The Great Compromise

5 Key excerpts on "The Great Compromise"

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  The Constitutional Convention of 1787

  A Reference Guide

  • Stuart Leibiger(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  The Great Compromise

  To counter the Virginia Plan, William Paterson, on behalf of the small states, presented the New Jersey Plan on June 15. This proposal, which conformed with Congress’s February 21, 1787, resolution, would add executive and judicial branches to the existing Confederation and give it the power to tax imports and regulate commerce. Although the one-state, one-vote system would remain, requisitions on the states for additional money would be based on population, requiring the big states to pay more taxes than the small ones. A serious proposal that would strengthen the Confederation without violating Congress’s charge to the convention, the New Jersey Plan nevertheless quickly suffered defeat, but not before making clear that the small states would settle for nothing less than state equality in one house of the legislature. The impasse over representation lasted until mid-July, when the convention passed the troublesome representation issue to a Grand Committee of a delegate from each state. Stacked with compromisers from the large states and hard liners from the small states, this committee—not surprisingly—proposed a settlement that granted the small states what they wanted. The lower house would be based on population, and the upper house would be based on state equality. The small states managed to overcome the large state-Lower South coalition and pass this Great Compromise on July 16 by a 5–4–1 vote because the Massachusetts delegation deadlocked, and the North Carolina delegation switched sides and joined the small states.

  The Great Compromise not only protected the interests of the small states, but it also safeguarded the states as states. Congress could pass no law without being approved by both the House of Representatives, elected by the people, and by the Senate, elected by the state legislatures.

  William Paterson’s parents brought him from Ireland to America at age two. He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, where his merchant father operated a store. After graduating from his home town’s elite college in 1763, he earned a master’s degree from the same institution three years later. In college, Paterson became friends with fellow Princetonians Luther Martin and Oliver Ellsworth, both later small-state allies at the convention. Paterson did not share the wealth and aristocratic background of most of his classmates. Pierce described Paterson as “a man of great modesty, with looks that bespeak talents of no great extent.” But Pierce believed that Paterson knew exactly when and how to engage in a debate. An example of this skill came on June 15.1

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  Roger Sherman

  Signer and Statesman

  • Roger Sherman Boardman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  252 THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION while the large States were refusing any equal representa-tion. With the Compromise, the government adopted was partly national and partly federal. True, it contained germs of future dissension; but at the moment, if the Convention was to continue, it was a great and necessary triumph. in The critical importance of the Connecticut Compromise just considered no scholar denies. There were not just two other outstanding ones, as was formerly taught—the Constitution as finally put forth has well been called a bundle of com-promises. 27 Despite excited debate in some cases, settlements were made without great difficulty. This was true of that illogical arrangement whereby a slave was accounted for pur-poses of State representation as equivalent to three-fifths of a white man; 28 the same value had been proposed for requisi-tion purposes by the Continental Congress in 1783. So too with the compromise by which the Carolinas and Georgia, desiring that the States might share with the national gov-ernment power over foreign commerce, conceded this claim in return for the northern-state concession that the foreign-slave trade might be permitted till the year 1808. There was no serious danger of the Convention's disruption over this issue, though to it we owe Mason's noble denunciation of the slave trade. And it must be conceded that the Connecticut members were too cold toward those flaming words. Sher-man disapproved of the slave trade; yet as the States were now possessed of the right to import slaves, as the public good did not require it to be taken from them, & as it was expedient to have as few objections as possible to the pro-posed scheme of Government, he thought it best to leave the matter as we find it. Moreover, the abolition of Slavery seemed to be going on in the U. S. & the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees compleat it. 29 17 Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution, p.

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  Compromise and the American Founding

  The Quest for the People's Two Bodies

  • Alin Fumurescu(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 The Constitution “. . . that greatest of all compromises” . . . if no compromise should take place, our meeting would not only be in vain but worse than in vain. – Oliver Ellsworth When on July 22, 1850, Henry Clay rose in the Senate to claim that the Constitution of the United States was the “greatest of all compromises . . . a great, memorable, magnificent compromise, which indicates to us the course of duty when differences arise,” 1 no one denied it, even though some may have disagreed with Clay that on issues such as slavery, compromise represented the unavoidable, let alone the proper, solution. By the time of Clay’s speech, the idea that the Constitution was a great compromise had already been well embedded in the minds of Americans. During the Philadelphia Convention, the framers made constant references to the necessity and benefits of compromise, and they continued to do so, even more forcefully, during the state ratifying conventions. In the eyes of its supporters, compromise was the only way of preventing the disintegration of the newly created United States. When Nicholas Gilman, a delegate from Hew Hampshire, wrote to his brother in the day after the adjournment of the Convention, he endorsed the document in the familiar terms of a choice between compromise and open conflict, between national unity and an unrepairable fragmentation: “It was done by bargain and Compromise, yet notwithstanding its imperfections, on the adoption of it depends (in my 1 Quoted in Peter B. Knupfer (1991), The Union as It Is: Constitutional Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press), 23. 139

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  America's Second Revolution

  How George Washington Defeated Patrick Henry and Saved the Nation

  • Harlow Giles Unger(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Trade Paper Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  The Great Compromise

  With the convention stalemated over congressional voting, Roger Sherman, the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, proposed a compromise. The son of a farmer, Sherman had started life as a shoemaker, but “despising the lowness of his condition, he turned Almanack maker” and built an enormously prosperous mercantile enterprise that earned him enough political influence to win appointment as a judge. At sixty-six he was the second-oldest delegate after Franklin, but one of the least popular—indeed, “the oddest shaped character I ever remember to have met with,” according to Georgia’s William Pierce. “He is awkward, un-meaning, and unaccountably strange in his manner.” Pierce called Sherman’s train of thinking “deep and comprehensive,” but “the oddity of his address, the vulgarisms that accompany his public speaking and that strange New England cant . . . make everything that is connected with him grotesque and laughable.”1 Pierce and others resented Sherman’s presentation of his every idea as if it were a revelation from God:

  “Let voting in the lower house be proportionate to each state’s population,” Sherman suggested in his distinctive, Solomon-like tones, “and give each state parity—one vote—in the upper house. Otherwise a few large states will rule. The smaller states would never agree to [a] plan on any other principle than an equality of suffrage in this branch.”2

  Incredibly, the delegates voted down the former shoemaker by one vote—more, perhaps, because of personal dislike of the man than of his suggested compromise. As all sides refused to budge, New York’s Alexander Hamilton rose to call for voting by proportionate representation in both houses. His motion carried by one vote, but Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts made it clear that the motion would not stand.

  Roger Sherman. A Connecticut shoemaker who built a prosperous mercantile enterprise and became a mayor and a judge, Sherman was a voice of compromise at the Constitutional Convention.

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  Decision in Philadelphia

  The Constitutional Convention of 1787

  • Christopher Collier, James Lincoln Collier(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Blackstone Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Tempers were rising. However, Paterson realized that if the delegates voted on the issue, proportional representation would win, and he and his small-state allies would be forced either to accept the decision or leave. He therefore moved to postpone the vote until the next session. With relief the delegates agreed, and adjourned for the day.

  Fortunately, the next day was Sunday, June 10. It appears that Paterson, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and some of the other small states’ men made use of the day to meet and work out a strategy, and it is probably then that they came up with what came to be known as the Connecticut Compromise. This was a plan by which one house of the Congress would be based on proportional representation, the other on equal votes for each state.

  The so-called Connecticut Compromise was devised by one of the most neglected of our Founding Fathers, Roger Sherman. There is one small town at the western edge of his home state named for him, and he appears on the two-dollar bill as one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in John Trumbull’s famous painting. Few people except students of American history know his name, and even some historians have only the vaguest idea of his importance. His role in the making of the nation was immense. Roger Sherman is the only man in our history who signed all the basic American documents. He signed the Declaration and Resolves of 1774, in which the American colonies stated their determination to resist British power, and the Association of the same year, which established the boycott of British goods. He not only signed the Declaration of Independence but was on the committee that wrote it. He was also on the committee that wrote the Articles of Confederation, which he signed; and he voted for the peace treaty with England. Finally, he would sign the Constitution. He was in the First and Second continental congresses, which organized the Revolution. He spent more time in the old Congress under the Articles than anybody else. He would be in the first United States Congress of the new government as representative, and in the second as senator.

  He was, moreover, no silent witness to great events but a careful reasoner and frequent speaker. At the Convention he spoke more often than anyone other than Madison and perhaps one other, depending on whose biographer does the counting. He was considered by his peers to be one of the most influential men in the country, a clever and persuasive debater who more often than not brought people around to his way of looking at issues: things tended to go his way, because he knew how to make them do so.

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