Property owners were thought to have a more long-term stake in the republic, rather than potentially transient, mobile citizens.
Only later was universal suffrage given to all American men, regardless of whether they owned property. The Founding Father's tempering of the direct, democratic will of the populace was further expressed by the fact that in the original constitution, members of the U.S. Senate are elected by the (democratically selected) state legislature, rather than by the direct will of the people. The 'removed' or representative, republican element of the constitution in its original form was even more extreme in the original constitution, in terms of the electoral process and the incomplete enfranchisement of even the male populace.
Another fear, besides the fickleness of the populace expressed by Madison was that of factionalism, that in a pure democracy the populace would have the ability to form self-interested factions and exert an undue influence, disproportionate to their actual numbers, through those factions. Factions could override the rights of individuals, just as the fickle will of the democratically expressed voice of the populace could override the rights of minority individuals, and members of minority...
Power would be dispersed on the federal level between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and all powers not specifically delineated in the Constitution would be relegated to the state. By dispersing power through elected entities rather than the popular will, Madison hoped that no single faction would dominate all of government, as there would be no singular branch that could exclusively dominate the other, in his idealized vision of the emerging country's government.
Works Cited
American Constitution. Cited in Making Connections: Reading American Cultures. 2000.
Madison, James. The Federalist Paper, No. 10. Cited in Making Connections: Reading American Cultures. 2000.
