By 1786 these accumulated pressures made some sort of revision of the Articles inevitable. Virginia’s desire for trade regulation led to a convention of several states at Annapolis in September 1786. Those who attended the meeting quickly realized that commerce could not be considered apart from other problems and called for a larger convention in Philadelphia in May of the following year. After several states agreed to send delegates to Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress belatedly recognized the approaching convention and in February 1787 authorized it to revise the Articles of Confederation.
By 1787 almost every political leader in the country, even those who later opposed the new Constitution, expected some new powers to be added to the Confederation Congress. Reform of the Articles in some way or other—particularly by granting the Congress a limited authority to tax and the power to regulate trade—was in the air. This desire to do something about the central government gave the nationalists like James Madison their opportunity, and it helps explain the willingness of people to accede to the meeting at Philadelphia.
Yet few people expected what the Philadelphia Convention eventually created—a new Constitution that utterly transformed the structure of the central government and promised a radical weakening of the states. The extraordinarily powerful national government that emerged from Philadelphia possessed far more than the additional congressional powers that were required to solve the United States’ difficulties in credit, commerce, and foreign affairs. Given the Revolutionaries’ loyalty to the sovereignty of their states and their deep-rooted fears of centralized governmental authority, the formation of the new Constitution was a truly remarkable achievement. It cannot be explained simply by the obvious weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation.
In the end, it was also the problems within the separate states in the 1780s that made possible constitutional reform of the central government. The unjust and confusing laws coming out of the state legislatures, Madison informed Jefferson in 1787, had become “so frequent and so flagrant as to alarm the most stedfast friends of Republicanism.” These popular abuses by the state legislatures, said Madison, “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention, and prepared the public mind for a general reform, than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects.”
In 1786 a rebellion of nearly 2,000 distressed debtor farmers threatened with foreclosure of their mortgages broke out in western Massachusetts. The rebellion, led by a former militia captain, Daniel Shays, closed the courts and threatened to take over a federal arsenal. But more alarming, it occurred in the very state, Massachusetts, that was considered to have the best-balanced constitution. Although Shays’s rebels were defeated by militia troops, his sympathizers were victorious at the polls early in 1787. Consequently the newly chosen state representatives soon enacted the kinds of debtor relief legislation that Shays had wanted and that other states were enacting. This legislation convinced many that calling for people to obey the law was a remedy for insurrections only; it did not solve the peculiar problem of legislative tyranny. By voting the sympathizers of Shays into legislative office, the people had made it possible, as one Boston newspaper complained in May 1787, for “sedition itself [to] make laws.”
Thus by 1786–87 the reconstruction of the central government was being sought as a means of correcting not only the weaknesses of the Articles but also the democratic despotism and the internal political abuses of the states. A new central government, some believed, could save both the Congress from the states and the states from themselves. New groups joined those already working to invigorate the national government. Urban artisans hoped that a stronger national government would prevent competition from British imports. Southerners, particularly in Virginia, wanted to gain proportional representation of their growing population. And most important, members of the gentry up and down the continent momentarily submerged their sectional and economic differences in the face of what seemed to them a threat to individual liberty from the tyranny of legislative majorities within the states. Creating a new central government was no longer simply a matter of cementing the union, or of standing strong in foreign affairs, or of satisfying the demands of particular creditor, mercantile, and army interests. It was now a matter, as Madison declared, that would “decide forever the fate of republican government.”
Fifty-five delegates representing twelve states attended the Philadelphia Convention in the summer of 1787. (Rhode Island, which was acutely jealous of its local autonomy, refused to have anything to do with efforts to revise the Articles.) Although many of the delegates were young men—their average age was forty-two—most were well-educated and experienced members of America’s political elite. Thirty-nine had served in Congress at one time or another, eight had worked in the state constitutional conventions, seven had been state governors, and thirty-four were lawyers. One third were veterans of the Continental Army, that great dissolvent of state loyalties, as Washington once called it. Nearly all were gentlemen, “natural aristocrats,” who took their political superiority for granted as an inevitable consequence of their social and economic position.
Washington’s presence was crucial, but he hesitated to attend. In December 1783 he had voluntarily surrendered his sword to the Congress and had retired to Mount Vernon, promising never again to engage in public affairs. This almost unprecedented willingness to give up political power had electrified the world and had established his worldwide fame as a modern version of the ancient Roman farmer-soldier Cincinnatus. Washington’s earlier pledge to withdraw from public life, however, made him reluctant to risk his reputation by getting involved in politics. But friends convinced him that people might think that by not attending the Convention he wanted the federal government to fail so that he could manage a military takeover. So he came and was immediately made president of the Convention.
Some of the other luminaries of the Revolution were not present: Samuel Adams was ill; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were serving as ministers abroad; and Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, although selected by the Virginia legislature, refused to attend the Convention, Henry saying that he “smelt a rat.” The most influential delegations were those of Pennsylvania and Virginia, which included Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson of Pennsylvania and Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and James Madison of Virginia.
The Virginia delegation took the lead and presented the Convention with its first working proposal. This, the Virginia Plan, was largely the effort of the thirty-six-year-old Madison. Short, shy, and soft-spoken, habitually dressed in black, trained to no profession but widely read and possessing an acute and questioning mind, Madison devoted his life to public service. He understood clearly the historical significance of the meeting of the Convention, and it is because of his decision to make a detailed private record of the debates of the Convention that so much is known of what was said that summer in Philadelphia.
Madison’s initial proposals for reform were truly radical. They were not, as he pointed out, mere expedients or simple revisions of the Articles; they promised “systematic change” of government. Madison wanted to create a general government that would no longer be a confederation of independent republics but a national republic in its own right. It would operate directly on individuals and be organized as most of the state governments had been organized, with an executive, a bicameral legislature, and a separate judiciary. This national republic would be superimposed on the states. The states would now stand to the central government, in John Jay’s words, “in the same light in which counties stand to the state, of which they are parts, viz., merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government.” Thus the radical Virginia Plan provided for a two-house national legislature with the authority to legislate “in all cases to which the states are incompetent” and to veto or “to negative all laws passed by the several states, contravening in the opinion of the National Legislature, the articles of Union.” If the national government had the power to veto all state laws, Madison believed, it could then play the same role the English crown had been supposed to play in the British Empire—that of a “disinterested & dispassionate umpire” over clashing interests.
For many in the Philadelphia Convention, however, this Virginia plan was much too extreme. Most delegates were prepared to grant substantial power to the federal government, including the right to tax, regulate commerce, and execute federal laws. But many refused to allow such a weakening of state authority as the Virginia Plan proposed. Opponents of the nationalists, led by delegates from New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, and Delaware, countered with their own proposal, the New Jersey Plan (so-called because it was introduced by William Paterson of New Jersey). This New Jersey Plan essentially amended the Articles of Confederation by adding to the powers of Congress, but at the same time it maintained the basic sovereignty of the states. With two such opposite proposals before it, the Convention approached a crisis in the middle of June 1787.
During the debate that followed, the nationalists, led by Madison and Wilson, were able to retain the basic features of the Virginia Plan and convince a majority of the states at the Convention to reject the New Jersey Plan. Yet the nationalists had to make some concessions. Instead of granting the national legislature a blanket authority “to legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent,” as the Virginia Plan proposed, the Convention granted the Congress (in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution) a list of enumerated powers, including the powers to tax, to borrow and coin money, and to regulate commerce. And instead of giving the national legislature the right to veto harmful state laws, the Convention forbade the states from exercising certain sovereign powers whose abuse had helped to create the crisis of the 1780s. In Article I, Section 10 of the final Constitution, the states were barred from carrying on foreign relations, levying tariffs, coining money, emitting bills of credit, passing ex post facto laws, or doing anything to relieve debtors of the obligations of their contracts. In contrast to the extensive fiscal powers given to the Congress, the states were rendered nearly economically incompetent. Not only did the new Constitution prohibit the states from imposing customs duties—the eighteenth century’s most common and efficient form of taxation—but it also denied the states the authority to issue paper money, and thus succeeded in doing what the British government’s various currency acts in 1751 and 1764 had tried and generally failed to do.
The Convention decided on a strong and single executive. The president was to stand alone, unencumbered by an executive council except one of his own choosing. With command over the armed forces, with the authority to direct diplomatic relations, with power over appointments to the executive and judicial branches that few state governors possessed, and with a four-year term of office and perpetually reeligible for reelection, the president was a magistrate who, as Patrick Henry later charged, could “easily become king.” To ensure the president’s independence, he was not to be elected by the legislature, as the Virginia Plan had proposed. Since the Framers believed that few presidential candidates in the future would enjoy wide popular recognition throughout the country, they provided for local elections of “electors” equal in number to the representatives and senators from each state. These electors would cast ballots for the president. But if no candidate received a majority—which in the absence of political parties and organized electioneering was normally expected—the final selection from the five candidates with the most votes would be made by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation having one vote.
The Virginia Plan’s suggestion of a separate national judiciary to hold office “during good behavior” was accepted without dispute. The structure of the national judiciary was left to the Congress to devise. The right of this judiciary, however, to set aside acts of the Congress or of the state legislatures was by no means clearly established.
The nationalists in the Convention reluctantly gave way on several crucial issues, particularly on the national legislature’s authority to veto state legislation. But they fought longest and hardest to hold on to the principle of proportional representation in both houses of the legislature, and this dispute almost stalemated the Convention. It was decided that both taxation and representation in the House of Representatives ought to be based on population, and not on the states as such or on landed wealth. The nationalists like Madison and Wilson, however, wanted representation in the Senate also to rest on population. Any suggestion that the individual sovereignty of the states ought to be represented equally smacked too much of the old Articles of Confederation. Hence the nationalists came to regard the eventual “Connecticut Compromise,” by which each state secured two senators in the upper house of the legislature, as a disastrous defeat.
Although Madison and Wilson lost the battles over the congressional veto of state laws and proportional representation in both houses, they and the other Federalists (as those who supported the Constitution shrewdly came to call themselves) had essentially won the war over the basic nature of the central government. Once the New Jersey Plan, which preserved the essentials of the Articles of Confederation, was rejected on June 19 in favor of the Virginia Plan, the opponents, or Anti-Federalists, found themselves forced, as Richard Henry Lee complained, to accept “this or nothing.” And most Anti-Federalists wanted some sort of central government.
Although the Articles of Confederation required that amendments be made by the unanimous consent of the state legislatures, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention decided to bypass the state legislatures and submit the Constitution to specially elected state conventions for ratification. Approval by only nine of the thirteen states was necessary for the new government to take effect. This transgression of earlier political principles was only one of many to which the Anti-Federalists objected.