The Convention of 1787

A Country on Paper Only

The Constitution was not born from triumph. It was born from embarrassment.

By 1786, the United States existed as a country in name only. The Articles of Confederation — the framework adopted in 1781 — had created a league of independent states with a Congress that could ask for money but not levy it, could sign treaties but not enforce them, and could declare war but not raise an army without begging the states for men.

There was no president. There was no federal court system. There was no power to regulate commerce between the states, which meant each state taxed its neighbors' goods at its own borders and printed its own currency. Rhode Island, at one point, refused to send delegates to Congress at all.

The breaking point came in western Massachusetts. In the summer of 1786, a farmer and Revolutionary War veteran named Daniel Shays led an uprising of indebted farmers who had seen their property seized for unpaid taxes. They marched on courthouses to stop foreclosures. In January 1787, they attempted to raid the federal armory at Springfield.

The national government could not respond. Massachusetts had to raise its own militia to put the rebellion down. George Washington, watching from Mount Vernon, wrote to a friend that unless something changed, the young republic would soon be “liable to be annihilated.”

“What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves.” George Washington, 1786

A small meeting in Annapolis the previous September had tried to address the problem of interstate commerce and failed — only five states bothered to send delegates. But that meeting issued a call for a broader convention the following year. Congress, reluctantly, endorsed it. The stated purpose was to revise the Articles of Confederation. What actually happened in Philadelphia went far beyond revision.

Who Came — and Who Didn't

Twelve of the thirteen states sent delegates. Rhode Island, suspicious of any central authority, sent no one.

Fifty-five men attended at some point over the four months. They were, almost without exception, educated, propertied, and white. They were lawyers, planters, merchants, and soldiers. Twenty-five owned enslaved people. Eight had signed the Declaration of Independence. Nearly all had served in the Revolution in some capacity.

They were also, in many ways, a snapshot of the American elite — and that is worth naming plainly. No women were present. No enslaved people. No Native Americans. No laborers, no sailors, no small farmers of the kind who had marched with Shays. The men who wrote the rules of American government were the men who already held most of the power under the old ones.

Some of the most prominent figures of the era were missing. Thomas Jefferson was in Paris as minister to France. John Adams was in London. Patrick Henry, who opposed the whole enterprise, refused to attend, explaining that he “smelt a rat.” Samuel Adams was not selected. Thomas Paine was in Europe.

The men who did come would shape the document for the next two centuries.

Windows Shut, Doors Locked

The delegates made two decisions on the first day that shaped everything that followed.

First, they chose Washington to preside. He had not wanted to come. He was persuaded that his presence was the only thing that could give the meeting legitimacy. He was right. Without Washington in the chair, it is doubtful the states would have taken the result seriously.

Second — and more consequentially — they agreed to meet in secret. No notes would be published. No reporters admitted. Windows were shut even in the summer heat so that passersby could not overhear. Delegates were forbidden to discuss the proceedings outside the room.

The secrecy was not paranoia. It was strategy. If the debates had been public, delegates could not have changed their minds without losing face. Compromise requires the freedom to retreat from a position you argued loudly the week before. The sealed room made that possible.

It also meant that for four months, the country had no idea what was being built in Philadelphia. When the document was finally published in September, many Americans read it for the first time — and were furious.

The Virginia Plan vs. the New Jersey Plan

Two weeks in, Edmund Randolph of Virginia introduced a proposal that went far beyond revising the Articles. Drafted largely by Madison, it called for an entirely new national government with three branches — legislative, executive, judicial — and a legislature that would derive its power from the people rather than the states.

The catch: representation in both houses of the legislature would be based on population. Virginia, the largest state, would dominate.

Small states were horrified. On June 15, William Paterson of New Jersey introduced a counterproposal. It kept the existing structure of one vote per state and merely gave Congress a few new powers. It was, in effect, a patched version of the Articles.

The debate that followed was bitter. Large states argued that giving Delaware the same vote as Virginia was absurd. Small states argued that population-based representation meant their interests would simply disappear. On June 29, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut proposed a middle path. The convention deadlocked. A committee was formed to find a way out.

Two Houses, Two Rules

Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut proposed what became known as the Connecticut Compromise, or the Great Compromise.

The House of Representatives would be apportioned by population, elected directly by the people. The Senate would give each state two votes regardless of size, chosen by state legislatures. Money bills would originate in the House, which pleased the large states. The Senate would check the House, which pleased the small ones.

It was not a clean solution. It was a workable one. And it is the reason the United States has a bicameral Congress with two chambers that represent two different things — the people and the states.

“Representation is the pivot on which the whole system turns.” James Wilson, Philadelphia, 1787

What Was Traded Away

The Great Compromise is the one taught in textbooks. The other compromises made that week are equally part of the document, and they are the reason the Constitution's opening promise of liberty was, from the beginning, unfinished.

The most notorious was the Three-Fifths Compromise. Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted for purposes of representation in the House — which would inflate Southern power — but did not want them counted for purposes of taxation. Northern delegates objected to counting people who were not citizens and could not vote. The convention settled on counting three-fifths of the enslaved population for both representation and direct taxation. The result was that slaveholding states received extra seats in Congress and extra votes in the Electoral College, without giving the people they enslaved any voice at all.

The convention also agreed that Congress could not prohibit the importation of enslaved people before 1808, and it added a clause requiring the return of those who escaped slavery to their enslavers.

These provisions were not accidental. They were deliberate concessions to keep the Southern states in the room. Some delegates — including Gouverneur Morris and Luther Martin — said so out loud and objected. But the convention's priority was union, and union came at a price that would not be paid in full for another seventy-eight years.

Naming this is not a modern judgment imposed on the past. It was contested at the time. The delegates knew what they were doing. The Constitution they produced was a foundation built with cracks that would eventually have to be reforged by a civil war and three amendments.

From Sketches to a Signed Document

By late July, the broad structure was settled. The convention handed its resolutions to a Committee of Detail, which spent ten days turning them into a working draft. That draft came back with the familiar outline: Article I, Article II, Article III, and so on.

In September, a Committee of Style — Madison, Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Rufus King, and William Johnson — was given the task of polishing the language. Morris, a Pennsylvania delegate with a gift for prose, rewrote the Preamble almost entirely.

The earlier draft had opened with the states: “We the People of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations...” — a list that would have tied the document's authority to the states that happened to sign it.

Morris changed it to three words.

“We the People of the United States.” Gouverneur Morris, Preamble, September 1787

It was a small edit with enormous consequences. The authority of the new government would rest on the people, not on the states. That single phrase, later cited by Lincoln at Gettysburg and by the Supreme Court in case after case, reshaped what the Constitution was.

The Rising Sun

On the final day, thirty-nine of the remaining delegates signed. Three refused: Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Mason wanted a Bill of Rights and a ban on the slave trade. Randolph wanted more time. Gerry had a list of objections he read aloud.

Franklin, too frail to read his own speech, had a colleague deliver it. He said he did not entirely approve of the Constitution, but he was not sure he would ever approve of any document produced by a group of men. Still, he said, he consented to it “because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.”

He then told the story the room would remember. He had been staring at the back of Washington's chair, which bore a carved sun, through the long months of debate. He could never tell whether the sun was rising or setting. But now, at last, he knew.

“I have the happiness to know that it is a rising, and not a setting sun.” Benjamin Franklin, September 17, 1787

Ratification Was Not Guaranteed

The convention's work was not finished when the delegates signed. The Constitution had to be ratified by nine of the thirteen states, and ratification was not a formality. It was a fight.

Opponents — the Anti-Federalists — argued that the document created a distant, powerful central government that would trample the states, that it lacked a bill of rights, and that it concentrated too much power in a president who could become a king. Supporters — the Federalists — argued that the Articles had failed, that a stronger union was the only way to survive, and that the system of separated powers would prevent any branch from dominating.

Three of the most important writers in American history took up the Federalist side anonymously. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published eighty-five essays in New York newspapers between October 1787 and August 1788. Collected as The Federalist Papers, they remain the most influential commentary on the Constitution ever written — and the best guide to what the framers actually thought they were doing.

The Constitution was not the product of consensus. It was the product of argument, and the argument did not end in Philadelphia. It continued through ratification, and it has continued ever since.