Reconstruction and the Electoral College

I want to draw attention to an interesting new article in The Journal of the Civil War Era entitled "Reconstruction, Racial Terror, and the Electoral College." Here is the Abstract:

The threats of “fake electors” and of legislatures choosing presidential electors are important in the Trump era. The question of how electors are chosen dates back to the Founding era, but the Electoral College achieved new salience during Reconstruction, when Florida’s Republican legislature called off its presidential vote in 1868. Klan terrorism against African Americans prompted that measure, and when Alabama’s legislature followed suit, it provoked a national backlash. After U. S. Grant’s election, a diverse coalition of congressmen tried to ensure that voters, not state legislatures, would choose presidential electors. The idea was broadly popular. In 1869 the Senate passed a “Sixteenth Amendment” mandating popular elections, but conflict between the two chambers over the Fifteenth Amendment killed it. Despite that outcome, the outcry against legislative selection had enduring consequences. The issue had been settled in the public mind; few ventured to raise it again until the twenty-first century.

The article observes that there was considerable debate in 1869 about the role of the Electoral College. Advocates of a constitutional amendment requiring a popular vote to appoint electors went out of their way to stress that states would retain broad power over the rest of the presidential election process, which is the point that Respondents are making in Trump v. Anderson. I may have more to say about this paper in a subsequent post.