Constitutional Convention and debates over ratification

Shays’s Rebellion

The early years of the newly independent United States presented significant challenges. The new country had just emerged from a long, violent, expensive war for independence, with a variety of European colonies straddling its often porous borders. Indigenous societies strove to protect their diminishing populations and rapidly shrinking territorial domains. State governments confronted their own fractious populations and each other; with each passing day, new challenges seemed to arise and it became increasingly clear that the federal structure established under the Articles of Confederation was insufficient for the demands and desires of the newly independent United States and its peoples.

In late summer 1786, farmers in western Massachusetts, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, protested against the closing of the Massachusetts legislative session without the state government enacting tax relief and currency measures for farmers and small merchants. Several thousand men, led, according to the state government, by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, prevented state and local courts from meeting in several towns and counties in western Massachusetts. With no permanently established army nor military units directly under federal control, Congress could not order state militias to respond nor pay the soldiers. Massachusetts mustered its state militia and merchants and financiers recruited a second, private militia to put down the rebellion. After a significant skirmish in Stockbridge, Massachusetts at the end of February 1787, resulting in the capture of over 100 rebels, Shays’s Rebellion ended with many of the reported leaders, including Daniel Shays, seeking refuge in surrounding states as well as Vermont, which at the time sought independence from New York, and several thousand people signing confessions related to their participation. While the end of Shays’s Rebellion was welcome news for Governor James Bowdoin, seething resentment from farmers and rural merchants who blamed him and the Boston and Springfield merchants, financiers, and legislators for excessive taxation and seizure of their farms elected John Hancock governor in the fall of 1787.

Shays’s Rebellion, both then and now, has often been characterized as one of the main impetuses behind the calling of the **Constitutional Convention **in Philadelphia in the late spring and summer of 1787. In September 1786, shortly after the beginning of Shays’s Rebellion, delegates from Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia met in Annapolis, Maryland to discuss trade and tariff issues, but in its final report, primarily authored by New York delegate and former Washington aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton, called for a broader convention to reform the Articles of Confederation. In November 1786, George Washington wrote to fellow Virginian James Madison about Shays’s Rebellion and the need for stronger federal authority to regulate relations between the states and ensure peace and prosperity for Americans.

Letter from George Washington to James Madison, November 5, 1786

What stronger evidence can be given of the want of energy in our governments than these disorders? If there exists not a power to check them, what security has a man of life, liberty, or property? To you, I am sure I need not add aught on this subject, the consequences of a lax, or inefficient government, are too obvious to be dwelt on. Thirteen sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head will soon bring ruin on the whole; whereas a liberal, and energetic Constitution, well guarded, & closely watched, to prevent incroachments, might restore us to that degree of respectability & consequence, to which we had a fair claim, & the brightest prospect of attaining.”

On to Philadelphia

The Constitutional Convention remains one of the most praised political negotiations in American history, but we must remember that assembling a mass of often querulous politicians, frequently operating under different instructions from their state governments, and representing distinctive local and regional cultural, economic, legal, and political perspectives, without clear authority from Congress to formulate a new system of government, was an arduous undertaking. Once assembled in late May 1787, the delegates immediately decided to deliberate in secrecy, in part to avoid being recalled by their respective state governments for exceeding the authority granted to them. Our records of the Constitutional Convention are derived primarily from the journal of James Madison, which by agreement from the delegates was not published until 1840, once all of the attendees had died.

A whole new system of government

Once the delegates decided that amending the Articles of Confederation, which required all 13 states to agree, was insufficient for their purposes, they had to debate devising a fundamentally new form of government. While several broad lines of prospective agreement emerged about the need to establish a more powerful central government, the delegates disagreed, sometimes vehemently, about the extent of, and limitations upon, these new powers; ultimately, several delegates left the Constitutional Convention, typically being replaced by new delegates from their respective states, and others that stayed refused to sign the final Constitution.

When debating the structure and powers of Congress, delegates differed over whether Congress should remain unicameral or instead become a bicameral legislature. Under the Virginia Plan, promoted by Edmund Randolph and James Madison, Congress would have two houses, both of which would be apportioned by the states’ respective populations and with legislators serving 3-year terms in one house and 7-year terms in the other house. By contrast, William Paterson’s proposed New Jersey Plan maintained a unicameral legislature with all states maintaining equal representation. After days of contentious debate, including over whether southern states would gain prospective representation based upon their enslaved populations, even though enslaved peoples would enjoy no rights nor be effectively represented in Congress, a demand especially from Georgia and South Carolina, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth proposed what was come to be variously known as the Connecticut Compromise or Great Compromise. Congress would feature a bicameral legislature, with the House of Representatives being apportioned by population and the Senate featuring equal representation for all states regardless of population. In the infamous ⅗ Clause, enslaved people would count as ⅗ of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation in the House of Representatives, one of the most direct references to slavery in the Constitution, although the actual language employed referred to “other persons,” reflecting the delegates’ reluctance to include explicit references to slavery.

While contemporary US presidents are considered to be quite powerful, frequently referred to by Americans as the “leader[s] of the free world,” early Constitutional Convention debates and the later enumeration of Congressional powers in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution highlighted the primacy of Congress. Initially, many delegates concluded that a federal executive was neither needed nor desirable, unsurprising given their disdain for European monarchs. Several prominent delegates, including Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, argued for an executive as a necessary leader to conduct foreign policy and potentially to command the various state militias and/or national army in the midst of insurrection or war; this proposal gained greater acceptance as delegates considered that George Washington, who they had unanimously elected to serve as the presiding officer or president of the convention, would likely serve as the first chief executive of the United States. Even with what many considered to be the obvious choice for the first president in the convention hall, delegates still had to resolve the prospective powers of the president, the appropriate method for selecting or appointing this leader, and the length of the president’s term. In the final stages of these debates, proposals for a vice president emerged because of legitimate concerns about what would happen if a president died or was impeached while in office. Delegates also decided to create a separate institution, the Electoral College, to select the president and the vice president rather than relying strictly on the popular vote within the respective states. This was not the only instance where election to federal office was not based strictly on the popular vote; until ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 authorizing direct election by the people, US senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures.

Delegates also debated and approved the establishment of a federal court system but left most of the details up to future sessions of Congress. Indeed, Article III of the Constitution established the Supreme Court and then articulated that “Congress may from time to time ordain and establish … inferior courts” without specifying whether the number of these courts or whether they would be permanent or potentially ad hoc. Building upon similar provisions in the Articles of Confederation, Article III also delineated the types of cases that would be handled by the federal court system if the Constitution was ratified and then under the jurisdiction of Congress.

To ratify or reject

When the 55 delegates concluded their deliberations in September 1787, 39 ultimately signed the new Constitution. Once the proposed Constitution was unveiled to the American public, supporters and opponents immediately began debating the merits of this new system, knowing that it represented a fundamental shift away from the Articles of Confederation, still the governing framework for the country.

Throughout the next two and a half years, debates over ratification, formal approval, of the Constitution in state legislatures and their attendant conventions, in the press, in taverns, anywhere Americans gathered to discuss affairs of state. The most forcefully articulated, and probably the most famous series of political essays in American history, the Federalist Papers, authored primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, with future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Jay contributing five essays, encapsulated a variety of arguments, both expected and at the time counterintuitive, about the strengths of the new constitutional system. Opponents of ratification, labeled the anti-Federalists by supporters of the Constitution, expressed a broad array of critiques and concerns about greater concentration of federal power, the unproven nature of this new political experiment, and fears of creeping monarchism. Ultimately, while the Constitution was officially ratified with New Hampshire’s vote providing the required 9th state in favor, all 13 states ratified the Constitution by the end of May 1790 once Rhode Island approved the Constitution contingent upon the later inclusion of a Bill of Rights.

Objections to the Constitution of Government Formed by the Constitution, George Mason, 1787

There is no Declaration of Rights; and the Laws of the general Government being paramount to the Laws & Constitutions of the several States, the Declarations of Rights in the separate States are no Security….

This Government will commence in a moderate Aristocracy; it is at present impossible to foresee whether it will, in it’s Operation, produce a Monarchy, or a corrupt oppressive Aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.—

Federalist Number 10, James Madison, 1788

Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.