2.7 Conflict and Constitution

It would take an armed conflict labeled as Shays’ Rebellion in 1787 to convince the states that the Article of Confederation had failed. Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War veteran, was the leader of a rebellion in western Massachusetts. Farmers in the area were suffering due to economic issues caused in part by Congress’ inability to tax or raise revenue. They wanted Congress to interfere and protect them from their creditors such as the tax collectors, thereby protecting their land. Instead, the government supported the lenders. In protest, the rebels took up arms and blockaded courthouses to prevent judges from signing foreclosure notices.

Thousands of militiamen were called up by the governor to put down the rebellion. The rebellion was dispersed and many of the rebels, including Shays, were arrested and charged with treason. Most of the men, including Shays, will eventually receive pardons, but the rebellion had the unintended effect of beginning a debate on the national stage about the necessity for a stronger central government.¹ The states now agreed to a convention whose purpose was to revise the Articles of Confederation.

Constitutional Convention

The uprising in Massachusetts convinced leaders around the country to act. After years of goading by James Madison and other nationalists, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met at the Pennsylvania state house in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Only Rhode Island declined to send a representative. The delegates arrived at the convention with instructions to revise the Articles of Confederation.²

The biggest problem the convention needed to solve was the federal government’s inability to levy taxes. That weakness meant that the burden of paying back debt from the Revolutionary War fell on the states. The states, in turn, found themselves beholden to the lenders who had bought up their war bonds. That was part of why Massachusetts had chosen to side with its wealthy bondholders over poor western farmers.

James Madison, however, had no intention of simply revising the Articles of Confederation. He intended to produce a completely new national constitution. In the preceding year, he had completed two extensive research projects—one on the history of government in the United States, the other on the history of republics around the world. He used this research as the basis for a proposal he brought with him to Philadelphia. It came to be called the Virginia Plan, named after Madison’s home state.³

The Virginia Plan was daring. Classical learning said that a republican form of government required a small and homogenous state: the Roman republic, or a small country like Denmark, for example. Citizens who were too far apart or too different could not govern themselves successfully. Conventional wisdom said the United States needed to have a very weak central government, which should simply represent the states on certain matters they had in common. Otherwise, power should stay at the state or local level. But Madison’s research had led him in a different direction. He believed it was possible to create “an extended republic” encompassing a diversity of people, climates, and customs.

The Virginia Plan, therefore, proposed that the United States should have a strong federal government. It was to have three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—with power to act on any issues of national concern. The legislature, or Congress, would have two houses, in which every state would be represented according to its population size or tax base. The national legislature would have veto power over state laws.⁴

Other delegates to the convention generally agreed with Madison that the Articles of Confederation had failed. But they did not agree on what kind of government should replace them. In particular, they disagreed about the best method of representation in the new Congress. Representation was an important issue that influenced a host of other decisions, including deciding how the national executive branch should work, what specific powers the federal government should have, and even what to do about the divisive issue of slavery.

For more than a decade, each state had enjoyed a single vote in the Continental Congress. Small states like New Jersey and Delaware wanted to keep things that way. The Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman, furthermore, argued that members of Congress should be appointed by the state legislatures. Ordinary voters, Sherman said, lacked information, were “constantly liable to be misled” and “should have as little to do as may be” about most national decisions.⁵ Large states, however, preferred the Virginia Plan, which would give their citizens far more power over the legislative branch. James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that since the Virginia Plan would vastly increase the powers of the national government, representation should be drawn as directly as possible from the public. No government, he warned, “could long subsist without the confidence of the people.”⁶

Ultimately, Roger Sherman suggested a compromise. Congress would have a lower house, the House of Representatives, in which members were assigned according to each state’s population, and an upper house, which became the Senate, in which each state would have one vote. This proposal, after months of debate, was adopted in a slightly altered form as the Great Compromise: each state would have two senators, who could vote independently. In addition to establishing both types of representation, this compromise also counted a slave as three fifths of a person for representation and tax purposes.

The delegates took even longer to decide on the form of the national executive branch. Should executive power be in the hands of a committee or a single person? How should its officeholders be chosen? On June 1, James Wilson moved that the national executive power reside in a single person. Coming only four years after the American Revolution, that proposal was extremely contentious; it conjured up images of an elected monarchy.⁷ The delegates also worried about how to protect the executive branch from corruption or undue control. They endlessly debated these questions, and not until early September did they decide the president would be elected by a special electoral college.

In the end, the Constitutional Convention proposed a government unlike any other, combining elements copied from ancient republics and English political tradition but making some limited democratic innovations—all while trying to maintain a delicate balance between national and state sovereignty. It was a complicated and highly controversial scheme, and one that enshrined racial chattel slavery’s place in America, ignored the rights of women, relegated native peoples to a status as separate nations conquered and denigrated, and ignored complexities between categories like the existence of mixed race people.

Notes

1. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., “Chapter 6,” The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), II. Shays’ Rebellion, at http://www.americanyawp.com/text/06-a-new-nation/
2. Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 8–9.
3. Madison took an active role during the convention. He also did more than anyone else to shape historians’ understandings of the convention by taking meticulous notes. Many of the quotes included here come from Madison’s notes. To learn more about this important document, read Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
4. Virginia (Randolph) Plan as Amended (National Archives Microfilm Publication M866, 1 roll); The Official Records of the Constitutional Convention; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1774–1789, Record Group 360; National Archives.
5. Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009), 114.
6. Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 16.
7. Ray Raphael, Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive (New York: Knopf, 2012), 50. See also Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, and For Fear of an Elected King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789