LISTEN ON SOUNDCLOUD: The Greatest Compromises Secure the Blessings of Liberty In our current era of partisan polarization, just about any compromise can seem great. This makes all the more remarkable the Great Compromise of 1787, when so much seemed at stake. The Great Compromise (also known as the “Connecticut Compromise”) broke an impasse between large and small states as well as nationalists and localists. It made possible the eventual ratification of the Constitution. But the compromise did more than result in the creation of the Senate, in which each state has two members, and the House of Representatives, where a state’s number of seats is proportional to its population. It also strengthened the Constitution’s checks and balances of competing powers and interests in order to better secure Americans’ liberty. When the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia in May of 1787, the need for compromise soon became apparent. Congress had authorized delegates to meet “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation,” under which states had equal representation in a unicameral assembly of delegates chosen by state legislatures. Yet on May 29, James Madison and Edmund Randolph proposed the “Virginia plan,” which would scrap the Articles and institute a new constitution featuring a strong, one-man executive, as well as a bicameral legislature in which membership in both houses would be proportional to states’ populations or contributions in tax revenue. What had once been a confederation of states would be erased by a new national government in which state governments had no direct voice. This displeased localists (soon to be labeled “Antifederalists”) who viewed the American Revolution, in part, as a struggle for the autonomy of the 13 former British colonies. It also put on the defensive small states, which feared that the proposed new system would allow highly-populated neighbors such as Virginia and Pennsylvania to dictate the government’s direction. In response, on June 15 William Patterson presented the “New Jersey plan.” Patterson proposed to retain the Articles of Confederation and its one-house legislature in which all states had one vote. The Articles would be amended, however, to vest the central government with new powers to collect taxes and regulate commerce. In addition, a new, multiple-person executive branch would be authorized to compel compliance with the central government’s laws. It took delegates only a few days to reject the New Jersey plan. Even so, the Virginia plan lacked the support necessary for its adoption. The Constitutional Convention remained deadlocked. The Convention regained momentum when Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, both of Connecticut, proposed combining elements of the Virginia and New Jersey plans. When finalized on July 23, the Great Compromise had settled on a Senate in which states had equal representation and a House of Representatives where seats were assigned according to population. The compromise did more than split the difference between the Virginia and New Jersey plans. Embracing the Virginia plan’s bicameralism meant that bills would need to pass through an additional filter prior to arriving on the desk of the (one-man) executive. Embracing in the Senate the New Jersey plan’s insistence on representation that was not only equal among the states but also (prior to the 1913 adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment) elected by the state legislatures meant that state governments, which had existed prior to the new national one, enjoyed a safeguard against the usurpation of their authority. Unlike under the Articles of Confederation, however, the compromise allowed senators to vote as individuals; gone would be the days when delegates cast ballots to decide their state’s single vote. Yet revenue bills would originate in the proportional, popularly-elected House—in deference to the Revolutionary rallying cry of “no taxation without representation.” All this made the Great Compromise better, stronger, and more consequential than the sum of its parts. It helped to institute a plan that leveraged key features of America’s Revolutionary heritage in the service of the future United States—a nation of nations that divided power within the central government and between the central government, the states, and individual citizens. The democratic republic that resulted was to be a means to an end even greater than itself. Although the framers of the Constitution imagined different ways to achieve their goal, they refused to compromise their commitment to secure the blessings of liberty. They found a way to compromise on the new government’s decision-making process in order to enjoy the best hopes of realizing its purpose. This made all the difference. Robert M. S. McDonald is Professor of History at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time. Click Here to have the NEWEST essay in this study emailed to your inbox every day at 12:30 pm Eastern! Click Here for the previous essay. Click Here for the next essay. Click Here to view the schedule of topics in our 90 Day Study on Congress.
A convention of delegates from all the states except Rhode Island met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in May of 1787. Known as the Constitutional Convention, at this meeting it was decided that the best solution to the young country's problems was to set aside the Articles of Confederation and write a new constitution. George Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention. The delegates, or representatives for the states, debated for months over what would be included in the Constitution. Some states were in favor of a strong central government, while other states were opposed. Large states felt that they should have more representation in Congress, while small states wanted equal representation with larger ones. Roger Sherman, a delegate from Connecticut, proposed a legislature with two parts; states would have equal representation in the Senate, and the population of states would determine representation in the House of Representatives. This created a bicameral legislative branch, which gave equal representation to each State in the Senate, and representation based on population in the House. Small states feared they would be ignored if representation was based on population while large states believed that their larger populations deserved more of a voice. Under the bicameral system, each party would be represented in a balance of power. Each state would be equally represented in the Senate, with two delegates, while representation in the House of Representatives would be based upon population. The delegates finally agreed to this "Great Compromise," which is also known as the Connecticut Compromise. The Constitution also created an executive branch and a judicial branch, which set up a system of checks and balances. All three branches would have a distribution of power so that no one branch could become more powerful than another. Early on, Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia presented the Virginia Plan, which provided for a national government with three branches. The legislative branch would make laws, the executive branch would provide leadership and enforce laws, and the judicial branch would explain and interpret laws. Like the issue of political representation, commerce and slavery were two issues that divided the Northern and Southern states. Southern states exported goods and raw materials and feared that the Northern states would take unfair advantage. The South finally agreed not to require two-thirds passage in both houses to regulate commerce. The North agreed that the slave trade could continue until 1808. In addition, slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for representation in the House of Representatives; this was known as the “Three-Fifths Compromise.” Nationality requirements and ways to amend and ratify the Constitution were also addressed. Senators would have to be citizens for nine years and Representatives for seven years, and the President must be native-born to be eligible to hold office. In order to make changes or amendments to the Constitution, nine of the 13 states would have to vote to ratify before an amendment could become law.
The Great Compromise of 1787, also known as the Sherman Compromise, was an agreement reached during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 between delegates of the states with large and small populations that defined the structure of Congress and the number of representatives each state would have in Congress according to the United States Constitution. Under the agreement proposed by Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman, Congress would be a “bicameral” or two-chambered body, with each state getting a number of representatives in the lower chamber (the House) proportional to its population and two representatives in the upper chamber (the Senate).
Perhaps the greatest debate undertaken by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 centered on how many representatives each state should have in the new government's lawmaking branch, the U.S. Congress. As is often the case in government and politics, resolving a great debate required a great compromise—in this case, the Great Compromise of 1787. Early in the Constitutional Convention, delegates envisioned a Congress consisting of only a single chamber with a certain number of representatives from each state. Weeks before the Constitutional Convention convened on July 16, 1787, the framers had already made several important decisions about how the Senate should be structured. They rejected a proposal to have the House of Representatives elect senators from lists submitted by the individual state legislatures and agreed that those legislatures should elect their senators. In fact, until the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, all U.S. Senators were appointed by the state legislatures rather than elected by the people. By the end of its first day in session, the convention had already set the minimum age for senators at 30 and the term length at six years, as opposed to 25 for House members, with two-year terms. James Madison explained that these distinctions, based on “the nature of the senatorial trust, which requires greater extent of information and stability of character,” would allow the Senate “to proceed with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom than the popular[ly elected] branch.” However, the issue of equal representation threatened to destroy the seven-week-old convention. Delegates from the large states believed that because their states contributed proportionally more in taxes and military resources, they should enjoy proportionally greater representation in the Senate as well as in the House. Delegates from small states argued—with similar intensity—that all states should be equally represented in both houses. When Roger Sherman proposed the Great Compromise, Benjamin Franklin agreed that each state should have an equal vote in the Senate in all matters—except those involving revenue and spending. Over the Fourth of July holiday, delegates worked out a compromise plan that sidetracked Franklin’s proposal. On July 16, the convention adopted the Great Compromise by a suspenseful margin of one vote. Many historians have noted that without that vote, there would likely have been no U.S. Constitution today. The burning question was, how many representatives from each state? Delegates from the larger, more populous states favored the Virginia Plan, which called for each state to have a different number of representatives based on the state’s population. Delegates from smaller states supported the New Jersey Plan, under which each state would send the same number of representatives to Congress. Delegates from the smaller states argued that, despite their lower populations, their states held equal legal status to that of the larger states, and that proportional representation would be unfair to them. Delegate Gunning Bedford, Jr. of Delaware notoriously threatened that the small states could be forced to “find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice.” However, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts objected to the small states’ claim of legal sovereignty, stating that “we never were independent States, were not such now, and never could be even on the principles of the Confederation. The States and the advocates for them were intoxicated with the idea of their sovereignty.” Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman is credited with proposing the alternative of a "bicameral," or two-chambered Congress made up of a Senate and a House of Representatives. Each state, suggested Sherman, would send an equal number of representatives to the Senate, and one representative to the House for every 30,000 residents of the state. At the time, all the states except Pennsylvania had bicameral legislatures, so the delegates were familiar with the structure of Congress proposed by Sherman. Sherman’s plan pleased delegates from both the large and small states and became known as the Connecticut Compromise of 1787, or the Great Compromise. The structure and powers of the new U.S. Congress, as proposed by the delegates of the Constitutional Convention, were explained to the people by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers. Today, each state is represented in Congress by two Senators and a variable number of members of the House of Representatives based on the state’s population as reported in the most recent decennial census. The process of fairly determining the number of members of the House from each state is called "apportionment." The first census in 1790 counted 4 million Americans. Based on that count, the total number of members elected to the House of Representatives grew from the original 65 to 106. The current House membership of 435 was set by Congress in 1911. To ensure fair and equal representation in the House, the process of “redistricting” is used to establish or change the geographic boundaries within the states from which representatives are elected. In the 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all of the congressional districts in each state must all have roughly the same population. Through apportionment and redistricting, high population urban areas are prevented from gaining an inequitable political advantage over less populated rural areas. For example, if New York City were not split into several congressional districts, the vote of a single New York City resident would carry more influence on the House than all of the residents in the rest of the State of New York combined. While the populations of the states varied in 1787, the differences were far less pronounced than they are today. For example, the 2020 population of Wyoming at 549,914 pales in comparison to California’s 39.78 million. As a result, one then-unforeseen political impact of the Great Compromise is that states with smaller populations have disproportionately more power in the modern Senate. While California is home to almost 70% more people than Wyoming, both states have two votes in the Senate. “The founders never imagined … the great differences in the population of states that exist today,” said political scientist George Edwards III of Texas A&M University. “If you happen to live in a low-population state you get a disproportionately bigger say in American government.” Due to this proportionate imbalance of voting power, interests in smaller states, such as coal mining in West Virginia or corn farming in Iowa, are more likely to benefit from federal funding through tax breaks and crop subsidies. The Framer’s intent to “protect” the smaller states through equal representation in the Senate also manifests itself in the Electoral College, as each state’s number of electoral votes is based on its combined number of representatives in the House and Senate. For example, in Wyoming, the state with the smallest population, each of its three electors represents a far smaller group of people than each of the 55 electoral votes cast by California, the most populous state. |
Do you think the great compromise shared power equally between large and small states?
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