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When the proposal for the Electoral College was voted on during the Constitutional Convention, Northern states with a lower slave population, unanimously voted for the proposal; yet, with the exception of Virginia, the Southern states, with a higher population of slaves, voted against it.
When the Constitution was drafted, slavery was practiced in every state, and the number of slaves did not give the Southern states a particular advantage. According to the 1790 Census, New York and Virginia were the largest slave-holding states north and south of the Mason–Dixon Line. If you subtracted the entire slave populations present in each state, Virginia still had a larger population of free people (over 136,000 more) than New York and still would have had more representatives in Congress and a larger electoral vote.
In fact one could argue that the Electoral College contributed to ending slavery, since Abraham Lincoln, having only earned 39.9% of the popular vote in 1860, nevertheless won in the Electoral College leading many Southern slaveholders to stampede to secession in 1860 and 1861. They could run the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the Electoral College would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents.
The Electoral College requires candidates to appeal to a broad cross-section of the American people, which in turn moderates and combats extremism and passions harmful to the country as a whole.
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