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By Root 2576 0

in May 1787 representatives from all over America began to assemble at the old State House in Philadelphia in what would come to be known as the Constitutional Convention. Though America had declared its independence eleven years earlier, it was not yet in any real sense a nation, but rather an uneasy alliance of states bound by a document known formally as the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. Enacted in 1781, the Articles had established a central government of sorts, but had left it subordinate to the states and embarrassingly lacking in clout. In consequence, as the historian Charles L. Mee, jun., has put it, in 1787 the government of the United States ‘could not reliably levy taxes, could not ensure that its laws would be obeyed, could not repay its debts, could not ensure that it would honour its treaty obligations. It was not clear, in fact, that it could be called a government at all.‘1

Since the conclusion of the war with Britain four years before, the states had increasingly fallen to squabbling. Connecticut boldly claimed almost a third of the territory of Pennsylvania after many of its residents settled there. Pennsylvania bickered with Virginia over their common border and was so fearful of New York imposing tariffs on its manufactures that it insisted on having its own access to the Great Lakes. (If you have ever wondered why Pennsylvania’s border takes an abrupt upward jag at its northwestern end to give it an odd umbilicus to Lake Erie, that is why.) New York bickered over patches of land with little Rhode Island, and Vermont constantly threatened to leave the union. Clearly something needed to be done. The obvious solution would be a new agreement superseding the Articles of Confederation and creating a more powerful central government: in a word, a constitution. Without it, America could never hope to be a nation. As Page Smith has put it: ‘The Revolution had created the possibility, not the reality, of a new nation. It is the Constitution that for all practical purposes is synonymous with our nationhood.‘2

However, there were problems. To begin with, the delegates had no authority to form a constitution. Their assignment was to amend the Articles of Confederation, not replace them. (Which is why it wasn’t called the Constitutional Convention until afterwards.)3 Then, too, the scale of the American continent and the diversity of its parts seemed fated to thwart any hope of meaningful unification. With 1,500 miles of coastline and a vast inland wilderness, America was already one of the largest countries in the world – ten times larger than any previous federation in history – and the disparities in population, wealth and political outlook between the states presented seemingly insurmountable obstacles to finding a common purpose. If proportional representation were instituted, Virginia and Pennsylvania between them would possess one-third of the nation’s political power, while Delaware would be entitled to a mere one-ninetieth. Little states thus feared big ones. Slave-owning states feared non-slave-owning states. Eastern states with fixed borders feared those to the west with an untapped continent on their doorsteps, suspecting that one day these western upstarts would overtake them in population and that they would find their destiny in the hands of rude frontiersmen in tassled buckskins – an unthinkable prospect. All the states, large and small, had proud, distinct histories, often going back nearly two centuries, and were reluctant to relinquish even the smallest measure of autonomy to an unproven central authority. The challenge of the Constitutional Convention was not to give powers to the states, but to take powers away from them, and to do it in a way that they would find palatable.

Some states refused even to entertain the notion. Rhode Island, which had declared independence from Britain two months before the rest of America had, now refused to send delegates to Philadelphia (and rather sulkily declined to join the union until 1790). Vermont likewise snubbed the convention and