3.8 The Constitutional Convention and Debates over Ratification

Fifty-five delegates from twelve states met in Philadelphia from May to September 1787; Rhode Island refused to send anyone. George Washington presided, and James Madison of Virginia took detailed notes and shaped much of the debate. The delegates were mostly wealthy, well-educated men, and they met in secret. They were supposed to revise the Articles but quickly decided to write a new constitution.

Notice that the Constitution never uses the word 'slave' or 'slavery', but several clauses protected it. Historians still debate how much the Constitution strengthened slavery and how much it left room to limit it.

• Representation: Madison's Virginia Plan gave large states more power by basing representation in a two-house Congress on population. The New Jersey Plan gave each state one equal vote in a one-house Congress. The Great Compromise (also called the Connecticut Compromise, proposed by Roger Sherman) created a House of Representatives based on population and a Senate with two members per state.
• Three-Fifths Compromise: Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted for representation but not for taxes; Northern delegates wanted the reverse. They agreed to count three-fifths of the enslaved population for both representation in the House and direct taxes. This gave slaveholding states extra seats and extra electoral votes.
• Slave trade: Congress could not ban the importation of enslaved people before 1808.
• Fugitive slave clause: people 'held to service' who escaped to another state had to be returned.
• The presidency: delegates created the Electoral College, in which electors chosen by each state elect the president, as a compromise between election by Congress and direct popular election.

The Constitution would take effect when special conventions in nine of the thirteen states approved it. Hamilton, Madison and Jay wrote 85 newspaper essays, later collected as The Federalist (or the Federalist Papers), to win over New York. New Hampshire became the ninth state in June 1788, but the large states of Virginia and New York were still needed for the government to work, and both ratified narrowly that summer.

Several states ratified only after Federalists promised amendments to protect rights. In the first Congress in 1789, Madison drafted amendments, and the first ten, the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791. They protect freedoms such as speech, religion, the press and the right to a fair trial, and the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states or the people powers not given to the national government.