Joseph J. Ellis: On Constitutional Compromise
[Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College.]
In September 1789, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote in dismay to his old friend Thomas Jefferson, who was an ocean away in Paris. “I hazard an opinion,” he lamented, “that the plan should it be adopted will neither effectively answer the national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which everywhere excite disgust against the state governments.”
Madison had come to Philadelphia four months earlier determined to create a fully empowered national government designed to replace the state-based system under the Articles of Confederation. Despite his own best efforts, however, the delegates to the convention, so he thought, had proved unequal to the task, producing a document that finessed the core issues behind a veneer of willfully ambiguous compromises. Madison regarded these political accommodations as loose knots that would soon unravel, predicting that the Constitution would be lucky to last a decade....
The most famous compromise, recognized as such by the delegates at the time and enshrined in most history books as the Great Compromise, was brokered in the early weeks of July. The issue at stake was the character of representation in Congress. (Everyone had already agreed that the new legislature should be bicameral.) The question remained whether representation should be determined by state, as in the government under the Articles of Confederation, or by population....
The second and less renowned compromise on slavery—Madison called it “the sectional compromise”—was a backroom bargain between the delegates from New England and from the Deep South, specifically South Carolina and Georgia. The former agreed to an extension of the slave trade for 20 years if the latter supported a provision making all federal laws regulating commerce a mere majority vote rather than a supermajority of two-thirds. Though slavery was the underlying issue, the compromise is often described as a political bargain between the commercial interests of New England and the agrarian interests of the Deep South....
Of all the political compromises in American history, the second Great Compromise brokered at the Constitutional Convention was probably the most controversial and most consequential. Much like the first Great Compromise, the decision it delayed eventually required a Civil War to resolve. The celebratory glow surrounding the framers today needs to be replaced by a more somber light, and the moral podiums from which people second-guess their judgments should be put aside forever.
Read entire article at American Heritage
In September 1789, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote in dismay to his old friend Thomas Jefferson, who was an ocean away in Paris. “I hazard an opinion,” he lamented, “that the plan should it be adopted will neither effectively answer the national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which everywhere excite disgust against the state governments.”
Madison had come to Philadelphia four months earlier determined to create a fully empowered national government designed to replace the state-based system under the Articles of Confederation. Despite his own best efforts, however, the delegates to the convention, so he thought, had proved unequal to the task, producing a document that finessed the core issues behind a veneer of willfully ambiguous compromises. Madison regarded these political accommodations as loose knots that would soon unravel, predicting that the Constitution would be lucky to last a decade....
The most famous compromise, recognized as such by the delegates at the time and enshrined in most history books as the Great Compromise, was brokered in the early weeks of July. The issue at stake was the character of representation in Congress. (Everyone had already agreed that the new legislature should be bicameral.) The question remained whether representation should be determined by state, as in the government under the Articles of Confederation, or by population....
The second and less renowned compromise on slavery—Madison called it “the sectional compromise”—was a backroom bargain between the delegates from New England and from the Deep South, specifically South Carolina and Georgia. The former agreed to an extension of the slave trade for 20 years if the latter supported a provision making all federal laws regulating commerce a mere majority vote rather than a supermajority of two-thirds. Though slavery was the underlying issue, the compromise is often described as a political bargain between the commercial interests of New England and the agrarian interests of the Deep South....
Of all the political compromises in American history, the second Great Compromise brokered at the Constitutional Convention was probably the most controversial and most consequential. Much like the first Great Compromise, the decision it delayed eventually required a Civil War to resolve. The celebratory glow surrounding the framers today needs to be replaced by a more somber light, and the moral podiums from which people second-guess their judgments should be put aside forever.