Page 183 - American Stories, A History of the United States

a clause assuring the return of fugitive slaves. “We have obtained,” Charles Cotesworth
6.1 Pinckney told the planters of South Carolina, “a right to recover our slaves in whatever
Quick Check part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before.”
Why did the delegates think a Although these deals disappointed many northerners, they conceded that estab-
6.2 compromise on slavery and states’ lishing a strong national government was of greater immediate importance than end-
rights was necessary to achieve the
ratification of a new constitution? ing the slave trade. “Great as the evil is,” Madison wrote, “a dismemberment of the
union would be worse.”
6.3
The Last Details
On July 26, the convention formed a Committee of Detail, a group that prepared a rough
6.4 draft of the Constitution. After the committee completed its work—writing a document
that still, after so much debate, preserved the fundamental points of the Virginia Plan—
the delegates reconsidered each article. The task required the better part of a month.
During these sessions, the convention concluded that the president, as they now
called the chief executive, should be selected by an electoral college, a body of promi-
nent men in each state chosen by local voters. The number of “electoral” votes each
state held equaled its number of representatives and senators. This awkward device
guaranteed that the president would not be indebted to the Congress for his office.
Whoever received the second most votes in the electoral college automatically became
vice president. If no person received a majority of the votes, the lower house—the
House of Representatives—would decide the election, with each state casting a single
vote. Delegates also gave the president veto power over legislation and the right to
nominate judges. Both privileges would have been unthinkable a decade earlier, but
the state experiments revealed the importance of having an independent executive to
maintain a balanced system of republican government.
As the meeting was concluding, delegates expressed concern about the absence of
a bill of rights. Most state constitutions included such declarations. Virginians such as
George Mason insisted that the states and their citizens needed explicit protection from
Quick Check excesses by the federal government. While many delegates sympathized with Mason’s
Why did the delegates to the appeal, they noted that the hour was late and, in any case, that the proposed Constitu-
Constitutional Convention fail to
Include a formal Bill of Rights? tion provided security for individual rights. During the hard battles over ratification,
the delegates may have regretted passing over the issue so lightly.

We the People

Now that many issues were settled, the delegates had to overcome the hurdle of ratifying
the Constitution. They adopted an ingenious procedure. Instead of submitting the Consti-
tution to the state legislatures, all of which had a vested interest in the status quo and most
of which had two houses, either of which could block approval, they called for electing
13 state conventions to review the new federal government. Moreover, the Constitution
would take effect after the assent of only nine states. There was no danger that the pro-
posed system would fail simply because a single state like Rhode Island withheld approval.
The convention asked the urbane Gouverneur Morris to make final stylistic
changes in the wording of the Constitution. When Morris examined the working
draft, he discovered that it spoke of the collection of states forming a new government.
This wording presented problems. Ratification required only nine states. No one knew
whether all the states would accept the Constitution and, if not, which nine would.
New England states, for example, might reject the document. Morris’s brilliant phrase
“We the People of the United States” eliminated this difficulty. The new nation was a
republic of the people, not of the states.
On September 17, 39 men signed the Constitution. A few delegates, like Mason,
Quick Check could not support it. Others had gone home. For more than three months, Madison
What was the “ingenious procedure had been the convention’s driving intellectual force. He now generously summarized
for ratification” adopted by the the experience: “There never was an assembly of men, charged with a great and arduous
Constitutional Convention trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted
delegates?
to the object committed to them.”
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