One of the reasons why some leaders believed that unicameral legislatures created more democratic governments was because bicameral ones often led to gridlock and political hardship.
Answer: All the members of the single house are elected by the people.
Context/detail:
The Articles of Confederation, which preceded the creating of the Constitution of the United States, employed a unicameral (single house) legislature. In the end, the United States Constitutional Convention in 1787 decided to go with a bicameral (two-house) legislature as a compromise between small states vs. large states in regard to representation. "The Great Compromise," as it became known, resolved a dispute between small population states and large population states. The large population states wanted representation in Congress to be based on a state's population size. The smaller states feared this would lead to unchecked dominance by the big states; they wanted all states to receive the same amount of representation. The Great Compromise created a bicameral (two-chamber) legislature. Representation in the House of Representatives would be based on population. In the Senate, all states would have the same amount of representation, by two Senators. In the original US Constitution, each state's senators were selected by that state's legislature, not directly elected by the people. The 17th Amendment changed that, so that now US Senators are also directly elected by the people. But we retain the two-house legislature as a way of balancing power between states with high populations and those with lower populations.
Some examples of this were the Fugitive Slave Act, Preston Brooks's attack on Charles Sumner, and the Dred Scott decision (the part of it which said that African Americans could never be citizens). None of these events tangibly hurt the North or the South.
Washington made the office of the presidency powerful by appointing a cabinet and proposing major legislation to Congress. But at the same time he defined practices that emphasized the republican character of the position.
