Imagine fighting a brutal multi -year war to
escape a global empire. You bleed for independence,
you secure the victory, and you finally establish
your own nation. Right, the ultimate underdog
story. Exactly. But then within a few short years
the new government you build is just it's so
incredibly weak that they can't even afford to
pay the soldiers who won the war Yeah, which
is a terrifying position to be in and it gets
worse The borders are completely porous foreign
powers are actively harassing your shipping and
get this Neighboring states within your own country
are waging bitter economic trade wars against
each other like their rival nations, right? And
that wasn't some dystopian nightmare scenario.
That was the actual daily reality for the United
States in 1780s. So welcome to the deep dive.
Glad to be here for this one. Today we are immersing
ourselves in a comprehensive historical overview
of the constitutional convention of 1787. But
our mission here isn't just to look at the finished
product, the Constitution itself. No, because
you really can't appreciate the fix without understanding
the problem. Exactly. We are looking at the absolute
unmitigated systemic failure that forced the
founders to write the Constitution in the first
place. We are focusing on the catastrophic collapse
of America's first governing document, the Articles
of Confederation. And the context of that collapse
is really everything. You cannot understand the
medicine if you don't understand the severity
of the disease. The disease was bad, right? Oh,
it was nearly fatal for the early United States.
Most historical narratives kind of gloss over
the period between the surrender at Yorktown
and the signing of the Constitution. Yeah, they
treat it like this brief, quiet interlude where
everyone just took a breath. Right, but the reality
was a period of profound geopolitical and economic
panic. The United States was not a unified country.
I mean, it was a dysfunctional, bankrupt league
of states teetering on the edge of complete dissolution.
The timeline itself is surprising to a lot of
people. We won the war, kicked out the king.
And I think most of us assume the Constitution
just, you know, immediately appeared. That's
a huge misconception. But the Articles of Confederation
were actually adopted by the Second Continental
Congress way back in 1777, right in the thick
of the Revolutionary War. And they weren't even
ratified by all 13 states until 1781. Wow. So
for the first decade of its existence, the United
States was operating under a completely different
operating system. And from the sources we're
looking at today, this document wasn't a national
constitution in the way we think of one today.
It was, well, more like a treaty. Yeah. Under
the Articles, the United States was really a
federation of independent republics. The document
explicitly guaranteed state sovereignty and independence.
Which is wild to think about now. It is. It literally
referred to itself as a League of Friendship.
So if you want a modern equivalent, it was much
closer to the United Nations or the European
Union than a single cohesive nation. A League
of Friendship. That sounds less like a functioning
government, more like a club. Exactly. And the
organizational structure they implemented was
the Congress of the Confederation. Its design
perfectly reflects the immediate trauma of the
revolutionary generation. Right. Because they
just got out of a horrific war with a king. Precisely.
The 13 colonies had just replaced their colonial
governments with Republican constitutions based
heavily on the principle of legislative supremacy.
OK, meaning the legislature had all the power.
They put almost all the power in the hands of
the legislature because they viewed it as the
branch most directly representative of the people.
So they had just thought this. devastating war
against the king and his royal governors. The
absolute last thing they wanted to do was create
another powerful executive who could just unilaterally
dictate their lives. And that fear dictated the
entire architecture of the government. They designed
the national government to have no executive
branch whatsoever. Wait, none. None. There was
no president, no prime minister, no royal governor
equivalent, nothing. Furthermore, they designed
it to have no judicial branch. There was no national
court system to settle disputes or interpret
laws. So no president, no Supreme Court? Right.
Just Congress? Yep. The entire federal government
consisted of a unicameral legislature, so a single
chamber. And the members of this Congress were
not elected directly by the people. How did they
get there then? They were selected and sent by
the respective state legislatures. And when it
came time to vote on national policy, every state
was given exactly one vote. regardless of the
population size or the geographic footprint of
the state. Exactly. Virginia, which was massive
and had a huge population, held the exact same
voting power in Congress as Delaware or Rhode
Island. That's crazy. So wealth, population,
landmass, none of that mattered for political
power at the national level. Entirely irrelevant.
The founders essentially engineered a system
specifically designed to prevent a centralized
tyranny. But in doing so, they created a government
that was structurally too weak to function. Because
there was no executive branch and no judiciary.
Right. The national government had absolutely
no mechanism to enforce its own laws. They could
sign a treaty with a foreign power, sure, but
they had no way to force the individual states
to comply with the terms of that treaty. It's
like setting up a complex system of traffic lights
in a major city. But you completely forget to
hire a police force or establish a traffic court
or institute any fines. That's a great analogy.
The red light is just a polite suggestion to
stop. If you decide to blow through it, absolutely
nothing happens. A government of polite suggestions
is the perfect description. And that structural
lack of enforcement immediately triggered a cascade
of catastrophic economic failures. Because a
nation's sovereignty is ultimately tied to its
ability to fund itself. Right. Exactly. You have
to be able to fund yourself and defend your borders.
But one of the Oracles of Confederation, Congress
had no power to levy taxes, and they could not
impose tariffs on imports. Which means the National
Treasury is essentially running on the honor
system. It really was. If the federal government
needed to pay off the massive foreign debt it
accumulated fighting the British, or if it needed
to pay the soldiers guarding the frontier, they
had to rely on this system of requisitions. They
just had to send a request to the state legislatures
asking for money. And the requisition system
was an absolute disaster. Once the immediate
unifying threat of the British military was neutralized,
the individual states just began to prioritize
their own local economic recoveries over the
national debt. Of course they did. Why send your
state's money to Philadelphia if nobody's forcing
you to? Exactly. So, by the mid -1780s, the states
simply stopped providing Congress with the requested
funding. The National Treasury was effectively
empty. Man. And the real world impact of that
was immediate and severe, wasn't it? Oh, yeah.
The United States government defaulted on the
interest payments for its foreign loans. They
had soldiers stationed along the Ohio River to
guard the Western frontier, and the government
just lacked the funds to pay them or properly
supply them. And foreign powers were watching
this weakness and actively exploiting it. I mean,
from the sources down south, the Spanish controlled
New Orleans, and they were severely restricting
American navigation rights on the Mississippi
River. Which was devastating for Western farmers.
Right. For an American farmer living west of
the Appalachians, the Mississippi River was the
only economically viable way to get their crops
to market. If Spain choked off the river, those
farmers were ruined. And the Confederation government
was too poor and militarily weak to do anything
about it. They couldn't push back. And the British
were engaging in similar provocations up north,
too. Oh, absolutely. Despite the Treaty of Paris
requiring them to vacate their forts in the Northwest
Territory, so areas that are now Ohio, Michigan,
and Wisconsin, the British military simply stayed
put. They just refused to leave. They knew the
American government couldn't afford to raise
an army to push them out. They were treating
the United States not as a sovereign equal, but
as a temporary geopolitical anomaly that would
eventually collapse under its own dysfunction.
So if the system is clearly broken, if the treasury
is completely empty and foreign empires are just
squatting on your territory and choking off your
trade routes, the logical next step is to change
the rules, right? You amend the Articles of Confederation
to allow the national government to collect a
basic tax. You would think so. But the founders
had built a fatal trap door into the amendment
process. To change the Articles of Confederation
for any reason, it required a unanimous vote
of all 13 states. Unanimous? Every single one?
Every single one. A single state could veto an
amendment that the other 12 desperately needed
for survival. And that wasn't just a theoretical
problem. That actually happened repeatedly, right?
Oh, yeah. In 1782, a critical amendment was proposed
that would have allowed Congress to levy a basic
5 % tax on imported goods, a federal impost.
Which seems reasonable. It would have provided
a steady stream of revenue to finally start paying
down the Revolutionary War debt and restoring
the nation's credit. 12 states recognized the
existential necessity of this tax and agreed
to it. But let me guess. Yep. Rhode Island alone
vetoed it. Rhode Island, literally the smallest
state in the Union, single -handedly shut down
the financial recovery of the entire continent
because they didn't want federal tax collectors
in their local ports. That's exactly what happened.
And then three years later, in 1785, the financial
situation was even more dire. So Congress tried
again. They proposed another federal imposed
amendment. Did he get Rhode Island on board this
time? They actually did after intense lobbying,
but then New York disapproved. Oh, come on. Why
New York? Well, New York had a massive bustling
port and the state government was funding itself
by collecting its own state -level tariffs on
goods coming into New York Harbor. They just
refused to surrender that lucrative revenue stream
to the national government. So the veto stood.
The veto stood. The amendment failed. That structural
flaw meant the United States was paralyzed. You
have a national government that cannot pay its
debts, cannot fund a military, and cannot even
agree to let itself collect taxes to fix those
exact problems. Maddening. European powers must
have viewed the United States with utter contempt.
They absolutely did. Britain, France, and Spain
recognized that the United States was completely
incapable of coordinating any kind of national
policy. They realized they didn't even need to
fight the Americans militarily. They could just
squeeze them economically. Because the Confederation
Congress lacked the power. to regulate foreign
commerce. Crucially, yes. And they also lack
the power to regulate interstate commerce, the
trade between the individual states themselves.
Let's look at the mechanics of how that played
out, because it's wild. Britain starts imposing
heavy restrictions on American ships and American
products entering British ports. Right, trying
to strangle them out of the market. If the United
States had a strong central government, they
could have responded with a unified retaliatory
tariff. They could have said, if you tax our
goods, we will place a massive tax on all British
goods entering any American port. That provide
leverage. That's how normal nations operate.
But because Congress had no power over trade,
the states tried to handle it individually, which
resulted in absolute chaos. Yeah, Massachusetts
and Pennsylvania attempted to fight back against
the British restrictions by placing reciprocal
duties on British trade entering their specific
state ports. Which makes sense. It does, but
the 18th century mercantile economy was highly
competitive. When neighboring states saw Massachusetts
turning away British shipping or taxing it heavily,
they saw a massive economic opportunity. Oh,
no. Oh, yes. States like Connecticut and Delaware
immediately established themselves as free ports.
They actively undermine their neighbors. It's
like a city council deciding to set up a tollbooth
on the main highway to raise funds and the neighboring
town immediately pays a dirt road around the
tollbooth and puts up a billboard saying, drive
through our town for free. That is exactly what
happened. Connecticut basically invited the British
ships to unload their cargo there without paying
the Massachusetts taxes. And then those goods
were just smuggled across the poor estate borders
anyway. Unbelievable. The states were cannibalizing
the national economy to secure short term local
advantages. And the economic warfare didn't start
with foreign trade. Because Congress couldn't
regulate interstate commerce, the states began
treating each other like rival foreign nations.
New York actually began applying customs duties
against goods arriving from New Jersey and Connecticut.
Wait, seriously? So a farmer bringing cabbage
from New Jersey across the Hudson River into
New York City? was being taxed as if he were
a foreign importer from France. That is a total
train wreck. They were strangling their own domestic
trade networks. The obsession with individual
state sovereignty had mutated into a system of
active self -sabotage. In 1784, Congress made
a desperate attempt to propose an amendment granting
themselves the power over foreign trade just
to establish a unified front against the European
empires. It failed to get unanimous approval.
Unsurprisingly, yes, the states were locked in
a zero sum game with each other, oblivious to
the fact that the entire ship was sinking. So
the national government has no money, no military
power. Foreign empires are laughing at them.
and the individual states are locked in petty
destructive trade wars with their own neighbors.
The geopolitical situation is disastrous, but
what's happening on the ground to the average
citizen is even worse. Much worse. The post -war
economic depression was devastating, and our
sources show it was significantly worsened by
a severe scarcity of physical currency. Right.
The United States was suffering from a massive
shortage of specie gold and silver coins. During
the war, physical currency was hoarded. And afterward,
whatever hard currency remained was rapidly flowing
out of the country to pay for imported European
manufactured goods. Because we didn't have our
own manufacturing base yet. Exactly. There simply
wasn't enough money circulating in the domestic
economy. Let's trace the causality of that shortage
because it leads directly to the breaking point
of the entire era. If there is no gold or silver
circulating, everyday people, especially rural
farmers, cannot pay their taxes, and they cannot
pay their private debts to merchants. And that
lack of specie created an intense class conflict
between debtors and creditors. The state legislatures
during this period were highly sensitive to popular
opinion. Because of the whole revolutionary spirit.
Yeah, the revolutionary era had unleashed a wave
of hyper -democratic sentiment. Politicians wanted
to maintain popular approval. So when the rural
masses began demanding relief from their crushing
debts, many state legislatures caved to the pressure.
What were the actual mechanics of that relief,
though? How does the state government fix a debt
crisis when nobody has any real money? Well,
they turned to the printing press. Several state
legislatures responded to the crisis by issuing
vast amounts of unbacked paper currency. Just
printing money out of thin air? Pretty much.
They also passed stay laws, making it easier
to defer tax payments, and tender laws, which
forced creditors to accept this newly printed
paper money at face value for the repayment of
debts. Okay, let me walk through this. If I am
a merchant in a port city, and I lent a farmer
$100 in gold coins before the depression hit.
I am legally owed $100 in gold. But the state
legislature steps in and prints thousands of
paper notes that everyone knows are essentially
worthless. Because there is no gold backing them,
severe depreciation kicks in. Merchants might
charge $500 in paper money for a $5 physical
good just to offset the risk. Exactly. But the
state passes a law saying the farmer can legally
pay me back my hundred dollar loan using a hundred
of these worthless paper notes. Yep. The creditors
were being legally wiped out. Wealthy merchants
and the political elite were terrified. They
viewed these populist state legislatures as engines
of mob rule, legislating away private property
rights. I mean, you can see why they'd panic.
The elite proposed that the Confederation Congress
be given the power to intervene and prevent such
populist economic laws. But as we know, Congress
remained completely powerless. But not every
state adopted these populist measures, right?
Right. Some states held a hard line and that
rigidness actually sparked the powder keg. Massachusetts
is the prime example here. Massachusetts is the
crucial turning point. The government of Massachusetts,
heavily influenced by the wealthy mercantile
class in Boston, absolutely refused to enact
debtor relief laws. They refused to issue cheap
paper money. Instead, they aggressively demanded
that all state taxes and private debts be paid
in hard currency. Which, as we established, the
rural population simply did not have. So the
farmers in the western part of Massachusetts
were devastated. The local courts began seizing
their land through foreclosures to satisfy their
debts. If the sale of the land didn't cover the
debt, the farmers were thrown into debtor's prison.
It is. And the bitter irony that fueled the ensuing
violence was that many of these impoverished
farmers facing the loss of their land and their
freedom were veterans of the Continental Army.
This is the environment that creates Shays Rebellion.
This is the specific moment where the theoretical
flaws of the Articles of Confederation translate
into actual armed violence against the state.
Daniel Shays really embodies the tragedy of this
era. He was a former captain in the Continental
Army who had fought bravely in some of the war's
most crucial battles, Lexington, Bunker Hill,
Saratoga. He was a legitimate war hero. Like
many veterans, he returned to his small farm
after the war burdened with accumulated tax debts.
But the critical context is that Shays, along
with thousands of his fellow soldiers, had never
received payment from the confederation government
for his years of military service. The narrative
here is just stunning. You have an unpaid war
hero who literally fought and bled to create
this new nation. Now, the government he helped
build is taxing him into poverty, dragging his
neighbors into court, seizing their farms and
throwing them in jail for failing to pay those
taxes, all while the national government completely
ignores the back wages they owe him. It's a recipe
for radicalization. You couldn't design a better
system to create a rebellion. In late 1786, the
rural farmers realized that peaceful petitions
to the legislature in Boston were failing, so
they resorted to direct action. What did they
do? Daniel Shays and other local leaders organized
thousands of angry farmers into armed militias.
They didn't march on the Capitol immediately.
Their first tactic was to march on the local
county courthouses. Because if the courts are
physically shut down by armed men, the judges
can't issue the foreclosure orders, and the sheriffs
can't seize the farms or throw anyone in debtor's
prison. Precisely. They were effectively halting
the machinery of the state. The governor of Massachusetts
realized the local militias sympathized with
the rebels and wouldn't fight them. So the state
government appealed directly to the Confederation
Congress for military assistance. They asked
for federal troops. They asked the national government
to send troops to put down the rebellion. But
the national government has an empty treasury
and no standing army. They're completely paralyzed.
They couldn't even afford to pay the soldiers
they already had stationed on the frontier, let
alone raise a new force to deploy to New England.
Massachusetts was entirely on its own. The federal
government's inability to provide basic domestic
security was laid bare for the entire world to
see. So what did Massachusetts do? Because the
state government lacks the public funds to raise
a state army, they had to rely on private wealth.
The wealthy merchants and creditors in Boston,
terrified that Shays' men would march eastward
and burn their property or forcefully cancel
all debts, pooled their private money to hire
a mercenary militia to march west and crush the
uprising. It's a dystopian scenario. a private
army funded by rich merchants marching across
the state to put down a rebellion of broke, unpaid
war veterans. And it wasn't a quick skirmish
either. It took months of tension and maneuvering
before this privately funded army finally dispersed
chase forces in early 1787. That had to have
sent shockwaves through the rest of the country.
Oh, the psychological impact of this event on
the nation's political elite cannot be overstated.
George Washington, who was in retirement at Mount
Vernon, was receiving letters from his former
officers, like Henry Knox, detailing the chaos.
Where are they saying? Knox warned Washington
that the rebels wanted to completely redistribute
property and cancel all debts. If you are George
Washington or James Madison, watching this unfold
from afar, the implications are terrifying. If
a few thousand angry farmers in western Massachusetts
can bring a state government to its knees and
force them to rely on private mercenaries because
the federal government is entirely useless, What
happens when the rebellion spread? Exactly. Or
worse, what happens if the British or the Spanish
decide this is the perfect moment to invade?
Washington wrote that he was mortified. He believed
the union was on the verge of anarchy and dissolution.
The system wasn't just inefficient, it was suicidal.
So it was a wake up call. A massive one. This
acute panic over domestic security, combined
with the ongoing economic strangulation of the
trade wars, forced a massive pivot. The political
elite realized they could no longer ignore the
terminal sickness of the Articles of Confederation.
This realization led directly to a meeting in
September of 1786, known as the Annapolis Convention.
But the Annapolis Convention wasn't the main
event, was it? Only a fraction of the states
actually bothered to show up. Right. Only delegates
from five states attended. The rest either didn't
appoint delegates in time or the delegates simply
didn't make the difficult journey. So it was
a bust. Not entirely. The handful of men who
did gather at Annapolis, which included Alexander
Hamilton of New York and James Madison of Virginia,
used the failure of the meeting to launch a much
larger initiative. They realized that you couldn't
just fix the interstate trade issues without
addressing the fundamental lack of national power.
The issues were too interconnected. You can't
fix trade without fixing taxes and you can't
fix taxes without an enforcement mechanism. Exactly.
The Annapolis delegates drafted a formal report
concluding that their current mandate was too
narrow and the representation too defective.
They called for a new general convention of all
the states to be held in Philadelphia in May
of 1787. With broader powers. With much broader
powers to devise provisions necessary to render
the Constitution of the federal government adequate
to the exigencies of the Union. So they send
this radical recommendation to the Confederation
Congress. How did the Congress react to a group
of rogue delegates suggesting a massive overhaul
of the government? The Confederation Congress
was incredibly cautious. They debated it for
months. Finally, on February 21, 1787, they officially
endorsed the idea of holding a convention in
Philadelphia. But they attached a massive legally
binding caveat. What was it? They explicitly
stated that the convention was approved for the
sole and express purpose of revising the Articles
of Confederation. Revising. That is a very specific
legal parameter. They are telling the delegates,
you can go to Philadelphia, you can tinker with
the edges, you can maybe propose a new formula
for requesting money from the states, but you
absolutely cannot scrap the foundational document.
Congress only granted authority for the convention
to produce a report detailing suggested alterations
to the articles. And those alterations would
then have to be submitted back to Congress and
unanimously approved by the states. Which we
know was impossible. Right. And by the time Congress
even issued this restricted endorsement, several
states had already passed their own measures
authorizing delegates to attend, relying on their
own state authority rather than congressional
permission. The entire endeavor was legally ambiguous
from the start. Into this legally murky high
stakes environment steps, James Madison. And
Madison didn't just show up to Philadelphia hoping
for the best. He arrived with a very specific,
aggressive agenda to completely hijack the convention.
Madison arrived in Philadelphia 11 days before
the convention was scheduled to begin. He was
arguably the most prepared man in North America.
He did his homework. Oh, he did. For months beforehand,
Thomas Jefferson, who was serving as a diplomat
in Paris, had been shipping Madison crates of
books on political theory and history. Madison
essentially conducted a massive, comprehensive
literature review of every republic and confederacy
that had ever existed in recorded history. Wait,
like all of them? From the Amphictyonic League
of Ancient Greece to the contemporary Swiss Confederacy.
He was looking for the historical patterns of
why governments fail. He didn't want to just
patch the leaks. He wanted to understand the
engineering flaws of the entire boat. That's
a great way to put it. In April 1787, he synthesized
all of this research into a private memorandum
titled, Vices of the Political System of the
United States. He systematically diagnosed the
fatal illnesses of the confederation. And what
was his conclusion? He concluded that the system
was unworkable because the states possessed too
much power and the national government lacked
the authority to act directly upon the citizens.
His diagnosis is that you cannot have a national
government that relies entirely on the voluntary
compliance of independent states. What was his
proposed solution? Madison believed the only
path forward was a supreme overarching national
government. Congress needed compulsory taxation
authority. They needed absolute power to regulate
foreign and interstate commerce. Okay, so total
overhaul. But the most radical part of his solution
was the enforcement mechanism. Madison believed
the national government needed an explicit right
to use military force against non -compliant
states, and it needed a federal court system
to establish the supremacy of national law. He
wanted a government that could act on the individual
rather than just politely asking the state governments
to behave. But if Madison's plan involves creating
a supreme national government with three branches,
he is blatantly ignoring the instructions from
the Confederation Congress to merely revise the
article. Oh, completely. Madison, Hamilton, and
their nationalist allies never had any intention
of revising the articles. They knew the unanimous
amendment process made revision impossible anyway.
I mean, Rhode Island was already boycotting the
Philadelphia Convention entirely. So they were
basically starting from scratch. Their strategy
from day one was to scrap the articles completely
and introduce a brand new frame of government.
The environment in which they execute this plan
is fascinating. They are gathered in the Pennsylvania
State House Independence Hall in the middle of
a sweltering Philadelphia summer. And one of
the first things they do is nail the windows
shut and post guards at the doors. They instituted
a strict rule of absolute secrecy. No delegate
was allowed to speak to the press, write in their
private letters or discuss the proceedings with
anyone outside that room. In the middle of summer.
That sounds miserable. Despite the brutal heat
and the lack of ventilation, the windows remained
closed to prevent eavesdropping. Because they
were orchestrating a bloodless bureaucratic coup.
If the state politicians back home caught wind
that these delegates were secretly tearing up
the Articles of Confederation and designing a
supreme national government that would strip
the states of their sovereignty, the state legislatures
would have recalled their delegates immediately
and shut the whole thing down. Absolutely. The
secrecy was a crucial operational necessity.
It allowed the delegates to speak freely, debate
radical ideas, and most importantly, change their
minds without fear of public backlash. or political
retribution back home. So who was in charge once
they locked the doors? Once they finally achieved
a quorum of seven states on May 25th, they unanimously
elected George Washington as the president of
the convention. Washington rarely spoke during
the debates, but his mere presence sitting at
the front of the room lent the secret proceedings
an aura of unimpeachable legitimacy. With the
doors locked and Washington presiding, Madison
makes his move. the Virginia delegates present
his blueprint to the convention. On May 29th,
Edmund Randolph, the governor of Virginia, officially
introduced Madison's framework. It became known
as the Virginia Plan. And this is the bombshell.
It was a staggering departure from everything
the delegates thought they were there to do.
The Virginia Plan proposed a powerful national
government divided into three distinct branches,
legislative, executive, and judicial. It completely
eliminated the unicameral confederation congress
and replaced it with a bicameral legislature
consisting of two houses. Two houses instead
of one. And the powers granted to this new legislature
were sweeping. Oh, incredibly sweeping. The proposed
Congress would have the power to legislate in
all cases to which the separate states are incompetent.
It could levy taxes, regulate all commerce, and
forcefully execute national laws. But the most
controversial and explosive provision of the
Virginia plan was the mechanism for representation.
This is where the real war begins. How did Madison
propose they allocate voting power in this new
Congress? Madison proposed that representation
in both the lower and upper houses of the new
Congress should be strictly proportional, based
either on a state's population or its wealth.
The lower house would be elected directly by
the people and the upper house would be elected
by the lower house. You can instantly see why
the small states would panic. Under the Articles
of Confederation, every state had exactly one
equal vote. If voting power suddenly shifts entirely
to population size, the massive states like Virginia,
Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts are going to
mathematically dominate every single piece of
legislation. The large states believed the one
-state, one -vote system was fundamentally unjust.
They were frustrated that a small minority of
the national population living in places like
Delaware or Rhode Island could veto policies
supported by the vast majority of Americans.
Which is a fair point. But the small states viewed
proportional representation as an existential
threat. They believed the large states would
use their numerical advantage to completely consume
the interests and economies of the smaller states.
The small states didn't just accept this obviously.
They organized a counteroffensive. They did.
On June 15, William Patterson of New Jersey introduced
an alternative framework known as the New Jersey
Plan. This plan was much closer to the original
legal mandate of the convention. It sought to
genuinely revise the Articles rather than destroy
them. How did it work? The New Jersey Plan maintained
the unicameral confederation congress where each
state possessed one equal vote. So it's essentially
the Articles of Confederation version 1 .5. It
patches the biggest leaks by giving the existing
Congress the power to levy tariffs and regulate
interstate trade, but it preserves the fundamental
architecture of state equality. Exactly. It also
proposed a weak, multi -person executive council
chosen by Congress rather than a single powerful
president. The convention debated the two wildly
different visions for days. The dividing line
was clear. The large states supported the Virginia
plan's proportional representation, while the
small states desperately clung to the New Jersey
plan's equal representation. And there's a fascinating
extreme proposed during this period by Alexander
Hamilton. Because Hamilton listens to both of
these plans and essentially decides neither of
them goes nearly far enough in centralizing power.
Hamilton's intervention is a remarkable piece
of convention history. On June 18th, he delivered
a massive, sprawling six -hour speech outlining
his own vision for the government. Six hours.
Six hours. Hamilton deeply admired the British
system. He proposed a highly centralized national
government where the states would essentially
be reduced to administrative provinces, their
governors appointed directly by the national
government. He essentially wanted an elected
monarchy. Pretty much. He proposed a national
executive and senators who would serve during
good behavior, which effectively meant life terms
barring impeachment. He believed the government
needed immense energy and stability to survive
against European empires. How did the room react
to that? His plan was so extreme that it found
almost no support among the other delegates.
However, Hamilton's radical proposal served an
unintended psychological purpose. It made Madison's
Virginia plan look moderate and reasonable by
comparison. That's a brilliant, if accidental,
negotiation tactic. So the convention votes on
the New Jersey plan and the large states backed
by the southern slave states who anticipated
massive population growth manage to defeat it.
The Virginia plan becomes the working document,
but the small states refuse to concede the issue
of representation. The convention grinds to a
halt. The gridlock stretched through June and
into July. The heat inside the sealed room was
oppressive, and the political distrust reached
a boiling point. The frustration was best articulated
by Gunning Bedford Jr., a delegate from Delaware.
He stood up and explicitly threatened the large
states. He said, I do not gentlemen trust you.
And he didn't stop there. He escalated it to
a threat of national destruction, right? He did.
Bedford warned that if the large states persisted
in their attempt to strip the small states of
their equal vote, the small states would walk
away. He declared, sooner than be ruined, there
are foreign powers who will take us by the hand.
That is open treason being threatened on the
floor of Independence Hall. He's telling James
Madison and George Washington directly to their
faces. If you force proportional representation
on us, Delaware will leave the United States
and forge a military alliance with Great Britain
or France just to protect ourselves from Virginia.
It was explosive. The entire country is on the
verge of shattering right there in the room.
It was the lowest, most dangerous moment of the
convention. Realizing the entire project was
on the brink of collapse, the delegates formed
a grand committee consisting of one member from
each state to try and break the stalemate over
the Fourth of July recess. And did it work? The
result of that committee's work is what we now
call the Great Compromise, or the Connecticut
Compromise. How did they finally split the difference
and satisfy both the massive population of Virginia
and the tiny population of Delaware? They blended
the architectural concepts of both the Virginia
and New Jersey plans. They agreed on a bicameral
legislature. In the lower chamber, the House
of Representatives representation would be strictly
proportional based on population. This was the
massive concession to the large states. To further
satisfy the large states, the compromise dictated
that all legislation concerning taxation or the
raising of revenue had to originate in this lower
house. The logic being that if the people are
going to be taxed, The chamber that is most directly
responsive to the fluctuating population should
hold the purse strings. Exactly. But the critical
concession to the small states occurred in the
upper chamber, the Senate. The compromise guaranteed
that every single state, regardless of its size
or population, would have exactly two senators
providing them with an equal vote. And these
senators were not elected by the general public?
No. The Constitution originally mandated that
senators be chosen by their respective state
legislatures. This was a deliberate design choice.
it served as a protective shield for state sovereignty.
Oh, I see. By giving the state governments the
direct power to select the individuals populating
the upper chamber of the national government,
they ensured that state -level interests could
never be completely bulldozed by national populism.
That mechanism remained in place until the 17th
Amendment established the direct election of
senators in 1913. The great compromise saves
the convention. They finally have a legislative
structure capable of passing laws, levying taxes,
and regulating commerce. The economic and structural
failures of the articles of consideration are
theoretically solved. But as we discussed earlier,
passing a law means absolutely nothing if you
don't have the apparatus to enforce it. The legislative
debates were brutal, but inventing the enforcement
mechanisms the executive and judicial branches
required creating entire institutions out of
thin air. And the creation of the presidency
was incredibly difficult because they had no
successful historical model to emulate. And of
course, they were haunted by their colonial experience
with King George III. They deeply distrusted
the concept of a strong central chief executive.
When the Virginia plan originally proposed a
national executive, it was incredibly vague.
It didn't even specify whether the executive
should be a single individual or a committee
of several people. Many delegates fiercely opposed
concentrating executive power in one man. Edmund
Randolph of Virginia openly argued that a single
executive was the fetus of monarchy. The fetus
of monarchy. That's vivid. He feared that one
individual would eventually consolidate power
and transform the republic back into a dictatorship.
They heavily considered a plural executive, perhaps
a triumvirate of three leaders representing the
northern, middle and southern regions of the
country. But if you put three politicians representing
completely different regional economic interests
in charge of enforcing the law, they're going
to spend all their time arguing with each other.
Nothing would ever get done in an emergency.
That was exactly the counterargument advanced
by James Wilson, a brilliant legal mind from
Pennsylvania. Wilson was really the unsung architect
of the American presidency. He argued forcefully
against a plural executive committee. What was
his reasoning? He recognized that the primary
flaw of the Articles of Confederation was paralysis.
He argued that only a single unitary executive
could possess the necessary attributes to govern
effectively. He summarized these attributes in
three words, energy, dispatch, and responsibility.
Let's unpack those attributes. Energy means the
power to actually act and enforce the laws. Dispatch
means the speed and efficiency to act quickly,
especially in a military or diplomatic crisis,
something a committee arguing over regional interests
can never achieve. Right. But responsibility
is the most interesting one to me. Wilson understood
the psychology of accountability. If you have
a committee of three executives and a disastrous
decision is made, each member will simply blame
the other two. The public never knows who is
truly at fault. Everyone just points fingers.
Exactly. But with a single executive, there is
nowhere to hide. If the administration fails,
the responsibility rests entirely on one highly
visible individual. The public knows exactly
who to hold accountable at the ballot box. Wilson's
logic ultimately prevailed, and the convention
agreed to establish a single president. They
agree on one person holding the executive power.
But the immediate, massive hurdle is how you
actually select this person. They are fundamentally
terrified of kings, so the position obviously
cannot be hereditary. They have to design an
election system. The method of electing the president
was one of the most agonizing, constantly debated,
and frequently revised issues of the entire summer.
James Wilson, demonstrating incredible faith
in the public, initially proposed direct popular
election by the people. Which seems normal to
us now. He believed that the executive needed
to be completely independent of the legislature
and drawing power directly from the citizens
was the only way to achieve that. But the other
delegates almost universally rejected that idea,
not necessarily because they thought the general
public was inherently foolish, but because of
the sheer physical realities of the late 18th
century. The logistics of a national popular
vote in 1787 were virtually impossible. The United
States was a massive, geographically sprawling
agrarian society. Information traveled only as
fast as a horse could run or a ship could sail.
Right. The delegates feared that the average
voter in rural Georgia would have absolutely
no knowledge of the character or qualifications
of a candidate from Massachusetts. And without
national political parties or mass media to filter
the candidates, people would naturally just vote
for the most prominent politician from their
own home state. Exactly. The vote would fracture
endlessly. A candidate from a massive state like
Virginia would always have a huge numerical advantage
over a highly qualified candidate from a smaller
state, simply based on local name recognition.
Because of these fears regarding a popular vote,
the convention defaulted for a long time to the
idea that the national legislature, the Congress,
should choose the president. It seemed logical.
The Congress would consist of knowledgeable men
who could evaluate the candidates properly. Wait,
I'm stuck here. If the entire goal of the Constitution
is to create a system of checks and balances
with separation of powers, how does having Congress
pick the president not violate that immediately?
If the legislature controls whether the executive
gets the job, the executive just becomes a subservient
puppet to the legislature. You've identified
the exact profound flaw that James Madison and
James Wilson wrestled with. If Congress chose
the president, the president would spend his
entire term making corrupt political deals with
powerful senators to ensure his own reelection
rather than independently enforcing the law.
The executive would have no independent energy
or dispatch. They also briefly considered having
the state governors choose the president, right?
They did, but that idea was discarded just as
quickly. They realized that state governors would
simply vote for themselves, or they would horse
trade their votes to secure specific economic
advantages for their own states, completely ignoring
the national interest. So they're out of options.
They needed a mechanism that was independent
of Congress, independent of the state governors,
and capable of overcoming the informational geographic
bias of the general public. And to solve that
incredibly specific web of problems, they invent
an entirely new, deeply convoluted mechanism.
The Electoral College. How exactly did they envision
this working? The Electoral College was a brilliant,
if highly complex, piece of political engineering
designed specifically for the realities of 1787.
The concept was that each state would be allocated
a certain number of electors equal to their combined
total of representatives and senators in Congress.
Okay, so it mirrors congressional power. Right.
And the states could choose these electors however
they saw fit. These electors were temporary officials.
Their one and only job in government was to gather
in their respective states, cast their votes
for the presidency, send the results to the national
capital, and then immediately disband and return
to private life. And the genius of that temporary
status is that it prevents the corruption they
feared with Congress. If you have a permanent
standing body of men choosing the president,
foreign powers like France or wealthy domestic
factions have four years to bribe them, blackmail
them, or influence them. Exactly. But because
the electors pop into existence, vote, and instantly
dissolve, they are essentially unbribable. It
preserved the separation of powers by keeping
the choice out of the hands of Congress, and
it mitigated the geographic bias of the popular
vote by entrusting the final decision to a group
of presumably knowledgeable local leaders. They
also instituted the mechanism of legislative
impeachment, borrowing a concept from the British
Parliament, to ensure that if this powerful single
executive abused his office or engaged in treason,
he could be legally removed before his four -year
term expired. So the legislative branch is built,
the executive branch is built. What about the
courts? The third pillar, the judiciary, was
also completely unprecedented. Under the Articles
of Confederation, there was no federal judiciary.
State courts handled everything, including disputes
between states or cases involving foreign ambassadors.
Which sounds like a mess. James Madison argued
that leaving the interpretation of national laws
to state judges who were pointed by and beholden
to state politicians was a recipe for corruption
and the complete fragmentation of federal authority.
If a federal treaty says British merchants can
collect pre -war debts, a state judge in Virginia
whose salary is paid by the Virginia politicians
who owe those debts is gone to find a way to
rule the treaty invalid. Absolutely. To prevent
that localized patronage, the convention quickly
agreed to establish a supreme national tribunal,
the Supreme Court, along with granting Congress
the power to create inferior federal courts.
This ensured that federal laws and the Constitution
would be interpreted and applied uniformly across
all 13 states, completely independent of local
political pressure. The structural architecture
is complete. The traffic light finally has a
police officer to write the ticket and a judge
to enforce the fine. But we cannot analyze the
mechanics of this convention without addressing
the darkest, most enduring shadow cast over the
entire procedure. Oh, you really can? The desperate,
panicked need to secure the survival of the nation
and fix the failing confederation led directly
to horrific foundational moral compromises regarding
the institution of slavery. It is the great tragic
paradox of the Constitutional Convention. You
cannot understand the drafting of the United
States Constitution without understanding that
the architecture of the government was fundamentally
shaped by the economic and political demands
of slavery. Right. At the time of the convention
in 1787, slavery was legal in all 13 states,
though the northern states were beginning the
slow process of gradual emancipation. However,
the overwhelming majority, more than 90 percent
of enslaved people lived in. southern states.
The entire agrarian economy of the south, particularly
the incredibly lucrative export crops of tobacco,
rice, and indigo, was built entirely upon the
brutal systemic exploitation of enslaved labor.
It wasn't just a part of their economy, it was
the foundation of their entire societal structure.
And the Southern delegates at the convention,
powerful men like Charles Cotesworth Pickney
and John Rutledge of South Carolina, made their
position unequivocally clear. They issued an
absolute non -negotiable ultimatum. The Southern
states would refuse to join the new union if
the Constitution did not explicitly protect the
institution of slavery. This is where the terrifying
reality of the failing Articles of Confederation
traps the Northern delegates, because if the
Southern states walk out of the room, the convention
collapses. The Northern delegates, some of whom
were staunchly opposed to slavery on moral grounds,
were forced into a brutal historical calculus.
If the South walked out, the Constitution would
not be ratified. The United States would remain
under the Articles of Confederation. Which they
all knew was doomed. Everyone in that sweltering
room in Philadelphia believed that the articles
were in a terminal spiral. They believed that
without a new, strong national government, the
country would quickly fracture into three or
four separate, warring confederacies, vulnerable
to imminent conquest by the British or the Spanish.
So the Northern delegates weighed the immediate
survival of the American experiment against the
moral atrocity of codifying slavery into the
DNA of the new government. And they chose survival.
They engaged in highly transactional compromises.
Let's look at the mechanics of the most famous
one, the Three -Fifths Compromise. How exactly
did this warp the balance of power? The compromise
was rooted entirely in the battle over political
representation. As we discussed, the Great Compromise
dictated that seats in the House of Representatives
would be apportioned based on a state's population.
The Southern delegates demanded that their massive
enslaved populations be counted fully when calculating
how many representatives their states would receive
in Congress. Which is a staggering display of
political hypocrisy. Under Southern state laws,
enslaved human beings were legally classified
as property. They were granted absolutely no
human rights, no legal protections, and certainly
no right to vote. Exactly. But when it came time
to calculate how much political power the white
southern elite would wield in the new national
capital, suddenly they demanded those enslaved
people be counted mathematically as part of the
population. The Northern delegates aggressively
highlighted that exact hypocrisy. They argued
that if enslaved people were legally property,
they should not be counted for political representation
any more than a Northern farmer's horses, cattle,
or machinery should be counted. The North suggested
that representation should be based solely on
the free population. But the South threatened
to walk away. Right. So to save the union, James
Wilson and Roger Sherman proposed the mathematical
compromise. Seats in the House would be apportioned
based on a state's total free population plus
three -fifths of its enslaved population. Let's
trace the causality of that math because it dictates
the next 70 years of American history. By embedding
slavery into the mathematical formula for representation,
the Constitution granted the Southern states
an immense disproportionate amount of political
power. It mathematically entrenched Southern
dominance. Because of the three -fifths compromise,
the Southern states gained dozens of additional
seats in the House of Representatives that they
would not have had otherwise. And it ripples
into the presidency, too. Absolutely. Because
the state's allocation of votes in the electoral
college is derived directly from its total number
of representatives and senators, the three -fifths
compromise gave the South an outsized artificial
influence in electing the president. This structural
advantage is a primary reason why Southern slaveholders
dominated the presidency for the vast majority
of the pre -Civil War era. And that wasn't the
only transactional bargain they made to keep
the Deep South at the table. We have to look
at the commerce and slave trade compromise. This
compromise directly addressed the economic chaos
of the Articles. The Northern merchant states
desperately needed the new federal government
to possess the power to regulate foreign commerce,
to pass navigation acts, establish unified tariffs,
and negotiate trade treaties with a simple majority
vote in Congress. This was the only way to end
the trade wars and fight back against British
shipping restrictions. But the South was deeply
paranoid about giving Congress that power. They
feared that if a northern majority in Congress
could regulate trade, they would immediately
use that power to ban the international slave
trade, or they would place heavy export taxes
on southern agricultural products like tobacco
to fund the national government. So the delegates
struck another grim bargain. The South agreed
to allow Congress to regulate foreign commerce
with a simple majority vote, securing the economic
survival of the nation. And in exchange. In exchange,
the Northern delegates agreed to insert a clause
into the Constitution explicitly prohibiting
the federal government from banning the international
slave trade for at least 20 years, pushing the
earliest possible ban to 1808. Additionally,
the Constitution permanently forbade the federal
government from placing any taxes on agricultural
exports. They were so terrified of reverting
to the bankrupt, chaotic dysfunction of the Articles
of Confederation that they essentially traded
20 more years of the horrors of the transatlantic
slave trade. trade just to secure the federal
power to regulate shipping and save the economy.
It was a cold, calculated transaction. The framers
successfully designed a system to cure the immediate
fatal diseases of the Articles of Confederation.
the empty treasury, the trade wars, the inability
to enforce the law. But to secure the survival
of the Union in 1787, they knowingly embedded
a profound moral and political contradiction
into the foundation of the country, a contradiction
that would inevitably fester and fracture the
nation in the Civil War. We have covered an incredible
amount of historical ground today. We've gone
from empty treasuries and unpaid soldiers to
secret meetings and massive constitutional engineering.
Let's pull all of this together. If we look at
the overarching narrative, the creation of the
Constitution is not a story of philosophical
demigods calmly handing down a perfect, sacred
document from the heavens. It is a story of desperate,
flawed men locked in a sweltering room, engaging
in bare -knuckle political brawl. trying to stop
their country from collapsing into anarchy and
foreign subjugation. Why should you care about
the failure of the requisition system or the
trade wars between New York and New Jersey? Because
when you look at the political architecture of
the United States today, when you see endless
debates over the balance of federal authority
versus states rights, when you wonder why the
incredibly complex Electoral College exists,
or why the Senate gives a tiny state the exact
same voting power as a massive one, you have
to remember the crucible in which it was all
forged. Our very first system, the Articles of
Confederation, completely and spectacularly collapsed
because it prioritized extreme local vetoes and
absolute state sovereignty over unified national
action. The Constitution we live under today
is essentially a massive patch job. It is version
2 .0. It was explicitly, specifically designed
to fix the catastrophic, nearly fatal bugs in
version 1 .0. They didn't build a strong federal
government with a powerful executive and a Supreme
Court because they were power hunks. politicians
looking to rule the continent. They built it
because their first attempt at a weak decentralized
government literally bankrupted the nation, sparked
devastating economic warfare between neighboring
states, and invited armed rebellions from their
own unpaid war veterans. The Constitutional Convention
was a desperate, highly illegal rescue mission.
And that rescue mission required immense agonizing
compromise. They compromised on the structure
of the legislature. They compromised on the nature
of executive power. And they made horrific, calculated
compromises on human morality to ensure the geopolitical
survival of the state. Which leaves us with a
provocative final thought for you to chew on
today. Consider the foundational reality of how
our government was created. The founders were
sent to Philadelphia by the existing government
with strict, legally binding instructions to
merely revise the Articles of Confederation.
Right, just a revision. But when they objectively
analyzed the reality of the situation, they realized
the existing system was too fundamentally broken
to be saved. So, in secret, behind locked doors
and nail -shut windows, they decided to throw
their permanent governing document in the trash
and write a completely new one to save the country.
They engaged in a peaceful, bureaucratic revolution.
They recognized that the survival and prosperity
of the nation were vastly more important than
strict adherence to a failing legal document.
So if the architects of our government were willing
to completely scrap their original permanent
constitution when it stopped working for the
people, well, what does that say about how we
should view the permanence of the constitution
today? Is it meant to be a sacred, untouchable
text that we must blindly revere? Or is it just
another prototype, an ongoing, adaptable experiment,
waiting for the people to realize it's time for
its next necessary update? Keep that in mind
the next time you hear a debate about what the
founders would have wanted. Thanks for joining
us on this deep dive.