The Constitutional Convention and Debates Over Ratification

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the political and economic conditions under the Articles of Confederation that led delegates to gather at Philadelphia in May 1787.
• Compare the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan and explain how the Great Compromise reconciled their competing visions of representation.
• Analyze the Three-Fifths Compromise and the slave-trade compromise as the constitutional terms on which the framers accommodated slavery within a republic of natural rights.
• Compare the central arguments of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist authors, drawing on Federalist No. 10 and either Brutus No. 1 or the Federal Farmer.
• Account for why the promise of a Bill of Rights was the structural compromise that delivered ratification by June 1788.

By the spring of 1787, the federal government under the Articles of Confederation was almost insolvent. Congress could not levy taxes, regulate interstate or foreign commerce, or compel states to honor treaty obligations. Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts the previous winter had shown how thin the central authority had become. Twelve states, all but Rhode Island, agreed to send delegates to a meeting in Philadelphia ostensibly to revise the Articles. Once George Washington accepted the chair on May 25, 1787, the meeting moved beyond revision and toward an entirely new framework of government (KC-3.2.II.C.i).

Fifty-five delegates served at one point or another during the summer. They were lawyers, planters, merchants, and former soldiers; thirty-nine of them eventually signed the finished document on September 17, 1787. The convention met behind closed doors at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), and the delegates agreed to keep the deliberations confidential so that they could change positions without political cost. James Madison kept a daily record of the debates that remains the most detailed source for understanding what the framers were arguing about. Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-one, contributed gravity and humor; Alexander Hamilton argued for an even stronger national government than the one finally adopted; Edmund Randolph, James Wilson, Roger Sherman, and Gouverneur Morris shaped the language of particular clauses. Two prominent absentees frame the rest of the period: Thomas Jefferson was in Paris as minister to France, and John Adams was on diplomatic assignment in London.

The first proposal on the table was the Virginia Plan, drafted by Madison and presented by Randolph. It called for a strong national government with a bicameral legislature in which both chambers would be apportioned by population. Large states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts would gain proportionally; small states feared they would be reduced to junior partners. William Paterson answered with the New Jersey Plan, which preserved equal state representation in a single-chamber legislature and proposed only modest expansions of federal power. The convention deadlocked through most of June. Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Oliver Ellsworth brokered the way out: a bicameral Congress in which the House of Representatives would be apportioned by population (favoring large states) and the Senate would seat two delegates from each state regardless of size (favoring small states). The Great Compromise, also called the Connecticut Compromise, was approved on July 16, 1787, and made the rest of the convention possible (KC-3.2.II.C.i).

Apportioning the House by population reopened a second quarrel. Southern delegates wanted enslaved persons counted in the apportionment base because that would inflate the South's congressional weight; northern delegates objected that people held as property could not also be counted as constituents. The Three-Fifths Compromise resolved the question by counting three of every five enslaved persons for both representation in the House and direct taxation. A second slavery-related bargain, the slave-trade compromise, prohibited Congress from banning the importation of enslaved Africans for twenty years, until 1808. Both clauses were political concessions by which northern delegates secured southern signatures on the Constitution; both have been read ever since as the price the framers paid to keep the convention intact (KC-3.2.II.D).

The signed Constitution went out to the states on September 28, 1787, accompanied by an instruction that nine state ratifying conventions would be sufficient to put it into effect. The ratification debate that followed was the first national political argument the United States ever conducted, and it produced the political vocabulary the country still uses. Supporters called themselves Federalists; their best-known argument was the eighty-five-essay Federalist Papers, written under the joint pseudonym Publius by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay for New York newspapers between October 1787 and August 1788. Federalist No. 10, written by Madison, argued that an extended republic would actually do a better job of containing faction than the small republics political theory traditionally preferred, because a larger population would make it harder for any single faction to gain a majority. Federalist No. 51, also Madison, defended separation of powers as a structural safeguard against tyranny on the principle that ambition must be made to counteract ambition (KC-3.2.II.E).

Opposition writers, the Anti-Federalists, charged that a federal government powerful enough to function would also be powerful enough to crush state authority and individual liberty. Patrick Henry made the case in the Virginia ratifying convention, warning that consolidated national power was a familiar prelude to monarchy. George Mason, who had drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, refused to sign the Constitution at Philadelphia because it lacked a comparable bill of rights. The pseudonymous essayist Brutus, almost certainly the New York judge Robert Yates, published sixteen letters that argued that a republic could only function in a small territory where citizens shared interests and could keep watch on their representatives. The Federal Farmer, possibly Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith, made a more measured but equally pointed case that the proposed government would consolidate power in a distant aristocracy. Anti-Federalist writers were not opposed to federalism in principle; they wanted a federalism more like the Articles, with the locus of authority in the states.

The decisive concession came during the state ratifying conventions. Massachusetts ratified in February 1788 only after Federalists pledged to introduce amendments protecting individual liberties; Virginia followed in June with the same understanding; New York ratified in July under similar terms. The threshold for activation was crossed when New Hampshire ratified ninth on June 21, 1788. Once the new Congress assembled in 1789, James Madison drafted twelve proposed amendments; ten were ratified by the states in December 1791 and became the Bill of Rights. The Anti-Federalist case had lost the ratification vote but won the structural concession (KC-3.2.II.E). The eight ratification conventions that submitted requested amendments shaped almost every provision in the first ten amendments, from freedom of speech and religion in the First Amendment to the reservation of unenumerated powers to the states or the people in the Tenth.

The settlement reached in Philadelphia and confirmed by the ratification debate was the political settlement of Period 3. The Constitution did not resolve the deepest questions facing the new Republic. It postponed the slavery question by twenty years and left federal versus state authority to be argued out in the decades that followed. What it did was create a framework durable enough to hold the argument. Madison's claim in Federalist No. 10, that a large diverse republic could absorb factions better than a small homogeneous one, became the working theory of the American political system, and the Anti-Federalist demand for written limits became its safety brake.

Five sources frame the ratification argument. Federalist No. 10 sets out the Federalist case for an extended republic; Brutus No. 1 is the most influential Anti-Federalist counter; Madison's convention notes record what the framers actually said in private; Patrick Henry's Virginia speech captures Anti-Federalist oratory at full force; the engrossed Constitution is the document the country was being asked to approve.

1. (Comparison) Compare the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan as proposals for republican government. Which features of each plan survived in the final Constitution, and which features were dropped? On what grounds did the Great Compromise distribute power between the two chambers?
2. (Causation) Account for why the framers chose to count enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person rather than as zero or as a whole person. What did each delegation gain from the Three-Fifths Compromise, and what did the country inherit from it?
3. (Comparison) Read Federalist No. 10 directly against Brutus No. 1. Identify the central claim each author defends, the evidence each author marshals, and the assumption about human nature that each author relies on. Which case do you find more persuasive on its own terms, and why?
4. (Continuity and Change) Compare the federal government created by the Constitution with the one it replaced under the Articles of Confederation. Which weaknesses did the Constitution remedy, and which structural features did it carry forward?
5. (Argumentation) The Bill of Rights is sometimes called the price the Federalists paid for ratification and sometimes called the Anti-Federalists' lasting victory. Defend a clear position on which framing is more accurate, drawing on at least two specific Anti-Federalist objections.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.