06 January 2008
The Great Compromise and Other Compromises
On June 13, 1787, the Virginia Plan, with some revisions, was reported out of the Committee of the Whole.
On June 15, 1787, William Paterson, speaking for the plan's opponents, introduced the New Jersey Plan. Under this plan, each state would have an equal vote in a unicameral Congress. Resolving themselves once again into a Committee of the Whole, the delegates debated the merits of the Virginia and New Jersey plans.
On June 19, 1787, the committee voted, seven states to three (with Maryland divided), to stay with the Virginia Plan. The matter remained unresolved, with votes settling into a pattern of six states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia) against Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, with Maryland divided. In late June, Connecticut's Oliver Ellsworth proposed a compromise -- population to be the basis for representation in one house, the states to have equality in the other.
In early July 1787, the convention voted on Connecticut's proposal for state equality in the Senate, but the motion failed on an equal division (with Georgia divided). The convention appeared to be deadlocked. Looking for a way out of the predicament, South Carolina's Charles C. Pinckney asked for the appointment of a grand committee. That committee then ratified what has come to be called the Great Compromise -- proportional representation in the lower house, states' equality in the upper house. Even though the larger states preferred representation based on population as the basic rule, some of their delegates preferred compromise to risking a walk-out by small state delegates. Virginia's George Mason said that he would "rather bury his bones" in Philadelphia than see the convention dissolved without agreement on a plan of government. On July 16, the convention voted for the compromise, five states in favor, four opposed, one divided (with New York not present).
Notwithstanding grumbling by some delegates from the larger states, the most contentious issue now had been resolved, and the convention could move on to other questions. Election of the executive proved a thorny issue. The Virginia Plan had provided for an executive elected by the legislature; this, however, would create a dependent executive branch -- a defect of many of the state constitutions. Few delegates were so bold as to suppose that direct election by the people was a wise move.
Ultimately, the convention opted for a device -- an awkward one to the modern mind -- of having an electoral college choose the president. Each state was entitled, by whatever method it pleased, to select electors equal in number to the number of that state's senators and representatives. The electors would meet in their respective states and vote for the president and vice president. The subsequent rise of political parties, however, has ended the framers' notion that electors actually would deliberate on their choices for national leadership.
On July 24, 1787, the convention appointed five members to a Committee of Detail, whose job it was to draft an actual constitution embodying the fundamental principles thus far approved by the whole body. The committee's members seem to have assumed that they were at liberty to make substantive changes of their own. The most important of these was, in place of a general statement of Congress's powers, a clear enumeration of its powers. Leading the list were the power to tax and the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce -- two of the basic reasons that had brought the delegates to Philadelphia in the first place.
Regional differences surfaced during the convention's latter weeks. Southern states, dependent on the export of agricultural commodities, wanted to forbid Congress from taxing exports, and they wanted to protect slavery and the slave trade. In late August 1787, the convention agreed to a ban on taxes on exports and a prohibition on interference with the slave trade until the year 1808.
Slavery was the unwelcome guest at the convention's table. Nowhere does the Constitution use the word "slave" or "slavery." In language intended to compromise competing southern and northern views on representation, the convention decided that, in apportioning representatives, to the number of "free Persons" should be added three-fifths of "all other Persons" -- that is, slaves. Some of the delegates thought slavery a blot on the nation's moral conscience, but they concluded, reluctantly, that a stronger stand on slavery would mean rejection of the proposed Constitution in the southern states and thus the prospect of the Union's dissolution. How to resolve the burning issue of slavery was thus postponed, to be settled decades later by civil war and reconstruction.
On September 8, 1787, a Committee on Style was appointed to polish the Constitution's language and to arrange its articles. When that committee reported, George Mason, the author of Virginia's 1776 Declaration of Rights, argued that the federal document also should have a bill of rights that would specify and protect the rights of individual citizens. Others argued, however, that nothing in the Constitution would infringe the rights guaranteed in the state constitutions. Mason's proposal was rejected, although it would be revived during the ratification debates.
The convention was moving to its conclusion. On September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin, at age 81 the convention's patriarch, pleaded with those who had some reservations about the meeting's product to "doubt a little of his own infallibility." Looking ahead to the ratification process, the Constitution's proponents wanted a unanimous result. Of the 42 members (of the original 55) still present on September 17, all but three signed the final document. As representatives from each state had concurred in the result, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania devised the formula "Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present" on that date.
