Miracle At Philadelphia

This was the term that came to define opponents of the US Constitution, although they often resented the term on the grounds that they were the true “Federalists” with a better plan for balancing national and state power. Including famous figures, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, along with others who wrote under aliases, such as “Federal Farmer,” the Anti-Federalists conducted their own publicity campaign parallel to Hamilton, Madison, and Jay’s Federalist Papers. Their main objection to the Constitution was that vesting too much power in the federal government, at the expense of the states, would be harmful to individual liberty. They argued that the states were close enough to people to represent them, whereas a distant capital would become a magnet of corruption for wealthy elites and foreign interests. A central government promised greater wealth and power on the world stage, but the Anti-Federalists feared that this would undermine the virtue of a small republic. They failed in their effort to prevent ratification, but their ideas remain hugely influential in American politics, particularly in the suspicion of—or outright hostility toward—concentrated federal power.

Proposed by Edmund Randolph, the governor of Virginia at the time as well as one of Virginia’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the Virginia Plan was essentially the first draft of the US Constitution. The Convention began with an unclear notion of its actual purpose—the problems with the Articles were acknowledged as being severe, and yet there was no legal remit to act beyond it. Randolph’s plan proposed an entirely new national government with a bicameral legislature, a chief executive, and a federal court system. Many of its provisions were edited or removed, but by establishing it early on as the basis for debate, it helped to establish the need for an entirely new system of government consisting of three branches that wielded their own powers while exercising checks and balances upon one another.

Also known as the Great Compromise or the Sherman Compromise, the Connecticut Compromise dealt with the question of representation in Congress, a source of extended and bitter debate in the Convention. Delegates from larger states wanted representation to be based on population, so that they would enjoy a larger share of congressional delegates. Those from smaller states insisted on equal representation for all states. In addition to reflecting the interests of the various states, the representation debate also spoke to the question of whether the people or the states were the ultimate source of sovereign power. Roger Sherman of Connecticut proposed a system whereby the lower house (the House of Representatives) would feature proportional representation, while the upper house (the Senate) provided equal votes to all states (ultimately two each). This proposal was finally adopted in July, breaking a deadlock that had threatened to derail the Convention. Equal representation in the Senate was also excluded from the standard amendment process, making it essentially unamendable.