The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (138 page)

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stating that the Convention could "conclude nothing" but was "at liberty to propose anything."
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Those arguments found sympathetic listeners in the large states. But it remained for Charles Pinckney and James Madison to isolate the underlying difference between the two parties of adherents. The "whole," according to Pinckney, came to this: "give New Jersey an equal vote, and she will dismiss her scruples, and concur in the National system." Madison, who spoke on June 18, the day after Hamilton gave a long, irrelevant discourse praising elective monarchy, pointed out that New Jersey and the other like-minded states might someday rue their advocacy of the equality of states. The prospect of many new states formed out of the West should make New Jersey pause; these states would undoubtedly enter the Union "when they contained but few inhabitants. If they should be entitled to vote according to their proportions of inhabitants, all would be right and safe." But let them "have an equal vote, and a more objectionable minority than ever might give law to the whole."
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The debate stopped when Madison finished, and the vote showed the weakness of the small states. Only New Jersey and New York voted for Paterson's plan, and the committee reported out the Virginia proposals. The small states wanted to control the government and agreed that state equality offered the means. But at this time they could not agree on much more.
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Small-state delegates attempted to collect themselves in the next couple of days as the Convention took up the report of the committee of the whole, the revised Virginia Plan. The large states first raised defeated spirits in the small by agreeing that the first resolution should read that the "Government of the United States ought to consist of a supreme Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary" rather than the "national" government. The word "national" excited small-state suspicions of the intentions of the large, and the change in wording went at least part way toward reassuring them. But the reassurance they most craved was equality in the national legislature. Three of them -- New Jersey, Delaware, and New York -- immediately opposed the resolution calling for a Congress of two houses. They had no hope of making their opposition stick; rather they intended to extract a concession to equality of the states. Roger Sherman offered a compromise almost at once, saying that "if

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the difficulty on the subject of representation cannot be otherwise got over, he would agree to have two branches, and a proportional representation in one of them, provided each State had an equal voice in the other." The large states refused the bait and landed their own fish, approval of a two-house legislature, with ease.
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Aristocratic bias, or planters' interest, next made itself felt in a motion, offered by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, that the lower house should be elected as the state legislatures directed rather than by the people. The play here for planter control with the protection of slavery in mind escaped no one. Of the southern states, however, only South Carolina joined by Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware, supported this motion. The Virginia Plan's provision that the people should choose the first branch then won approval with only New Jersey opposing.
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The problem of the second branch remained unsolved, and, though the Convention spent part of the last days of June discussing such matters as who should pay representatives and what qualifications they should have, it persisted in popping up. On June 27 the Convention began still another effort at dealing with it. These efforts unfortunately served not only to clarify premises but to harden them. That result, though not unanticipated perhaps, stands as another instance in history of good intentions leading to unintended results.
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The question of why the delegates debated the issue of representation so forcefully is not as simple as it seems. They might have abandoned what was by this time their usual practice and simply voted; much after all had been said about representation. But the delegates were, for all their practicality, much too imaginative to allow an opportunity to pass without examining once again the major division among them. They were men of pride; some may have believed that they might change the minds of the opposition. In any case almost all dreaded failure-and they were staring at failure. They had no choice but to argue out their differences. Since the large states were urging the acceptance of a constitutional system which could only reduce small-state power, they saw the debates as providing a chance to reassure the small. Over the next few days both Madison and Wilson denied the existence of a "combination" of the large against the others in the Union.
Madison reviewed

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the interests of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia and found nothing that threatened a "combination."
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Size certainly did not draw them together, he concluded. "Experience rather taught a contrary lesson." Among individuals, the rich and eminent more commonly fought one another than combined against the weak. Among nations, an analogous situation existed -- for example, "Carthage and Rome tore one another to pieces instead of uniting their forces to devour the weaker nations of the Earth." Among the ancient and modern confederacies the contentions, not the coalitions, of Sparta, Athens, and Thebes proved fatal to the smaller members of the Amphictyonic Confederacy. And if large states "
singly
" should prove threatening would not the safety of the small be secured best if the Union provided a "perfect incorporation" of the thirteen states, a Union which would have the strength to protect all its citizens from any part?
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There is no reason not to accept as genuine the small states' fears of the large. They had heard a great deal about majoritarian tyranny in recent months and were to listen to a good deal more. Where, they asked, was the majority but in the large? Madison, Randolph, and Wilson had reproached the small states for their refusal to comply with congressional requisitions and had expressed the impatience of the large states with the small. The small after all were being asked to change a system in which their weight had been evident. No one could anticipate clearly what the new would do to their power, and they, like the large states, wanted to exercise as much control as possible in the Union.
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Ellsworth, Sherman, and Johnson, all from Connecticut, made the heart of the case for equality of representation with minor, though longwinded, aid from Luther Martin. The essential weakness in the argument for proportional representation, they insisted, was that it rested on a misunderstanding of the Confederacy. The states in reality were joined together by an agreement much like a treaty; they were free and sovereign. Now they were asked to give up their equal voices in the Union, in effect to be consolidated out of existence, for as Bedford of Delaware explained, "there was no middle way between a perfect consolidation and a mere confederacy of the states." Bedford's rhetoric may have embarrassed his colleagues from the small states; they sought not a continuation of the old system but rather a compromise that would give the states an equal voice in the upper house.
Still, Bedford's extravagance

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had its uses; most notably it made the compromisers look more reasonable and moderate than they really were. Ellsworth himself, a sober and careful advocate, argued that "No instance of a Confederacy has existed in which an equality of voices has not been exercised by the members of it," an inaccurate assessment of history he was soon to choke back down. In any case there was no need for so drastic a change as popular representation in both houses, Ellsworth contended. "We are running from one extreme to another. We are razing the foundations of the building. When we need only repair the roof. No salutary measure has been lost for want of a majority of the states, to favor it," an argument-if true -- that made the existence of the Convention a little hard to understand.
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There were also principles at stake; both sides agreed on that. The small states saw their version of the government as representing the ideals of the Revolution. Their principles were the rights of man. They professed not to understand why anyone would wish to depart from a constitution that defended their rights. Martin's remark "that the language of the States being sovereign and independent, was once familiar and understood," but now seemed "strange and obscure," carried genuine bewilderment.
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What Luther Martin described as the language of the states did not impress Madison and Wilson as the language of the Revolution. Both rejected the small-state contention that a treaty bound the Confederation together. Far from a union of equals, the Confederation possessed some-but not enough -- authority over the states. The examples Madison cited, though not the stuff of the ordinary operations of government, made his point: "In the cases of captures, of piracies, and of offenses in a federal army, the property and persons of individuals depend on the laws of Congress." What was proposed would lengthen this list and would grant "the highest prerogative of supremacy" to the "National Government." In this government of considerable power, simple justice required that the majority rule. Wilson agreed and rejected the Connecticut proposal of a compromise -- the lower house to be apportioned according to population, the upper according to state equality -- and cited statistics which purported to show that such an arrangement Would permit the minority to control the majority. Seven states, Wilson noted, might control six; seven with one-third of the country's population would control six with two-thirds of the population.
"Can we forget," he asked, "for

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