When the Founding Fathers got together at Philadelphia to draft the Constitution, they had many different views and opinions as to how to govern our country. At the convention, the founders fought over the issues of slavery, representation and the Congress’s powers. Their personal lives had influenced their ideas and some of the compromises made at the Constitutional Convention. The founders’ different personal experiences, economic backgrounds, and coming from states of different sizes, economy and needs, led to the creation of the Three-Fifths Compromise, The Great Compromise, and the Slave Trade Compromise.
To start off, the founders all came from different states with different populations and sizes. Since the founders are representatives
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At the convention, the founders were debating about how many representatives in the Congress should each state allowed to have. For example, James Madison, who came from Virginia, one of the larger states, suggested that representation should be proportional to the state’s population (Hart et al. 109-110). Coming from a state with larger population had influenced Madison’s proposal, for he reasoned that since Virginia has a large population of people, so more representatives are needed to represent more people. However, the states with a smaller population disagreed with this proposal and came up with a proposal that would counter Madison’s proposal. Paterson, who came from New Jersey, one of those states with smaller population, proposed a plan in which equal number of people should be elected from each state for representation in the Congress (Hart et al. 109-110). It was evident to see how coming from a smaller state had affected Paterson’s proposal, for he feared …show more content…
The founders’ disagreements about this issue based on their economic backgrounds and coming from states with different economy had influence the creation of the Three-Fifths Compromise which dealt with how to count slaves as a part of the population. According to "The Slavery Compromises,” the Southern state 's economy, such as South Carolina, depends on the labor of slaves working in their large plantations (University of Louisiana Lafayette 2016). Since the Southern states that depended on slavery naturally owned more slaves, many of the founders from these states wanted slaves to be counted as any other white people to gain more representatives and more voice in Congress. On the other hand, the Northern states’ economy does not heavily rely on slavery, and many of these states are “free” states which restrict slavery (University of Louisiana Lafayette 2016). Many of these Northern delegates such as Elbridge Gerry countered that “Blacks are properties” and should be counted as properties that can be taxed, but not as people when they don’t have the rights of citizens (Hart et al. 111). From this, we can infer that the Northern delegates fear that the South will get more voice, more representation due to more slaves, and they thought it was ironic how the
The United States began to dissatisfy some of its citizens and so the concerns of sectionalism, or the split of the country began to arise. There was a continuous riff between the south and the north over a few issues, a major one being slavery. The south argued that the slaves were necessary to support the southern economy. According to document A, the south were angry that the north was creating taxes that hurt the southern economy, thus increasing the need for slavery since they had to make up for the expense of the taxes. The south felt that the north was able...
On June 12, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee, consisting of one delegate from each of the thirteen states, for the purpose of setting up a cohesive Federal Government. Headed by John Dickinson, the committee presented a draft of the Articles of Confederation to Congress a month later. Though the Articles were not officially ratified until five years later, Congress began operating under them in 1777. The delay that occurred during the years from drafting to ratification was partially caused by the opening of a multi-faceted debate that encompassed the issues of representation for citizens, the balance of power within the country, and state sovereignty. Densely-populated states wanted a system of representation based on population, while the more sparsely-inhabited states disagreed. The Federalist Party wanted a small federal government, but common sense demanded a balance in size. Everyone wanted the question of state sovereignty answered. The Articles of Confederation attempted to answer these questions, but instead, only succeeded in creating an ineffectual, self-contradictory government that required reform. This reform came in the form of the Constitution of 1789.
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.
On May 25, 1787 in a State House in Philadelphia, fifty-five delegates from twelve out of the thirteen colonies re-united, in efforts to modify the ineffective Articles of Confederation. This meeting was called the Continental Convention of 1787. After the Articles of Confederation, it was clear that a unicameral legislature was not going to uphold the needs of all the states, to maintain and unify them. Many ideas arose to offer a solution for the controversial debate on how many representatives each state should have in the U.S. Congress. The ...
"The American constitution recognized slavery as a local constitution within the legal rights of the individual states. But in the North slavery was not adaptable to the local economy, and to many, it contradicted the vision of the founding fathers for a nation in which all men are to be free. The South considered slavery as a necessary institution for the plantation economy. It was linked to the local culture and society. As the United states expanded, the North worried that the South would introduce slavery into the new territories. Slavery had become both a moral issue and a question of political power." (Kral p61)
The original version of the Constitution is a result of a series of compromises made to achieve a document that would be voted by the majority of the newly emerged states. Slavery was a very sensitive issue, as it was widely common on the continent.
Therefore, in 1787, two delegates by the names of Roger Sherman and James Wilson introduced the Three Fifths compromise in the Philadelphia Convention. 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 Rep...
The Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Acts were very advantageous to the South. In both pieces of legislation the south gained things that would aid them in their campaign to expand slavery. The advantages the south included a stronger fugitive slave law, the possibility for slavery to exist in the remaining part of the Mexican Cession, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the eventual plan to build the Southern Pacific Railroad.
The 1787 Constitutional Convention was paramount in unifying the states after the Revolutionary War. However, in order to do so, the convention had to compromise on many issues instead of addressing them with all due haste. This caused the convention to leave many issues unresolved. Most notably were the issues of slavery, race, secession, and states’ rights. Through the Civil War and the Reconstruction, these issues were resolved, and in the process the powers of the federal government were greatly expanded.
Madison believed that having diverse representatives would lead to a federal government that would be better than any state government that was homogeneous. He went a step further by saying that representatives should be unlike the populous, meaning that the elected should be wiser, better, and not like the voters. Anti-Federalists predicted the populist Americans wouldn’t put up with these bold Federalist ideas. The Anti-Federalists would make their mark on the Constitution, but ultimately the Constitution would be closer to the Federalists’ bold
When the Framers were drafting the presidential selection procedure of the Constitution in 1787, they presented an artful compromise to the issue of direct election. With the new country spanning thousands of miles along the Atlantic coast and barely connected by transportation or communication, it was impractical if not impossible to distribute information widely enough for every citizen to make an informed choice (Kimberling). In a direct election, this lack of knowledge about candidates living in other states would inevitably result in citizens voting for the candidate they knew the most about. Because the larger states have considerable more voters, presidents would be elected not for their political beliefs, but for their place of residence. Given the inability to spread information extensively, the Framers compromised by adopting the idea of representation. The people up and down the country would vote for local delegates with whom they were familiar with. These electors would then elect a president “pre-eminent for ability and virtue” (Hamilton 333). By devising the Electoral College, the Framers ensured th...
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.
The supporters of proportional representation (James Madison, James Wilson, and Rufus King) argued that the number of members in both houses should be based on the number of people that they would represent. Since government both acted and represented the people, they believe that the government should give equal voting power to an equal number of people. Madison argues that the states should not be represented as states in national gov. (each representative should serve a district and connect the people of that district to the national government). Others argued for equal representation of the states (as in Articles of Confederation). These delegates believe that U.S. was confederation of separate states, and the national government derived
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.
Sources A and D have slightly different opinions on how the United States should address the issue of slavery. Both sources are from the same year as the Compromise of 1850 was approved and started to work in the country. Other than that, both sources come from a speech directed towards the u.s senate by a credible southerner and northerner.