Constitutional Convention: Representation, Slavery, and Ratification

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was a gathering of fifty-five delegates from twelve states who met in Philadelphia from May 25 to September 17, 1787, and, instead of merely revising the Articles of Confederation as they had been instructed, drafted an entirely new United States Constitution. They worked in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House, later known as Independence Hall, under a strict rule of secrecy, and produced a document that reshaped American government through a series of compromises over representation, slavery, and executive power.¹

Why the Convention Was Called

The Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, had created a single-branch national government with no federal judiciary, no executive officer, and no power to tax. Congress relied on voluntary contributions from the states, which often went unpaid, and it could not regulate interstate or foreign commerce.² States imposed their own trade barriers on one another. Amending the Articles required unanimous consent from all thirteen states, and a proposal to let Congress tax imports died when Rhode Island alone refused.³

By the mid-1780s the country could not pay its Revolutionary War debts, its paper currency had become nearly worthless, and it could not raise a standing army to keep order.⁴ Shays’ Rebellion made the weakness impossible to ignore. In 1786, farmers in western Massachusetts, led by veteran Daniel Shays and crushed by taxes and debt, shut down county courts to stop property seizures. On January 25, 1787, roughly 2,000 insurgents tried to seize the federal armory at Springfield. State militia fired on them, killing four. Secretary of War Henry Knox asked for federal support to defend the armory; Congress had neither the money nor the soldiers to send.⁵

George Washington wrote to James Madison that without “some alteration in our political creed,” the republic was “fast verging to anarchy & confusion.”⁵ Earlier efforts at cooperation had pointed the same way. Maryland and Virginia commissioners had met at Washington’s Mount Vernon in 1785 to settle Chesapeake Bay disputes, and the September 1786 Annapolis Convention drew delegates from only five states.⁶ Rather than accept the poor turnout as failure, Alexander Hamilton drafted a report calling for a broader meeting in Philadelphia to make the federal government “adequate to the exigencies of the union.”⁷ On February 21, 1787, the Confederation Congress authorized the convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”⁸ That narrow mandate would not survive the summer.

Who Attended and How the Convention Operated

Delegates waited until May 25, 1787, for a quorum of seven states to be present.⁹¹⁰¹¹

Washington was unanimously elected president of the convention.¹² Benjamin Franklin, at 81, was the oldest delegate and had to be carried to sessions in a sedan chair; Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, at 26, was the youngest.¹³ Several major figures were missing. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were serving as diplomats abroad. Patrick Henry, a fierce opponent of centralized power, reportedly said he “smelt a rat” and stayed home.

One of the convention’s first decisions shaped everything that followed. Delegates voted that “nothing spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published, or communicated without leave.” Armed sentinels were posted inside and outside the building.¹⁴ The rule was meant to prevent misrepresentation of ideas still being worked out and to let delegates change their positions without public embarrassment. The secrecy held for the entire summer.

The Fight Over Representation

On May 29, Edmund Randolph of Virginia introduced fifteen resolutions drafted mainly by Madison. The Virginia Plan discarded the Articles entirely in favor of a three-branch national government with a bicameral legislature in which representation in both houses would be proportional to population.¹⁵ Large states, including Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, backed the plan. Smaller states saw it as an existential threat.

On June 15, William Paterson of New Jersey answered with the New Jersey Plan: a unicameral legislature in which each state cast a single, equal vote, preserving the structure of the Articles.¹⁶ The convention rejected it on June 19, but the deadlock continued and nearly broke the convention apart.

On July 16, 1787, delegates adopted the Great Compromise, championed by Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut. It passed by a single vote.¹⁶ The compromise produced the bicameral legislature that still exists:

A Senate with two senators from each state, giving equal representation regardless of population.
A House of Representatives with seats apportioned by population, and with all revenue bills required to originate there.

Both sides got something, and the structure has held ever since.¹⁵

The Slavery Compromises

Slavery ran through the debates, and produced three distinct compromises.

The Three-Fifths Clause

Southern states wanted enslaved people counted fully for apportioning House seats. Northern delegates objected that enslaved people were treated as property and denied any political rights. Delegates settled on a formula, first proposed during an earlier 1783 congressional debate over taxation, that counted “three fifths of all other persons” for both representation and direct taxation.¹⁷ The clause pushed Southern representation in Congress from about 38 percent under the old Confederation Congress to nearly 45 percent in the first Congress that met in 1790.¹⁸

The Slave Trade Provision

South Carolina and Georgia made clear they would not join a union that threatened their ability to import enslaved people. Northern states wanted Congress to have broad power over commerce. The bargain linked the two: Congress gained authority over foreign trade but was barred from prohibiting the importation of enslaved people until 1808. General Pinckney’s motion to extend the moratorium from 1800 to 1808 passed seven states to four.¹⁹ Congress banned the trade as soon as it could, effective January 1, 1808.²⁰

The Fugitive Slave Clause

On August 28, Pierce Butler and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina proposed that enslaved people who escaped to free states be returned to their owners. James Wilson objected that this would force free states to bear the expense of capturing people for slaveholders, and Roger Sherman likened it to seizing someone’s horse. Butler withdrew the proposal, returned the next day with language covering any person “bound to service or labor” who escaped into another state, and the convention agreed unanimously.²¹ The clause stayed in effect until the Thirteenth Amendment nullified it.²²

Designing the Presidency

The shape of the executive branch consumed weeks of argument. Randolph favored a plural executive to avoid concentrating power. James Wilson argued that a single executive was the best safeguard against tyranny, giving the office the “energy, boldness, steadiness” it required.²³ The convention chose a single president with a limited veto, rejecting the absolute veto Wilson had originally proposed.

How to choose that president proved harder. Delegates considered and rejected election by Congress, direct popular vote, and selection by state governors, each option raising fears of corruption, foreign influence, or damage to federal authority. The Committee of Eleven, formally the Committee on Postponed Matters, broke the deadlock on September 4, 1787, with a plan for indirect election through an Electoral College. Each state would appoint electors equal to its combined number of senators and representatives.²⁴ The Senate had first been designated to pick the president if no candidate won a majority. Fears of creating what some delegates called a “dangerous aristocracy” shifted that responsibility to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation casting one vote.²⁵

Drafting the Document

By late July the convention had agreed on general resolutions but not on an actual document. On July 23, delegates appointed a five-member Committee of Detail: John Rutledge of South Carolina as chair, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and James Wilson of Pennsylvania.²⁶ Rutledge delivered the working draft on August 6. The firm Dunlap and Claypoole printed it with wide margins so delegates could annotate as they debated it clause by clause.²⁷

Six more weeks of revisions later, the near-final text went to a Committee of Style and Arrangement: William Samuel Johnson as chair, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Rufus King, and James Madison. Johnson picked Morris to write the actual text, and Morris finished it in three days.²⁸

Morris did more than polish. He replaced the Committee of Detail’s preamble, which had listed individual states (“We the People of the States of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts…”), with “We the People of the United States,” reframing the document as a national compact rather than an agreement among sovereigns. He organized the text into its seven-article structure and spoke 173 times during the convention, more than any other delegate.²⁸ Morris later wrote that the Constitution “was written by the fingers, which write this letter,” and Madison confirmed that “the finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr Morris.”

Signing and the Three Who Refused

On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine delegates signed. Three delegates present that day refused: George Mason and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.²⁹

Mason’s objections were the most developed. He said the absence of a Bill of Rights left citizens unprotected against federal power and that he would “sooner chop off his right hand” than sign without one. He feared the president would become a tool of the Senate, worried that the federal judiciary would “absorb and destroy” state courts, and warned that the Necessary and Proper Clause gave Congress essentially unlimited power.³⁰ Gerry raised structural concerns from Senate terms to Congress’s power over its own compensation and the lack of civil jury protections. Randolph objected to the “indefinite and dangerous power” granted to Congress and the Senate’s outsized role in appointments and treaties.³¹ All three wanted a second convention to consider state-proposed amendments. The majority rejected the idea.

Franklin, in a conciliatory address on the last day, acknowledged the document’s imperfections and urged every delegate to sign, calling it the best possible outcome of their collective work.²³

Ratification

Article VII deliberately bypassed the Articles of Confederation’s unanimity requirement. Ratification would come from specially elected conventions in only nine of the thirteen states. Delegates believed unanimity was unattainable, citing the repeated collapse of amendments to the Articles that had majority support. Madison argued the new Constitution’s legitimacy had to rest on direct consent of the people rather than the “delegated authority” of state legislatures.³² Critics, including Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, called this an “open and bare-faced violation” of the existing legal framework. Congress transmitted the Constitution to the states on September 28, 1787.

The country split. Federalists, led by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, argued that checks and balances, separation of powers, and the federal structure would protect liberty better than the Articles had. They made their case through essays published under the pseudonym “Publius,” later collected as The Federalist Papers.³³ Anti-Federalists, including Henry, Mason, and writers using names like “Brutus” and “Cato,” warned that the proposed government was too powerful, that it lacked a bill of rights, and that no republic could function across such a vast territory.³⁴

Delaware ratified first on December 7, 1787, unanimously. Massachusetts ratified on February 6, 1788, by 187 to 168. New Hampshire became the crucial ninth state on June 21, 1788, meeting the constitutional threshold. Virginia followed four days later, 89 to 79, and New York ratified on July 26, 30 to 27.³³ North Carolina held out until November 1789 and Rhode Island until May 1790, approving by just two votes.

On July 2, 1788, Congress officially announced adoption and appointed a committee to set the new government in motion.³⁵ That September, Congress named New York City as the temporary capital and set the schedule: electors appointed in January 1789, voting in February, and the new government to begin on the first Wednesday in March. The Continental Congress completed its last official business on October 10, 1788. Proceedings under the new Constitution began on March 4, 1789, and Washington was inaugurated as the first president on April 30.³⁶

Fulfilling promises made during the ratification debates, Madison introduced twelve proposed amendments in the first Congress in 1789. The states ratified ten of them in 1791, creating the Bill of Rights and addressing the objection Mason, Gerry, and the Anti-Federalists had pressed hardest.³⁴

What the Historical Record Actually Shows

Because of the secrecy rule, no official transcript of the debates exists. Secretary William Jackson kept a journal but destroyed most loose papers before turning the remaining records over to Washington on the final day.¹⁴ The fullest account comes from Madison, who took detailed notes throughout the summer and expanded them in later years. His notes were not published until 1840, four years after his death.

For generations they were treated as essentially a real-time transcript. Research by legal historian Mary Bilder, published in Madison’s Hand, showed that Madison revised the manuscript extensively between 1787 and 1836. The document at the Library of Congress contains cross-outs, inserted sentences, and slips of paper pinned over original text. Some revisions appear politically motivated, softening language and adjusting his recorded positions to align with his later work in the Republican Party. Bilder concluded that “if original understandings of the Convention existed, we cannot retrieve them” through Madison’s notes alone.³⁷ What emerged from Philadelphia is precise; what was said inside the room is not.

1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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9
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11
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12
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13
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14
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15
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16
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
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25
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26
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27
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28
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29
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30
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31
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32
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33
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34
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35
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36
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37
Boston College Law Magazine. A Cautionary Tale About the Notes of James Madison