The Great Compromise

1 Key excerpts on "The Great Compromise"

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  eBook - ePub

  A History of the American People

  • Paul Johnson(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • HarperCollins e-books

    (Publisher)

  112

  Hence the Convention set to with a will. An analysis of the voting shows that the mechanics of compromise operated throughout—in 560 roll-calls, no state was always on the losing side, and each at times was part of the winning coalition. Broadly speaking, the Virginia Plan was adopted, and in this sense Madison can be called the author of the United States Constitution. A rather weaker version, from New Jersey, was rejected. On the other hand, the federalists, led by Hamilton, could make no real progress with their proposal for a strong central government on European lines. Amid many compromises, there were three of particular importance. In early July, the so-called Connecticut Compromise was adopted on the legislature. This gave the House of Representatives, directly elected by popular votes in the localities, the control of money Bills, and a senate, particularly charged with foreign policy and other matters, to represent the states, with two senators for each state, chosen by the individual legislatures.

  In August the Convention turned its attention to the knotty problem of slavery, which produced the second major compromise. The debating was complex, not to say convoluted, since the biggest slave-holder attending, George Mason, attacked the institution and especially the slave-trade. Article 1, section 9, grants Congress the power to regulate or ban the slave-trade as of January 1, 1808. On slavery itself the Northerners were prepared to compromise because they knew they had no alternative. Indeed, as one historian of slavery has put it, ‘It would have been impossible to establish a national government in the 18th century [in America] without recognising slavery in some way.’113 The convention did this in three respects. First, it omitted any condemnation of slavery. Second, it adopted Madison’s three-fifths rule, which gave the slave states the added power of counting the slaves as voters, on the basis that each slave counted, as three-fifths of a freeman, while of course refusing them the vote as such—a masterly piece of humbug in itself. Third, the words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ were deliberately avoided in the text. As Madison himself said (on August 25), it would be wrong ‘to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.’114

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