The Convention: Compromises over Representation and Slavery

Who came, and who did not

Chapter 2 ended in May 1787. The national government under the Articles of Confederation could not tax, could not control trade, and could not make the states obey it. Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts had frightened many of the country's leaders. Congress had agreed to a meeting in Philadelphia "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation." Within days of meeting, the delegates decided to do much more than revise the Articles. They set out to write a completely new plan of government.

A meeting of representatives who come together for a special purpose is called a convention. This one is usually called the Constitutional Convention. It is also called the Philadelphia Convention or the Federal Convention. It met in the Pennsylvania State House, the same building where the Declaration of Independence had been signed eleven years earlier. Today that building is called Independence Hall.

The meeting was supposed to begin on May 14, 1787. On that day only a few delegates had arrived. The convention could not do business until delegates from at least seven states were present. That did not happen until Friday, May 25. Travel was slow. A trip from Georgia or New Hampshire could take weeks, by horse, by coach, or by ship.

The men in the room

Over the whole summer, 55 delegates attended. A delegate is a person sent to represent others at a meeting. Not all 55 were there at the same time. Some came late, some went home early, and some came and went.

They were all white men, and most of them were well off. Many were lawyers or had studied law. Others were merchants (people who buy and sell goods, often by ship), owners of large farms, and owners of plantations. A plantation is a large farm, usually growing one crop for sale, such as tobacco or rice, and worked by many laborers. In the South, those laborers were enslaved people. Many of the delegates had served in their state legislatures or in Congress, and many had served as officers in the war. Their average age was about 42. The youngest, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, was in his twenties. The oldest, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, was 81.

Many of the delegates held people in slavery. Historians count them differently, depending on how they treat men who managed plantations for others or held a few people in a household. The counts run from about seventeen to about twenty-five of the 55. Slaveholders came from the South, but not only from the South. In 1787 slavery was still legal in most of the states, including New York. In the first national count of the population, in 1790, more than 21,000 people were enslaved in New York State. New York did not pass a law to end slavery gradually until 1799, and the last enslaved people in the state were not freed until 1827. Keep that in mind when this chapter speaks of "the North" and "the South." The North was not free of slavery in 1787. It depended on slavery less.

Some of the delegates were famous. George Washington had commanded the army in the war. Benjamin Franklin was known around the world as a printer, a writer, a scientist and a diplomat. Others became famous because of what they did that summer. James Madison of Virginia, a small, quiet man of 36, had studied the history of governments for months to prepare. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania wrote the final wording of much of the Constitution, including its opening words, "We the People." Alexander Hamilton of New York would later help persuade the country to accept the Constitution, as Chapter 4 explains.

Rules of the meeting

On the first day, the delegates chose George Washington to preside, which means to run the meeting and keep order. Robert Morris of Pennsylvania nominated him, and the vote was unanimous, meaning everyone agreed. All summer long, Washington sat at the front of the room in a tall chair. He almost never spoke in the debates. Part 6 tells about the one time he did.

The convention voted the way the old Congress voted. Each state's delegates talked among themselves and then cast one vote for their state. If a state's delegates were evenly split, the state's vote was recorded as "divided" and did not count. You will see votes in this chapter written like this: "Mas. no. Cont. ay." That means Massachusetts voted no and Connecticut voted yes. ("Ay" is an old spelling of "aye," meaning yes.)

The delegates also adopted a rule of secrecy. Here it is, from the rules they agreed to in the last days of May:

In plain words: Nothing said in this meeting may be printed, published or told to anyone outside without permission. ("The House" here means the convention itself. "Leave" means permission.)

No reporters or visitors were allowed in, and the delegates kept quiet about their work in the taverns and on the streets. Why so much secrecy? The delegates wanted to be able to speak freely, to change their minds, and to make deals without newspapers reporting every word and every reversal. Critics at the time, and since, have pointed out the other side: the people whose government was being redesigned had no way of knowing what was being said in their name.

Madison's notes

The convention had an official secretary, William Jackson, but his record lists mostly motions and votes. Most of what we know about the arguments comes from James Madison. He chose a seat at the front of the room, facing Washington's chair, with the other delegates to his right and left, so that he could hear every speaker. Every day he took notes on what each speaker said. In the evenings, or within a few days, he wrote them out in full. He kept this up for the entire summer.

Madison's notes were not published until 1840, four years after his death. By then every other delegate had died too. The official record of motions and votes was printed in 1819, and the shorter notes of Robert Yates of New York in 1821. But for more than fifty years, the country lived under the Constitution without knowing most of what had been said in the room where it was written.

When you read Madison's notes, know three things. First, they are a summary, written in Madison's words, not a word-for-word recording. Most of the time Madison writes "he said" rather than quoting a speaker directly, and he writes about himself as "Mr. Madison." Second, he used many short forms to write faster: "Genl." for general, "Govt." for government, "Natl." for national, "agst." for against, "wd." for would, and "&" for and. Third, Madison was a delegate with strong opinions of his own, and his notes are one man's record. In later years he also went back and made changes to some passages. Still, they are the fullest record we have. The quotations from the debates in this chapter come from them.

Who was missing

Rhode Island refused to send anyone. Rhode Island's government at that time was friendly to debtors and to paper money, and its leaders distrusted a meeting called to strengthen the national government. So only twelve of the thirteen states took part.

Some famous leaders of the Revolution were absent. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, was in Paris as the American minister to France. John Adams was in London as the American minister to Britain. (A minister, in this sense, is an official who represents his country in another country, much like an ambassador.) Patrick Henry of Virginia, a famous speaker of the Revolution, was chosen as a delegate and refused to go. He distrusted the whole project.

Other states were missing for part of the summer. New Hampshire's delegates did not arrive until late July. New York sent three delegates. Two of them, Robert Yates and John Lansing, went home in early July, believing the convention was going far beyond what it had been asked to do. After they left, Alexander Hamilton was New York's only delegate, and under the rules one delegate alone could not cast the state's vote. So for the rest of the summer, New York had no vote.

Who was not in the room

It matters just as much who was never invited.

Women were not delegates. In 1787, women could not vote in almost every state, and a married woman generally could not own property or sign contracts in her own name. Women were half the population, and the Constitution being written would govern them, but no woman had a voice in writing it.

Black Americans, enslaved or free, were not delegates. About 700,000 people were held in slavery in the United States in 1790, about one person in six. The convention would make decisions about their lives, including whether more people could be bought in Africa and brought over, and whether a person who escaped could be captured and returned. They were discussed for days in that room. They were never asked. There were also about 60,000 free Black Americans. Some of them could vote in their states at that time, but none sat at the convention.

Native nations were not represented. Many Native nations lived within and beyond the states' borders: the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in New York, the Cherokee and Creek in the South, and the nations of the Ohio country, among many others. The states and Congress dealt with them as separate peoples. The Constitution would give Congress the power to make treaties and to regulate trade with them. They had no part in writing the rules.

Working people without property were not represented in any direct way. In most states, a man had to own a certain amount of land or pay a certain amount in taxes to vote. Sailors, laborers, servants, apprentices and poor farmers, including many of the soldiers who had fought the war, were often left out. The farmers of Shays' Rebellion, from Chapter 2, were certainly not in the room.

Some delegates spoke about these groups, and a few spoke against slavery, as Part 4 shows. But speaking about people is not the same as having them present. When the test shows you a source from the convention, it helps to ask: whose interests is this speaker protecting, and who is not here to answer?

The big question: one vote per state, or votes by population?

Almost every delegate agreed that the national government had to be stronger. It needed to be able to tax, to pay its debts, to control trade, and to make its laws count. The hardest question was a different one: who would control that stronger government?

Under the Articles, as Chapter 2 explained, each state had one vote in Congress. Delaware, with about 59,000 people, had the same vote as Virginia, with about 748,000. (These numbers are from the first national count, in 1790.) Virginia had more than twelve times as many people as Delaware, but no more say.

A weak government that could do little was one thing. A strong government that could tax people directly was another. People in the large states said: if this new government can tax our citizens directly, then our many citizens must have votes in proportion to their numbers. That is only fair. People in the small states said: if votes go by population, the three or four biggest states will run everything, and we will be outvoted on every question that matters to us. Each state is a state, equal to every other, and must have an equal voice.

Both sides were arguing about representation. Representation means the way people are given a voice in government through others who speak and vote for them. The question was whether a state's representation should depend on how many people it had.

The Virginia Plan

The Virginia delegates came prepared. James Madison had worked out a plan before the convention opened, and on May 29, Edmund Randolph, the governor of Virginia, presented it. It is called the Virginia Plan, and it became the starting point for the whole summer's work. Here are two of its fifteen resolutions. (A resolution is a formal statement of what a group proposes or decides.)

In plain words: Each state's votes in the national law-making body should depend either on how much money the state pays in or on how many free people live there. The law-making body should have two parts. ("Resd." is short for "resolved." "Suffrage" means the right to vote. "Proportioned" means set in proportion, so that more people or more money means more votes. "Quotas of contribution" means each state's share of the national costs. "Branches," here, means the two parts, or houses, of the legislature.)

Here is what the Virginia Plan proposed, all together:

• Three branches of government. A national legislature to make laws, a national executive to carry them out, and a national judiciary (a system of courts) to decide cases. Chapter 1 explained that this idea of separating powers came partly from the French writer Montesquieu.
• A legislature of two houses. A legislature with two houses is called bicameral, from Latin words meaning "two rooms." The people would elect the first house. The first house would then choose the members of the second house from people nominated by the state legislatures.
• Both houses by population. In both houses, a large state would have more members than a small one.
• A strong national government. The national legislature could pass laws wherever the separate states were "incompetent," meaning unable to act on their own, and it could even cancel state laws that it judged to break the national plan.

For the large states, this was a good plan. Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, the three largest, would together hold a great deal of power. Delegates from the small states saw that at once.

The New Jersey Plan

On June 15, William Paterson of New Jersey presented a different plan, on behalf of several of the delegations from smaller states. It is called the New Jersey Plan. Its first resolution shows how different its starting point was:

In plain words: The Articles of Confederation should be repaired and expanded, so that the national government can meet its real needs and keep the Union together. ("Render" here means make. "Adequate to the exigencies" means able to handle the urgent needs.) Notice the difference. The Virginia Plan built a new government. The New Jersey Plan kept the Articles and fixed them.

Here is what the New Jersey Plan proposed:

• One house only, as under the Articles. A legislature with one house is called unicameral.
• One vote per state, as under the Articles, whatever the state's size.
• More power for Congress than under the Articles. Congress could tax goods brought in from other countries, and it could regulate trade with other countries and among the states. These were the very powers whose absence had caused so much trouble in the 1780s.
• An executive of more than one person, chosen by Congress, and a national supreme court.
• National laws and treaties would be "the supreme law of the respective States," and state judges would have to follow them. The same idea, in very similar words, ended up in the Constitution, in Article VI.

So the New Jersey Plan was not a plan for a weak government. It would have given the national government real power. Its main point was that the states would stay equal.

The convention debated the two plans and, on June 19, voted to keep working from the Virginia Plan. Seven states voted for the Virginia Plan, three (New York, New Jersey and Delaware) voted against it, and Maryland was divided. But the argument over equal votes for the states was not settled. It became more bitter in the weeks that followed.

The two plans side by side

The Great Compromise

Through late June and early July, the argument over representation came close to breaking up the convention. The weather was hot, tempers were short, and delegates on both sides spoke of walking out.

The small states held a strong position. Delaware's delegates had come with instructions from their state that forbade them to agree to any change in the rule of one vote per state. On June 30, Gunning Bedford of Delaware gave a speech that alarmed the large-state delegates. Here is how Madison recorded part of it:

In plain words: The large states would not dare to break up the Union. If they did, the small states would find a foreign country, more honorable and more honest than the large states, that would protect them and treat them fairly. ("Dissolve" means break up. An "ally" is a country that agrees to support another.) Bedford was hinting that small states might turn to a European power, such as Britain or France. Madison recorded that Bedford said he did not mean this to frighten anyone. Many delegates heard it as a threat all the same.

On July 2, the convention voted on whether each state should have one vote in the second house. The vote was a tie: five states yes, five states no, and Georgia divided. The convention was stuck. It chose a committee with one member from each state to look for a way out.

The bargain between large and small states

What was disputed. How each state would be represented in the new Congress: by its population, or equally, one vote per state.

Who wanted what. The large states, led by Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, wanted representation by population in both houses, as in the Virginia Plan. The small states, led by Delaware, New Jersey and Connecticut, wanted every state to have an equal vote, as in the New Jersey Plan and the Articles.

What was agreed. Each side got its rule, but in a different house. Congress would have two houses, and each house would follow a different rule:

• In the House of Representatives, the number of seats for each state would depend on its population. The people would elect the members directly.
• In the Senate, every state would have the same number of members, whatever its size. The final number was two senators per state, and each senator would vote separately.
• In addition, all bills for raising money through taxes would have to start in the House. This was offered to the large states in return for giving up representation by population in the Senate. The thinking was that taxes should begin in the house closest to the people and based on their numbers.

This agreement is called the Great Compromise. It is also called the Connecticut Compromise, because delegates from Connecticut had been proposing something like it for weeks. On June 11, Roger Sherman of Connecticut had already suggested it. Here is part of what Madison recorded:

In plain words: Sherman proposed that votes in the first house should depend on how many free people each state had, and that in the second house, the Senate, each state should have one vote. He said the states would keep certain rights of their own, so each state needed a way to protect itself. Otherwise a few large states would rule the rest. ("Sharman" is how Madison spelled Sherman's name that day. "Possessed of" means holding.)

A month later, the committee of one member from each state brought back almost the same idea. On July 16, 1787, the convention voted to accept it. The vote was as close as it could be: five states yes, four states no, and Massachusetts divided. New York, with only Hamilton present, could not vote. New Hampshire's delegates had not yet arrived. Rhode Island was not there at all. So the Great Compromise passed by a single state's vote.

The large states were deeply unhappy. Some of their delegates met the next morning to talk about whether to keep fighting. In the end they did not try to undo the vote. From then on, the convention moved forward.

In the Constitution's own words

Here is how the Great Compromise appears in the finished Constitution. (In this course, Article I, Section 2 is often written "Art. I, Sec. 2." An article is one of the Constitution's seven main parts. A section is a smaller part inside an article.)

In plain words: Seats in the House of Representatives, and certain taxes, will be divided among the states according to how many people each state has. ("Apportioned" means divided up and handed out in shares.) Part 4 of this chapter reads the rest of this sentence, which says how those people were to be counted.

In plain words: The Senate will have two senators from each state, chosen by that state's legislature, for six-year terms. Each senator has one vote. Notice that senators were first chosen by the state legislatures, not by the voters. That changed in 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment, which lets the people of each state elect their senators directly. (See All the Amendments.)

In plain words: Every bill that raises money through taxes must start in the House. The Senate can suggest changes to it, or agree to changes, as with any other bill. ("Revenue" means money the government takes in. "Originate" means start. "Concur" means agree.)

The small states also made sure their equal vote in the Senate would be very hard to take away. Article V, which explains how the Constitution can be amended (changed), ends with this promise:

In plain words: No state can lose its equal vote in the Senate unless that state itself agrees. ("Deprived of" means have something taken away. "Suffrage" here means voting power.) Today this is the only rule in the Constitution that the usual amendment process cannot change by itself: the state that would lose its equal vote must also agree.

New York and Wyoming today

The Great Compromise still shapes the government you live under. Look at two states.

In the 2020 census, New York State had about 20.2 million people. Wyoming had about 577,000. New York has about 35 times as many people as Wyoming. (A census is an official count of the population. The Constitution requires one every ten years, and it is used to divide up the seats in the House.)

• In the House, the seats follow population. After the 2020 census, New York has 26 representatives and Wyoming has 1. The House has 435 members in all.
• In the Senate, population does not matter. New York has 2 senators, and Wyoming has 2. The Senate has 100 members, two from each of the 50 states.

So in the Senate, the vote of one Wyoming senator, speaking for well under a million people, counts exactly as much as the vote of one New York senator, speaking for more than twenty million. New York City alone has more people than most states, and it shares its two senators with the rest of New York State.

The number of House seats for each state is worked out again after every census. States that grow faster than others can gain seats, and states that grow more slowly can lose them. The Senate never changes in this way. Every state, from the largest to the smallest, has two senators, and Article V protects that rule.

People today still argue about whether this is fair. Some say equal votes in the Senate protect smaller and more rural states from being outvoted by a few big ones, just as Sherman said. Others say it gives some citizens far more weight than others, and that this goes against the idea of one person, one vote. The GED test will not ask you to settle that argument. It may ask you to read a chart of House seats, or to explain why a small state and a large state have the same number of senators. The answer is the Great Compromise.

Drills for this part: II.09 The Convention's compromises. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

Slavery at the Convention

Once the delegates agreed that seats in the House would follow population, a second question came up at once, and it was harder. Who counts as population? In 1790, about one person in six in the United States was enslaved, and most of them lived in five states: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. In Virginia, nearly four people in ten were enslaved. In South Carolina, more than four in ten were.

On June 30, Madison told the convention that the real division among the states was not between large and small. As he recorded it, the great division of interests "lay between the Northern & Southern" states, and it came mainly from "the effects of their having or not having slaves." Slavery came up again and again that summer: in the counting of people for the House, in the question of bringing more enslaved people from Africa, and in the question of people who escaped. This part takes each one in turn.

A note before you read. The quotations below include the words some delegates used for enslaved people. They are quoted exactly, because the GED test uses sources as they were written, and because the words themselves show how the speakers thought.

The Three-Fifths Clause

What was disputed. Whether enslaved people should be counted when deciding how many seats each state would have in the House of Representatives. Connected to it: how much each state would pay when the national government laid a direct tax on the states.

Who wanted what. The answers turned upside down depending on whether the subject was seats or taxes.

• For seats in the House, delegates from the states with many enslaved people wanted every enslaved person counted in full. More people counted meant more seats, and more power, for those states. On July 11, Pierce Butler and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina moved that enslaved people be counted equally with free people. Yet the enslaved people being counted could not vote, could not hold office, and had almost no rights under their states' laws. The extra seats would go to the men who held them in slavery. That motion failed; only Delaware, South Carolina and Georgia voted for it.
• Many delegates from the Northern states wanted enslaved people not counted at all for seats. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts asked why, if enslaved people were property under Southern law, they should be counted any more than the cattle and horses of the North.
• For taxes, the sides flipped. If direct taxes were divided according to population, Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted less, and Northern delegates wanted them counted more. Hugh Williamson of North Carolina reminded the convention of this on July 11.

James Wilson of Pennsylvania put the puzzle into two questions. Here is how Madison recorded him on July 11:

In plain words: If enslaved people are being counted because they are citizens, why are they not counted equally with white citizens? If they are being counted as property, why is no other kind of property counted? Wilson said these problems were real, but that the need for a compromise had to win out over them. ("Admitted into the computation" means included in the count. "Overruled" means set aside.)

On July 12, William Davie of North Carolina told the convention that his state would never join a union on any terms that did not count enslaved people at least as three-fifths. If the Northern states meant to leave them out entirely, he said, "the business was at an end": the convention would fail.

What was agreed. Three-fifths. For both seats in the House and direct taxes, each state would count all of its free people, and then add three-fifths of "all other Persons." The fraction was not new. In 1783, Congress under the Articles had proposed using the same three-fifths rule to divide the national costs among the states. The convention adopted it in mid-July, in the same days as the Great Compromise.

Here is the whole sentence from the Constitution. It is long. Read it a phrase at a time.

In plain words: Seats in the House, and direct taxes, will be divided among the states by population. To find a state's population, start with all of its free people. Include indentured servants. Leave out Native Americans who do not pay taxes. Then add three-fifths of "all other Persons." ("Those bound to Service for a Term of Years" means indentured servants: people who had agreed to work for someone for a fixed number of years, often to pay for their passage across the ocean. They were counted in full. "Indians not taxed" means Native Americans living in their own nations, outside the states' governments. They were not counted. "All other Persons" means enslaved people, though the Constitution never says so directly.)

What the count did to power

The Three-Fifths Clause gave the slaveholding states more seats in the House than their free population alone would have earned. Each state's number of electors, the people who choose the president, equals its number of representatives plus its two senators (Part 5 explains this). So the clause also gave those states more weight in choosing presidents. For the more than seventy years until the Civil War, the slaveholding states held more power in the national government than their free population alone would have given them. Many people in the North came to call this power "the slave power," and they complained about it bitterly.

The direct taxes that were supposed to balance this were rarely laid. The national government raised most of its money from taxes on goods imported from other countries, and those taxes were not divided among the states by population. So the slaveholding states received the extra seats without paying much extra tax.

One more point is easy to get wrong. The Three-Fifths Clause did not say that an enslaved person was three-fifths of a human being. It was a rule for counting people in order to divide power among the states. But that rule counted enslaved people only to add to the power of the people who held them, and it gave the enslaved people themselves nothing. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868 after the Civil War, ended the three-fifths count. Since then, every person in a state is counted in full. (See All the Amendments. Chapter 8 also takes this up.)

The slave trade clause

What was disputed. Whether the new national government could stop the slave trade: the buying of captive people in Africa and shipping them across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery in America.

Who wanted what. By 1787, most of the states had already banned or stopped bringing in enslaved people from abroad, including Virginia and Maryland. The delegates of South Carolina and Georgia, with support from North Carolina, insisted that the national government must not be allowed to stop it. Many delegates from other states, including some slaveholders such as George Mason of Virginia, wanted the national government to have the power to end the trade.

The debate came on August 21 and 22. Here are two delegates from South Carolina, as Madison recorded them on August 21:

In plain words: This is not a question of religion or of human kindness. Countries act only on their interests, meaning what benefits them. The real question is whether the Southern states will join the Union or not. ("Parties to the Union" means members of it.) Rutledge was saying: give us this, or we will not join.

In plain words: South Carolina will never accept the Constitution if it bans the slave trade. ("Receive" here means accept. "Prohibits" means forbids.)

The next day, George Mason of Virginia answered with a long speech against the slave trade and against slavery itself. Mason himself held many people in slavery on his Virginia plantation. He still said this:

In plain words: Owning slaves turns every slaveholder into a small tyrant, a person who rules others cruelly and without limit. Slaves bring God's punishment on a country. ("Petty" means small. "Judgment of heaven" means punishment from God.) Notice that Mason spoke as a slaveholder. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut answered him in the same debate by pointing out that the number of enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland was already growing so fast that those states had no need to import more. Both things can be true: Mason's words condemned slavery, and his state's interests were also at stake.

Gouverneur Morris then suggested sending the slave trade, export taxes, and the rules for trade and shipping to a committee together. Madison recorded his reason in one sentence: "These things may form a bargain among the Northern & Southern States." That is exactly what happened. (Part 5 explains the other half of the bargain.)

What was agreed. The committee proposed that Congress could not ban the slave trade before the year 1800. On August 25, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina moved to push the date back to 1808. Madison objected:

In plain words: Twenty years of importing slaves will do all the harm anyone fears. To promise such a long time will bring more shame on the nation than if the Constitution said nothing at all. ("Mischief" here means harm. "Apprehended" means feared.)

Pinckney's motion passed anyway, seven states to four. Here is the clause in the finished Constitution:

In plain words: If any of the present states wants to keep bringing in "such Persons," Congress may not stop it before 1808. Congress may put a tax on each person brought in, up to ten dollars. ("Such Persons" means enslaved people brought from abroad. "Importation" means bringing in from another country.)

The convention protected this promise further. Article V says that no amendment made before 1808 could change this clause. So for twenty years, the slave trade was protected even from the normal way of changing the Constitution.

In 1807, Congress passed a law banning the import of enslaved people, to take effect on January 1, 1808, the first day the Constitution allowed. Smuggling continued afterward. And the ban did not end slavery inside the country. The buying and selling of enslaved people from one state to another, which often tore families apart, grew larger over the following decades.

The Fugitive Slave Clause

What was disputed. What would happen to an enslaved person who escaped into a state where slavery had been ended or was ending. Could that state treat the person as free?

Who wanted what. On August 28, Pierce Butler and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina moved, in Madison's words, "to require fugitive slaves and servants to be delivered up like criminals." (A fugitive is a person who runs away or escapes. "Delivered up" means handed over.) James Wilson of Pennsylvania objected that this would make a state carry out the capture at public expense. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, according to Madison, "saw no more propriety in the public seizing and surrendering a slave or servant, than a horse." ("Propriety" means rightness.) Butler withdrew his motion for the moment.

What was agreed. The next day, August 29, Butler offered a new version, and it passed with no state voting against it. In the final Constitution it reads:

In plain words: If a person who is held to work in one state, under that state's laws, escapes into another state, the second state's laws cannot set that person free. The person must be handed back when the one who claims his or her labor demands it. ("Held to Service or Labour" means forced to work, and here it covers enslaved people. "Discharged" means released. "Labour" is the British spelling of labor.)

This clause meant that a free state could not offer full safety to a person who had escaped from slavery. Congress later passed laws to enforce it, in 1793 and in 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was so harsh that it turned many Northerners against slavery. People who had escaped and built lives in Northern cities, including New York, could be seized and sent back south. Part 7 tells about one of those cases.

A word the Constitution never uses

Look back at the three clauses. "All other Persons." "Such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit." "Person held to Service or Labour." The words slave and slavery do not appear anywhere in the Constitution of 1787.

A milder word or phrase used in place of one that sounds harsh is called a euphemism. The delegates chose euphemisms on purpose. On August 25, according to his notes, Madison "thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men." Some delegates, like Madison, did not want the founding document to say openly that human beings could be owned. Other delegates may simply have wanted to avoid a word that would be hard to defend in public.

The word "slavery" finally entered the Constitution in 1865, with the Thirteenth Amendment, and it entered in order to abolish slavery. (Chapter 8 covers it.)

Voices from the floor

"The floor" means the meeting room where debates take place, so "speaking from the floor" means speaking in the debate. Not every delegate accepted the bargains over slavery quietly. The strongest speech against slavery that summer came from Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, on August 8. He moved to change the word "inhabitants" to "free inhabitants," so that only free people would be counted for House seats. Madison recorded his words:

In plain words: He would never agree to support slavery at home. Slavery was a wicked institution, a curse from God on the states where it was common. ("Concur" means agree. "Domestic slavery" here means slavery within the country. "Nefarious" means wicked. An "institution" is an established practice in a society. "Prevailed" means was widespread.)

In plain words: On what grounds should slaves be counted when seats are handed out? If they are men, then make them citizens and let them vote. If they are property, why is no other kind of property counted? ("Computed in the representation" means counted when deciding seats.)

Morris went on to say that a man from Georgia or South Carolina who went to Africa to capture people would end up with more votes in the new government than a citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who was horrified by the practice. He was speaking against the injustice of slavery. He was also speaking for the power of the Northern states, and historians note both motives. His motion failed. Only New Jersey voted for it. Ten states voted against it.

Other delegates who disliked slavery accepted the bargains as the price of union. Hugh Williamson of North Carolina said on August 25, according to Madison, that he was against slavery "both in opinion & practice," but that he thought it "more in favor of humanity, from a view of all circumstances, to let in S. C. & Georgia on those terms, than to exclude them from the Union." That argument, that a union with slavery was better than no union at all, is one of the two views you will meet in Part 7.

Drills for this part: II.09 The Convention's compromises. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

Other bargains

The Great Compromise and the bargains over slavery were the largest. But the Constitution is full of smaller agreements, each one a place where delegates wanted different things and settled somewhere in between. Here are three that the test may ask about.

The commerce compromise

Commerce means trade: the buying and selling of goods, especially between places. Chapter 2 showed that under the Articles, Congress could not control trade, and the states taxed one another's goods. Almost everyone agreed that the new Congress must have power over trade. The fight was over the details.

What was disputed. Two things. First, whether Congress could tax exports, which are goods sent out of the country to be sold abroad. Second, how large a vote Congress would need to pass navigation acts. A navigation act is a law about shipping, for example a law that favors American ships over foreign ships in carrying American goods.

Who wanted what. The Southern economy depended on selling crops abroad: tobacco from Virginia and Maryland, rice and indigo (a plant used to make blue dye) from South Carolina and Georgia. All of them were grown by enslaved labor. Southern delegates feared that a Northern majority in Congress would tax those exports, or pass shipping laws that forced Southern planters to pay high prices to Northern shipowners. So they wanted a ban on export taxes, and they wanted navigation acts to need a two-thirds vote in Congress, so that the South could block them. The Northern states, especially in New England, had many merchants, shipbuilders and sailors. They wanted Congress to be able to pass shipping laws by a simple majority, to protect American shipping against Britain.

What was agreed.

• No taxes on exports, ever. The South won this point. Article I, Section 9 says: "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State." ("Duty" means a tax on goods. "Articles" here means goods.)
• Navigation acts by a simple majority. The North won this point. On August 29, the convention dropped the two-thirds rule.
• The slave trade protected until 1808. This was tied to the commerce bargain. Delegates from New England voted with South Carolina and Georgia to protect the slave trade for twenty years, and the states of the Deep South (South Carolina and Georgia, the states farthest south) let go of the two-thirds rule for shipping laws. You can see the alliance in the vote of August 25 on the year 1808: New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut voted yes, along with Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

So the commerce compromise and the slave trade clause were really parts of one deal, made between groups of states with different economies. The people whose lives were traded in that deal had no part in it.

The presidency and the Electoral College

The delegates agreed there should be an executive, a branch to carry out the laws. Almost everything else about it was argued over all summer.

What was disputed. Whether the executive should be one person or several. How the executive should be chosen. How long the term should be, and whether the person could serve again.

Who wanted what. Many delegates feared a single powerful leader would become a king. On June 1, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, according to Madison, "strenuously opposed a unity in the Executive magistracy. He regarded it as the foetus of monarchy." (In plain words: he strongly opposed having one person as the executive, and he saw it as the beginning of a monarchy, a government by a king. "Magistracy" means the office of a public official. "Foetus" is an old spelling of fetus, an unborn child, used here to mean the first stage of something.) Others, like James Wilson, said one person could act with energy and could be held responsible in a way that a group could not.

On how to choose the executive, there were three main ideas:

• Choice by Congress. This was in the Virginia Plan, and the convention voted for it more than once during the summer. Critics said a president chosen by Congress would depend on Congress and would not be a real check on it.
• Choice by the people. James Wilson said on June 1 that "in theory he was for an election by the people," and he pointed to New York and Massachusetts, where the people already elected their governors. Others disagreed. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts said on July 19, as Madison recorded it, "The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men." ("Designing" here means scheming.)
• Choice by electors. Electors are people chosen for the single purpose of voting for president.

Slavery came into this question too. On July 19, Madison said that choice by the people was in his opinion the best in itself, but that there was "one difficulty however of a serious nature":

In plain words: Many more people could vote in the Northern states than in the Southern states, and in a direct vote of the people, the Southern states would get no extra weight for their enslaved population. Using electors instead would solve this problem, and it seemed to have the fewest drawbacks. ("Diffusive" means widely spread. "On the score of" means on account of. "Obviated" means removed.)

What was agreed. In early September, a committee proposed the system that the convention adopted:

• One person, the president, holds the executive power, with a vice president.
• The term is four years, and the Constitution as written put no limit on how many terms a president could serve. (A limit of two terms came later, with the Twenty-second Amendment in 1951.)
• The president is chosen by electors. Each state gets as many electors as it has senators and representatives together. Each state's legislature decides how its electors are chosen.

In plain words: Each state chooses electors in whatever way its legislature decides. The number of electors equals the state's number of senators plus its number of representatives. ("Appoint" means choose. "Entitled" means has a right to.)

All the electors from all the states together are called the Electoral College. (The Constitution does not use that name, but it is what everyone calls it.) It was a compromise that settled several of the summer's disputes at once. It kept Congress from choosing the president. It did not hand the choice straight to the voters, which some delegates distrusted. And because each state's electors equal its House seats plus two, it carried both of the earlier bargains into the choice of the president: the small states' extra weight from the Senate, and the slaveholding states' extra weight from the Three-Fifths Clause.

For the presidential elections of 2024 and 2028, which use the seats from the 2020 census, New York has 28 electors (26 representatives plus 2 senators), and Wyoming has 3 (1 plus 2). Today every state lets its voters choose its electors. Chapter 10 returns to the Electoral College and how it works now.

How long each term would last

A term is the length of time a person serves in an office before facing election again.

What was disputed. How often representatives, senators and presidents should have to face the people, or the legislatures that chose them.

Who wanted what. In 1787, almost every state elected its legislature every year. Many Americans believed frequent elections were the people's best protection. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts said on June 12, as Madison recorded it, that "He considered annual elections as the only defence of the people agst. tyranny." Roger Sherman said on June 21 that "He thought the Representatives ought to return home and mix with the people." Other delegates, including Madison and Alexander Hamilton, wanted longer terms. They argued that the country was large, travel took weeks, and new members needed time to learn the business of a whole nation. Some proposals went much further. On June 18, Hamilton proposed that the senators and the executive serve "during good behaviour," which in practice meant for life. Hardly anyone supported that.

What was agreed. The convention first voted for three-year terms in the House, then, on June 21, changed it to two years. For the Senate, after proposals ranging from four years to nine, it settled on six years, with one-third of the Senate chosen every two years. The president's term was set at four years. Federal judges would serve "during good Behaviour," which means for as long as they act properly, usually for life. The result was a set of different terms, on purpose:

The House, with short terms and direct election, was meant to stay close to the people's wishes. The Senate, with long terms and members chosen by state legislatures, was meant to be steadier and slower to change. Chapter 5 explains how the branches check one another.

Drills for this part: II.09 The Convention's compromises. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

The signing, September 17, 1787

By early September, the delegates had argued for more than three months. A committee of five, called the Committee of Style, put the Constitution into its final words. Gouverneur Morris did most of the writing. On Monday, September 17, 1787, the delegates met for the last time. The finished Constitution, written out by hand on large sheets of parchment, was read aloud.

Franklin's last word

Benjamin Franklin, 81 years old and in poor health, had written a speech. Another Pennsylvania delegate, James Wilson, read it aloud for him. Franklin asked every delegate, even those with doubts, to sign:

In plain words: I admit there are several parts of this Constitution that I do not agree with right now. But I am not sure I will never agree with them. Franklin went on to say that in a long life he had often changed his mind after learning more.

In plain words: So I agree to this Constitution, because I do not expect we could get a better one, and because I am not sure that it is not the best one possible. ("Sir" is addressed to Washington, as president of the convention.) Franklin was not saying the Constitution was perfect. He was saying that a group of people, each bringing "their local interests, and their selfish views," as he put it in the same speech, had made something good enough to accept.

Then something unusual happened. Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts asked to make one last change: to allow one representative for every 30,000 people, instead of every 40,000, so that each member would speak for fewer people and the House could be larger. When Washington rose to put the question to a vote, he spoke in favor of it. It was the only time all summer that he spoke on a question in debate. Madison made a note of it:

In plain words: This was the only time Washington, as president of the convention, took part in the debates. The change passed with no one opposed. If you look at the original Constitution at the National Archives, you can see that the word "Thirty" was written over an erased word, because the change was made at the last minute.

Then the delegates signed. Thirty-nine delegates signed the Constitution that day. (One of the 39, John Dickinson of Delaware, was ill and had a fellow delegate sign his name for him.) Alexander Hamilton signed alone for New York. The secretary, William Jackson, signed to confirm that the record was true.

As the last delegates were signing, Franklin looked toward Washington's chair, which had a sun painted on its back. Madison wrote down what Franklin said to the men near him:

In plain words: All through this meeting, as my hopes and fears rose and fell about how it would turn out, I have looked at that sun behind the president's chair and could not tell whether it was rising or setting. Now at last I am happy to know it is a rising sun, not a setting one. ("Vicisitudes," usually spelled vicissitudes, means ups and downs. "Issue" here means outcome.) A rising sun is a sign of a beginning. A setting sun is a sign of an end.

Three who would not sign

Three delegates who were present on the last day refused to sign: George Mason and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. (Several others who disliked the plan had already gone home.) Each had his reasons.

• Edmund Randolph, who had presented the Virginia Plan back in May, feared that the states would be forced to accept or reject the whole plan at once, with no chance to change it. He believed nine states would not ratify it as it stood, and, in Madison's record, that "confusion must ensue." (Ratify means formally approve. "Ensue" means follow.) He wanted the state conventions to be able to propose changes, with a second general convention to consider them. Randolph later changed his mind and supported the Constitution in Virginia.
• Elbridge Gerry spoke of his fear "that a Civil war may result from the present crisis," especially in Massachusetts, where, he said, two parties were bitterly opposed to each other. He also had objections to the plan itself.
• George Mason had many objections. The first and most famous was that the Constitution had no bill of rights: a list of the people's rights that the government may not take away.

Mason had raised this five days earlier. On September 12, he said he wished the plan "had been prefaced with a Bill of Rights," and Gerry moved for a committee to write one. Every state that voted said no. Most delegates thought a bill of rights was unnecessary, since the states had their own. Mason wrote out his objections, and copies spread through the country that fall. Here is how they began:

In plain words: The Constitution has no statement of the people's rights. Since the national government's laws will be above the states' laws and constitutions, the lists of rights in the state constitutions will not protect anyone. ("General government" means the national government. "Paramount" means highest, above all others. "Security" here means protection.)

Mason had long experience with this question. In 1776 he had written the Virginia Declaration of Rights, one of the models for the Bill of Rights. His objection became one of the strongest arguments against the Constitution in the year that followed. To win the states' approval, its supporters promised to add a bill of rights. Chapter 4 tells that story, and Chapter 7 takes the Bill of Rights one amendment at a time.

The Constitution was not law yet when it was signed. Article VII said it would take effect when special conventions in nine of the thirteen states ratified it. Under the Articles, any change had needed all thirteen states. The delegates did not wait for that. The fight over ratification is the subject of Chapter 4.

Two ways of seeing the Constitution and slavery

Part 4 gave the facts: three clauses that protected slavery, written so that the word itself never appears. People have argued ever since about what those facts mean. Was the Constitution a compromise with slavery that the delegates accepted because there was no other way to form a union? Or was it a bargain that protected slavery and made it stronger? Two of the most important opponents of slavery in American history, who had once worked side by side, came to opposite answers.

The first view: "a covenant with death"

William Lloyd Garrison was a white abolitionist from Boston. An abolitionist is a person who worked to abolish, or end, slavery completely. From 1831 he published a newspaper called The Liberator, which demanded an immediate end to slavery.

When Madison's notes were published in 1840, Garrison and his followers used them as evidence. They concluded that the Constitution had been, from the beginning, a deal to protect slavery, and that anyone who swore to support it was supporting slavery too. They refused to vote or to hold office under it. Their slogan was "No Union with Slaveholders." They argued that the free states should leave the Union rather than stay tied to slavery.

In 1854, a man named Anthony Burns, who had escaped from slavery in Virginia, was arrested in Boston under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the law that carried out the Fugitive Slave Clause from Part 4. Huge crowds protested, and some people tried to free him by force. Federal troops marched him through the streets to a ship that carried him back to slavery. A few weeks later, on July 4, 1854, at an outdoor antislavery rally in Framingham, Massachusetts, Garrison set fire to a copy of the Fugitive Slave Act. Then he held up a copy of the Constitution. His own newspaper, The Liberator, reported on July 7 that he called it:

In plain words: The Constitution is where all the other horrors come from. It is a promise made with death, a deal made with hell. ("Atrocities" means terrible acts of cruelty. A "covenant" is a solemn agreement or promise.) The phrase "a covenant with death" comes from the Bible, from the Book of Isaiah, where it describes a people who think a deal with evil will keep them safe. Garrison burned the Constitution and said, "So perish all compromises with tyranny!" ("Perish" means die or be destroyed.)

On this view, the Three-Fifths Clause, the slave trade clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause were not small flaws in a good document. They were the price the free states paid to the slaveholders, and the Union itself rested on the forced labor and suffering of enslaved people. The careful euphemisms only hid the truth.

The second view: "a glorious liberty document"

Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838 and made his way to New York City, then to Massachusetts. Garrison's circle welcomed him, and for years Douglass agreed with Garrison that the Constitution was a proslavery document. Then Douglass studied the question for himself, and by 1851 he had changed his mind. He decided that the Constitution, read by its actual words, could be used against slavery. That break with Garrison was painful, and the two men never fully made peace.

You met Douglass in Chapter 1, in his Fourth of July speech in Rochester, New York, in 1852. In that same speech, he said this about the Constitution:

In plain words: I believe the Constitution gives no permission or approval to slavery. Read the way it should be read, the Constitution is a glorious document of freedom. ("Instrument" here means a formal legal document. "Warrant," "license" and "sanction" all mean permission or approval. "The hateful thing" is slavery.) In the printed version of the speech, the last words appear in capital letters, for emphasis.

Eight years later, in a speech in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 26, 1860, Douglass made the full argument. He pointed out that the Constitution never uses the word "slave," and that its opening words make no exception:

In plain words: The Constitution begins with "We the People." It does not say "we the white people," or "we the citizens," or "we the privileged class," or "we the high," or "we the low." It says "we the people," and that includes everyone. ("Privileged" means having special advantages. "The high" and "the low" mean people of high rank and people of low rank.) Douglass went on: if Black Americans are people, then the Constitution was made for them too.

On this view, the Constitution's words matter more than the private deals behind them. The delegates refused to write "slave" into it. They gave Congress the power to end the slave trade after twenty years. They wrote a preamble promising to "establish Justice" and "secure the Blessings of Liberty." Douglass argued that the country should be held to those words, and that leaving the Union, as Garrison urged, would only abandon the enslaved people to the slaveholders.

Weighing the two views

Notice what the two men agreed on. Both hated slavery. Both knew the facts in Part 4. They disagreed about what the document was and what to do with it. Garrison looked at the intentions and the bargains behind the words, and said: reject it. Douglass looked at the words themselves, and at what they could become, and said: claim it.

Historians today still discuss these questions. Some stress that the delegates who disliked slavery had little choice: without the bargains, South Carolina and Georgia might not have joined, and there might have been no union at all. They point out that the Constitution let Congress end the slave trade, and that its words were later used to end slavery. Others stress that the bargains gave the slaveholding states extra power in the national government for seventy years, that the Fugitive Slave Clause applied inside the free states and required them to give up people who had escaped, and that the Union finally had to fight a civil war over slavery. Both sides of that discussion are working from the same facts.

The GED test will not ask you which view is right. It will ask you to recognize a point of view, to tell a fact from an opinion, and to see what evidence a writer uses. "The Constitution counted three-fifths of enslaved people for House seats" is a fact you can check. "The Constitution is a covenant with death" and "the Constitution is a glorious liberty document" are judgments. Each is supported by some facts and challenged by others.

The compromises at a glance

This table gathers every compromise in this chapter. For each one it shows what was disputed, what one side wanted, what the other side wanted, and what was agreed. It is one of the most useful things on this page to review before the test.

Drills for this part: II.09 The Convention's compromises. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

Words to know

Convention

A meeting of representatives who come together for a special purpose, such as writing or approving a constitution.

Delegate

A person sent to represent others at a meeting.

Preside

To run a meeting and keep order. Washington presided over the convention.

Compromise

An agreement in which each side gives up part of what it wants so that both can agree.

Representation

How people are given a voice in government through others who speak and vote for them.

Apportion

To divide something up and hand it out in shares, as seats in the House are divided among the states by population.

Census

An official count of the population. The Constitution requires one every ten years, and it is used to divide House seats among the states.

Bicameral and unicameral

A bicameral legislature has two houses, like Congress. A unicameral legislature has one, like Congress under the Articles.

Virginia Plan

The plan presented on May 29, 1787, for three branches and a two-house legislature with representation by population in both houses. It favored the large states.

New Jersey Plan

The plan presented on June 15, 1787, to keep one house with one vote per state while giving Congress more power. It favored the small states.

Great Compromise (Connecticut Compromise)

The agreement of July 16, 1787: a House of Representatives based on population and a Senate with equal representation for every state.

Three-Fifths Clause

The part of Article I, Section 2 that counted three-fifths of "all other Persons" (enslaved people) for House seats and direct taxes. Ended by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Slave trade clause

The part of Article I, Section 9 that barred Congress from banning the import of enslaved people before 1808.

Fugitive Slave Clause

The part of Article IV, Section 2 that required people who escaped slavery into another state to be returned. A fugitive is a person who escapes or runs away.

Euphemism

A milder word or phrase used in place of one that sounds harsh, such as "all other Persons" in place of "slaves."

Indentured servant

A person who agreed to work for someone for a fixed number of years, often to pay for passage across the ocean. Called "those bound to Service for a Term of Years" in the Constitution.

Commerce

Trade: the buying and selling of goods, especially between places.

Export and import

An export is a good sent out of a country to be sold. An import is a good brought in. The Constitution forbids taxes on exports.

Navigation act

A law about shipping and trade by sea.

Revenue

Money the government takes in, mostly through taxes. Bills for raising revenue must start in the House.

Executive

The branch or person that carries out the laws. Under the Constitution, the president.

Elector and Electoral College

An elector is a person chosen to vote for president. The Electoral College is the name for all the electors together. Each state has as many electors as it has senators plus representatives.

Term

The length of time a person serves in an office before facing election or appointment again.

Bill of rights

A list of the people's rights that the government may not take away. The Constitution of 1787 had none, which was George Mason's main objection.

Ratify

To formally approve. The Constitution needed nine states to ratify it.

Abolitionist

A person who worked to abolish, or end, slavery completely.