was tried in practice.

That change in opinion was itself part of the evidence. Madison described the Maryland constitution as increasingly gaining a reputation from the salutary operation of this part of its design, a reputation he considered unlikely to be matched by another state constitution in the Union. The point was not simply that the chamber had survived: experience had altered how its design was judged. What had first seemed a source of danger came to be associated with beneficial operation.

Role in the constitutional argument

The Maryland example belongs to a broader case for assessing constitutional arrangements through experience rather than suspicion alone. Elsewhere in the essays, Madison argues that the defects of the existing Confederation became unmistakable only in actual operation: the required concurrence of thirteen sovereign states repeatedly obstructed national measures, state defaults accumulated, and Congress was left scarcely able to maintain the forms of administration. He also cautions that the defects in a new constitutional plan may not be ascertainable until trial reveals them. The Maryland Senate supplies a favorable counterpart to that warning: an institution’s operation can allay fears as well as expose failures.

Madison places the example alongside the British political system, but the contrast makes the Maryland case especially pertinent. The British upper chamber, he notes, was hereditary and composed of wealthy nobles, while the lower house had longer terms and a much narrower electorate than the proposed American House of Representatives. Yet British history, in his account, showed the upper chamber unable to resist encroachments by the popular branch and eventually crushed after losing the monarch’s support. Against both this comparison and the Maryland experience, the feared trajectory of the proposed Senate appeared to Madison less a demonstrated danger than an unsupported prediction.