Smaller states like Delaware and New Jersey objected to the Virginia Plan saying that the large states would easily outvote them in Congress if the number of votes were based on population. After weeks of debate, William Patterson of New Jersey put forth a plan that called for three branches including a legislature with only one house where each state would have one vote. The New Jersey Plan with a single house legislature and equal representation was more like Congress under the Articles. The convention was deadlocked and appeared ready to fall apart when Roger Sherman proposed a compromise. Sherman�s proposal has come to be known as the Great Compromise. It called for a Congress with two houses (also known as "bicameralism") � the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate would give equal representation to all of the states. Each state would have two senators that would be chosen by the state legislature. This part of the plan satisfied the small states. The House of Representatives would base representation on a state�s population (one …show more content…
It is sometimes wrongly said that the compromise meant the founders considered slaves as only partial human beings. In fact, the compromise had nothing to do with the human worth of the individual slave. States with slaves wanted to count all of their slaves in the state�s population because that would yield more representatives in Congress. The opponents of slavery, noting that slaves had no rights of citizenship including the vote, argued that slaves should not be counted at all for purposes of representation. In the end, the compromise was to count three-fifths of the state�s slaves in the total population. In another words, for every five slaves, three of would be added to the population count used to determine representation in the House of
At the time, larger states like Virginia were creating an unfair amount of power for themselves that the small states didn’t have. In the new government, Congress was created to make laws, and was made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives would give states a number of Representatives they could have based on their population. This would give fair power deserved to the larger states. The Senate however would be two and only two Senators for each state, no matter how large or small, bringing some equality to Congress.
Several delegates submitted plans for consideration that would strengthen the national government two such plans were the Virginia and the New Jersey Plan. Despite much of Virginia’s plan being accepted, if a compromise had not been reached the New Jerseys plan would have been more workable because it offered: equal representation of the states, provided operational means to congress, and was not a radical departure from the Articles of the Confederation. To begin with the unequal representation of the states in the Virginia Plan was of great concern and controversy while the New Jersey Plan retained equal representation of the states. Virginia proposed a bicameral legislature that included elections by the people and appointments by those elected.
As I stated earlier each state wanted to be represented according to different factors. The states with bigger populations wanted representation to be based solely off of population. The states with smaller populations wanted there to be a fixed number of representatives per state, regardless of size or population. The Connecticut Compromise resolved this issue by forming the two houses that we have today.
The Signers also owned slaves themselves. They did not mention the issue of slavery, in the Constitution and little address was given to it, in a sense it was done to turn a blind eye. The signers were accused of being hypocrites. Although they did give some of the slave owning states a few extra seats in the House because they had “other persons,” this was not enough to stop the future problems that would challenge the meaning of, “all mean are created equal.” Some of the only mention The Signers had written the Constitution to ban slave trade for twenty years, in the Atlantic. There was a fugitive slave clause, that required others to return any runaway slaves to their owners. In my opinion this is not all-encompassing of the meaning “we the people” in its entirety. The signers did not include more protection and make provisions for the Slaves. I understand it was the time in history that was the way of life, and nothing seemed to be different for the country at that time however, it seems so disappointing to know the signers may have deliberately turned a blind eye (Wilson, DiIulio, Jr. and Bose
The Three Fifths compromise states that a slave be counted as three-fifths of a person. Therefore, the population of the southern states equaled the population of the northern states. Now that the populations were balanced, the south and the north sent the same amount of representatives to the House of Representatives. Pro-slavery southerners felt as if the north still had an advantage, but it was actually the south that had the advantage in the Senate and the House of Representatives.... ...
These compromises are found in four main places within the Constitution. The first is the three-fifths compromise, which detailed how slaves would influence the population of each state for the purpose of determining representation and taxation. Located in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution the compromise states that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for enumeration purposes (Dolbeare, 71). This compromise was important for the Southern states, whose populations consisted of large numbers of slaves, because without it they would have a significant smaller number of representatives in the House. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution prohibit...
So they "compromised" and said that each slave counted 3/5 of a person. The final compromise was the Commerce & Trade Compromise. The issue here was should Congress be able to regulate trade and should the United States continue with slave trading? The North felt that Congress should control trade and put an end to slave trading. The South was fearful of Northern jealousy of Southern agriculture trade with England, and the South was also wary of Congress regulating trade.
The delegates of Congress gathered to ratify the new Constitution in 1787, had to agree in many compromises, two of the biggest ones were the Great Compromise and the Three-Fifth Compromise. The Great Compromise also called The Connecticut framed mainly by Sherman, resolved the debate between the Virginia plan supporters and the New Jersey plan supporters on the biggest issue of the debate centered on how many representative each state should have in the Congress. The Three-Fifth Compromise resolved the debates over slavery, taxation, and representation in the lower house, mostly between the southern states seeking more representation in the lower house and wanted the slaves to be counted, and northern states that wanted the slaves to be taxed
The first proposals to this new plan were the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. The Virginia Plan called for a separation of powers among the government’s three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. Some states proposed this idea and came up with the New Jersey Plan, which called for all of the states to have equal representation from Congress. In order to move forward from the deadlock of the two proposals, the Connecticut Compromise was enacted. This decided that legislature would be bicameral, which meant that there would be two houses: one would have equal representation and one would be based on state population. This unified the states under a federal system. To this day, there are three types of Fe...
The purpose of this paper is to defend the argument that the Virginia Plan gave too much power to the national government. On May 29, 1787, Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph proposed what became known as "The Virginia Plan Written primarily by James Madison, the plan outlines of what would eventually become the United States Constitution: a national government consisting of three branches with checks and balances to prevent the abuse of power. It describes 2 houses: one with members elected by the people for 3-year terms and the other composed of older leaders elected by the state legislatures for 7-year terms. Both houses would use the population as a basis for dividing seats amongst the states. Each of the states would
Furthermore, the creation of The Constitution caused much debate between the elite and democratic states because they thought that if the Government got all of the power, they would lose their rights. The conflict between the North and South played a major role in the development of this document. The North felt that representation in Congress should be based on the number of total people and South felt that it should be based on number of whites. However, The Three Fifths Compromise settled this when it was said a slave will count as 3/5 of a free person of representatives and taxation. Article one section two of the Constitution defines how the population will be counted, obviously there was a strong opposition to this by Southern states like Virginia because their economy was based on slave labor and they had a bigger population because of it.
Since the beginning of their new nation, the United States had many differences between the Northern and Southern states. During the Constitutional Convention they disagreed on how to determine their representation in the house based on population; the Southerners wanted to count their slaves and the Northerners did not, which lead to the three-fifths compromise. Later in the Convention there were concessions given to the South, which left the Northerners feeling uneasy, such as: a guarantee that the slave trade would not be interfered with by Congress until 1808 and slave owners were given the right to recover refugee slaves from anywhere in the United States. While many Northern delegates were disappointed with the rights given to the South, they felt it was necessary for the good of the Nation. This was necessary to form a strong central government and union between the states.
One agreement the Constitution consisted of was the three-fifths Compromise. Foner states that the Constitution did not allow the national government to meddle with slavery in the states. This meant that three out of every five slaves could be counted as part of the state 's population. The powerpoint mentions that this raised their representation in the House of Representatives. The congress could not mess with the slave trade until
He asked them for a last-minute motion to change 40,000 to 30,000 people. This ended
New powers were granted to Congress to regulate the economy and currency. At the insistence of delegates from southern states, Congress was denied the power to limit the slave trade for a minimum of twenty years and exports would not be taxed. This was called the Trade and Commerce agreement. Along with that, slaves were allowed to be counted as 3/5 persons for the purpose of apportioning representatives and determining electoral votes, as well as for tax purposes. Delegates compromised on the issue of apportioning members of Congress, an issue that had divided the larger and smaller states. Under a plan put forward by delegate Roger Sherman of Connecticut- the Connecticut Compromise- representation in the House of Representatives would be based on population while each state would be guaranteed an equal two senators in the new