Madison rushed to defend his plan. To eliminate proportional representation in the Senate was, he said, “inadmissible” and “unjust.” He battled tooth and nail to realize his vision of a small body of senators able to govern “with more coolness, with more system, & with more wisdom, than the popular branch.” Dickinson was unwilling to concede.49
With this heady debate, the tide began to turn against Madison. Things got worse on June 7 when one of his closest colleagues, George Mason, rose and acknowledged the merit of Dickinson’s argument. Dickinson was the author of Revolutionary essays in opposition to British taxation. Mason was one to listen respectfully to a gentleman scholar, an elder statesman like himself. So after Dickinson had had his say, Mason conceded that the state legislatures needed the power to defend themselves against encroachments, just as much as the national government did. Madison’s system was one-sided, because it recognized only the trespasses of the states against the national government. The Virginia Plan did not provide for “self-defense” all around, Mason reasoned. “Shall we leave the States alone unprovided with the means for this purpose?” he questioned. Clearly Mason’s conversion tipped the scale in favor of Dickinson’s motion, and the convention voted unanimously to permit state legislatures to appoint members of the U.S. Senate.50
Madison had lost ground, though one of his undeterred supporters, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina (cousin to General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney), stepped forward with a modified Virginia Plan, which endorsed Madison’s expansive version of the absolute negative. At twenty-nine, Pinckney was one of the youngest members of the convention. He shared Madison’s love of learning, would master five languages, and eventually acquired a two-thousand-volume library, nearly as diversified as Jefferson’s collection. (At the convention both he and Madison advocated the establishment of a national university.) Building on Pinckney’s motion, then, Madison returned to the theme of finding means to control the “centrifugal tendency” of the states, which were prone to spin away from their proper orbits. The choice of metaphor was deliberate: Dickinson had just compared the states to planets as part of his defense of state influence.51
Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was to be Madison’s on-again, off-again, ally (and many years later his second-term vice president). At this moment he confessed to finding difficulty in imagining how the absolute negative would work, given that the states and their laws were so diverse. It would be onerous, if not impossible, for the national legislature to supervise them all. Gerry was revealing a glaring hole in Madison’s theory.
The unapologetic nationalist James Wilson rose to Madison’s defense. He reminded the delegates of the “impotent condition” of the Confederation. State jealousies were responsible for frittering away national unity, each one cutting “a slice from the common loaf” to enrich itself. To correct vices was the business of the convention, Wilson reiterated, and one of the most prevalent vices was the absence of “effectual control in the whole over its parts.”52
An unheralded delegate to the convention, Gunning Bedford, Jr., saw in this view a poorly concealed plan of attack on the small states. Under proportional representation, his state of Delaware would have no redress, a one-ninetieth share in the “General Councils” of government, while Virginia and Pennsylvania would together possess one-third of the vote. In pursuing their ambitions, he said, the large states would “crush” the small ones. Where military action was taken against a defiant state, the Virginians would have “an enormous and monstrous influence.” Instead of calming him, Madison chided the Delaware delegate with imagery no less extreme. Would the small states, he posed, be any safer from the “avarice & ambition” of the large states if the Union collapsed?53
As the debate wore on, Madison could see that his reasoning was failing to convince. It was entirely obvious that the large states benefited exclusively from having proportional representation in both houses of Congress, and that Virginia had the most to gain. Madison was juggling contradictory theories: it was impossible to keep the Senate small and apportioned by population, and at the same time grant the small states a real voice in government. Madison’s basic problem was his lack of sympathy for the small states; it was to them that he had assigned the largest share of the Confederation’s failures. The large states would continue to make the greatest contributions to the Union, and thus they deserved more of a say in policy. But who else could he convince?
Madison’s plan continued to lose traction as the New Jersey delegation did the math. Under proportional representation, Virginia would have sixteen votes in the House, and Georgia only one. William Paterson, a Princeton graduate like Madison, bluntly charged that the Virginia Plan struck at the very existence of the small states. He deliberately provoked Madison by proposing, tongue in cheek, that the states should all be dissolved at once and reconstituted along new boundaries to create fair and proportional units. New Jersey refused to be “swallowed up,” as Paterson put it, saying he would rather “submit to a monarch, to a despot,” than consent to the Virginia Plan. He then presented what became known as the New Jersey Plan, drafted by a coalition of small-state delegates and rejecting virtually every major tenet of the Virginia Plan. Dickinson of Delaware pulled Madison aside and lectured him: “You see the consequence of pushing things too far.”54
By this time the motion to expand the absolute negative (“in all cases whatsoever”) had failed by a vote of seven states to three. More disturbing to Madison was the fact that Randolph and Mason had deserted him, and Washington did not vote. Few of Madison’s colleagues felt comfortable with the absolute negative once they considered its potential for abuse. Some saw his plan as a Virginia power grab, and others thought it a simply unreasonable answer to the weaknesses of the Confederation.55
On June 19, four days after Paterson introduced it, the New Jersey Plan was voted down. But it had achieved its purpose of dividing the ranks of delegates and weakening the resolve of the moderates in Madison’s coalition.56 The course of debate was not very productive at this point—one step forward, two steps back—principally because the issue of representation refused to die. On June 29, as the convention voted to grant the lower house proportional representation, Connecticut delegate Oliver Ellsworth took up the small-state cause: equality in the Senate. He called for a “middle ground,” making the new government “partly national; partly federal.” Some powers would be retained by those at the seat of government, while in other respects, built-in limits would guarantee that the states could never be consumed by an omnipotent power center. To deny the small states an equal vote in the Senate would be, Ellsworth claimed, just like “cutting the body of America in two”; three or four large states would end up governing the rest. At this point, the small-state advocates were sounding the most republican.57
Madison was not beaten, not yet. He refused to acknowledge that the small-states faction owned the moral high ground, and he accused the Connecticut delegates of inconsistency, if not rank hypocrisy. While they were claiming to have supported the Confederation government in principle, they refused to pay their tax requisitions. According to his logic, the New Jersey Plan would create a national government with no more teeth than what the Confederation had.
Rufus King of Massachusetts (who would be on the opposing ticket when Madison ran for president) was his staunch ally at the convention. He called the idea of an equal vote in the Senate a “vicious principle.” But Delaware’s Gunning Bedford, a rotund character who dwarfed Madison, stole the show by resorting to theatrics and threatening secession. “The large states dare not dissolve the Confederation,” he bellowed, for if they do, “the small states will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith.” He was tired of talk and dubious assurances, stating unequivocally: “I do not, gentlemen, trust you.” Paterson, too, complained of Madison’s rudeness.58
The Virginian was abnormally contentious when he openly accused the small states of endangering the
Union. Now in the minority, all he could do to turn the tide was to paint as bleak a picture as he could conjure and hope it reached the doubters. He made a dire prediction: republican liberty would yield to militarism. Left to their own devices, the disunited states would resort to standing armies and foreign alliances; they would form “partial confederacies,” constantly at war with one another. All of this would occur, he claimed, unless the small states accepted their vulnerability and saw that they were in no position to make demands.59
As provocative as Madison’s approach already was, he stirred up a hornets’ nest when he shifted the terms of debate to the volatile subject of North-South differences. In one day’s session at the end of June he declared that regionalism actually mattered more than the sizes of states. The three largest states were, he insisted, “as dissimilar as any three other states in the Union.” They were more prone to “rivalships” than to “coalitions,” because of slavery.
He had touched the third rail of American politics by conceding that the most fundamental socioeconomic distinctions in the country lay between North and South, “principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.” Upon acknowledging the central role of slavery, he was able to propose an unusual new configuration: apportionment in the lower house based on free inhabitants; apportionment in the upper house based on free inhabitants plus three-fifths of the slave population. If proportional representation in the Senate had passed on the strength of this reasoning, Virginia’s control of the Senate would have been ensured. But once again Madison’s argument fell on deaf ears.60
Out of the deadlock emerged the Connecticut compromise, granting proportional representation in the House. To appease the southern delegates, it counted three slaves to every five free inhabitants in constituting that body. It also established, once and for all, equal representation in the Senate. When a committee was formed to determine the number of seats in the House, the large-state advantage could not be missed: the three largest states held 43 percent of the seats. Sherman of Connecticut protested, and another committee was organized, which crunched the numbers again and donated a few more seats to the smaller states and New England.
Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania was horrified by what was happening. Trusting in a chosen few more than in an expanding union, he wanted to restrict the number of seats granted to new states. He saw danger in making population, instead of wealth, the standard for representation in the House, fearing this would allow the western states eventually to overpower the Atlantic states. Elbridge Gerry imagined that empowered western legislators would conspire to “drain our wealth into the Western country.” He believed, as well, that the West would be flooded with foreigners.61
Gouverneur Morris was a famously captivating speaker. He would come up with the preamble of the Constitution, “We the People.” As sardonic as he was charming, he exuded a robust self-confidence in spite of a crippling calamity: he had been one-legged since 1780, when in a freak accident his own horse-drawn chaise had run him over, and his doctor saw amputation as the only option. Though he could be reckless with language, irreverent, and often abrasive, Morris was an attention-grabber. As an unrepentant elitist, he contended that “remote wilderness” was not the “proper school of political talents,” and that westerners were pretty much all backward. He was just as perturbed that the Constitution would protect slavery, and that slave-owning southerners were to be rewarded with added seats in Congress. He would abide by the compromise but continue to make himself heard.62
Madison, Mason, and Randolph all responded to Morris’s geographical absolutism by defending the principle of treating all new states as equals. Madison, thoroughly exasperated by this time, scolded Morris for his tendency to measure the human character “by the points of the compass.” Westward migration, he contended, could not be stopped, and it was only natural for people to move into less populous places where land was cheaper. True, the West was bound to grow at a rapid rate, as Spain yielded to America’s demands and the Mississippi opened up. But the Atlantic states, north as well as south, Madison argued, would all reap tremendous economic benefits by supplying commercial goods to the western states. It was the same cause he had taken up in Congress in years past, and he kept on doing so for one simple reason: it was in the best interest of Virginia.63
North and South could not agree on the apportionment of representatives in Congress. Each section feared that the other was to gain the upper hand. It was Pennsylvania’s James Wilson who finally provided the compromise solution in this instance, proposing that population-based representation also be tied to taxation and to a motion Congress had considered in 1783, which recognized the three-fifths principle. Northerners would be less offended if it appeared that counting southern slaves was a quid pro quo for taxing them. Wilson’s maneuver was less a concession than a performance, though. No one expected to realize federal tax revenues from slaves after the new government was established.64
The rancor of some debates, especially over slavery and the West, demonstrated the instability of Madison’s original coalition. Gouverneur Morris went so far as to accuse southerners of being unwilling to settle for anything less than a majority in Congress. He peered into the future and saw them conspiring with westerners to stage a war with Spain in order to secure the Mississippi. Northerners would be spilling blood in needless wars, just to satisfy the land-hungry South. He was not far off.65
Madison could not get his mind off proportional representation in the Senate and made one last attempt to salvage his plan. On July 14 he backed a motion presented by Charles Pinckney that would have recalibrated the system: no state, no matter how small, would be assigned any less than one-fifth the number of representatives of the most populous state. It was too little too late. On the sixteenth the convention voted to accept the Connecticut compromise—proportional representation in the House (counting slaves as three-fifths of a citizen for the purpose of apportioning seats), and equal representation in the Senate. Deeply troubled, Edmund Randolph asked for an immediate adjournment. Delegates from the large states met in private but failed to reach a consensus. Their coalition had dissolved. A modified version of the absolute negative contained in the Virginia Plan was decisively voted down the next day.66
After his study of constitutions, after all of his outlinings of a grand plan, and after a month and a half of debate, James Madison had witnessed the rejection of virtually every one of his ideas. The council of revision was the first to go. His absolute negative was quashed and its modified cousin faded away, as proportional representation in the Senate fell by the wayside. The Senate, his repository of “virtue & wisdom,” was now his worst nightmare: a hapless pawn of the state legislatures.
“The Builders of Babel”
If Madison won over few of his peers, it was not because his arguments were all unappealing—he had prominent defenders. But fears among the states which he had not prepared for ultimately redirected the course of debate. In a private letter to a friend, Washington, who sat silently through most of the proceedings, expressed his despair over the sectional sparring. Benjamin Franklin, though hardly a man of faith, put it best on June 28, when he proposed that each subsequent day of the convention should begin with a prayer. If his colleagues paused for a moment to give over their thoughts to a higher power, they might then, he said, rise above their “little partial local interests” and avoid behaving like “the Builders of Babel.” Regional bias had blinded delegates to the greater good.67
After his vision of a Senate comprised of an intellectual elite went down in flames, one might have expected Madison to pack his bags and leave the convention. Others did. But realizing that he would have to work with what he was given, he regrouped. For the remainder of the convention, he did everything possible to reduce the power of the Senate, looking to other branches to take on the responsibilities he had earlier assigned to the upper house.
He still faced an uphill battle. The tedium of the hot summer months
brought a discernible impatience among the delegates. Speeches were shorter, and so were Madison’s notes. An August 6 report of the Committee of Detail gave the Senate sole authority to select Supreme Court judges and U.S. ambassadors, to make treaties, and to resolve disputes between states. If the president died or had to be removed for some reason, the president of the Senate took his place. Meanwhile, in addition to the direct appointment of U.S. senators, state legislatures were to have new tools at their disposal: they could regulate the time and place of elections, determine districts, and set voter qualifications for House elections. Madison worried about abuses that were bound to occur if states had an uncontrolled right over election planning. They could corrupt the process by showing favor to one or another candidate. Equally galling to him, the Committee of Detail placed within the states’ grasp one very tight purse string: control over congressmen’s compensation.
Many besides Madison felt that after denying the Senate the power to police the states, the convention had gone too far in the other direction. So when the relentless Virginia delegate addressed these details, he obtained minor successes. He faced scant opposition when he motioned to reject the regulation of congressional elections by state legislatures. Even Roger Sherman, who agreed with Madison on little, concurred. And control over compensation of the officers of government was returned to Congress with virtually no protest.68
Madison’s strongest statement in the midsummer debates came after Oliver Ellsworth motioned to empower the state legislatures to approve the federal Constitution, rather than submit it to special ratifying conventions. Here, dismissing the legislatures as “incompetent” to weigh the issues at hand, Madison developed his theory of constitution writing: Only a ratifying convention gave legitimacy to any new government wherein new powers were to be based on the supremacy of the laws. This point was crucial to him. He felt that “the people,” not the states, must found the government. Popular ratifying conventions, like proportional representation, called forth the majority will. States, by definition, lacked a national focus. Their interests were naturally circumscribed, and they would only interfere with the duties, encroach on the powers, and clog the operations of the national government.69
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