The delegates arrive in Philadelphia to begin the business of hammering out a new government.

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Foreign.

Hello and welcome to the Political History of the United States.

All of the states, with the exception of Rhode island, had decided to send delegations to consider the question of just how they could get the United States back on track.

The Confederation government was all but non existent at this point, and everybody knew that something had to be done.

As I have sat down and planned just how to write these episodes on the Constitutional Convention, I have been left with a couple of questions as to how I want to structure things.

Well, this is common with pretty much any series that I write for this show.

Where I struggled here was where to talk about the expectations of everybody going into the Convention, especially when it comes to the ultimate inevitability of the creation of the Federal Constitution.

On the one hand, I think there is a good argument that this would all make sense as the conclusion, something that could synthesize all that we're about to embark upon.

On the other hand, a discussion of the subject could also prove beneficial at the start of our series as a way to better frame the thinking of the Convention's delegates.

Ultimately, I decided that we are going to lead off with a discussion of the forces that were basically driving the delegates to succeed.

I think that by going in this direction we're going to be able to better understand what the real battles actually were and not get too bogged down.

I, as I'm guessing many of you are, am a product of the U.S. school system.

The way the Constitutional Convention is most often taught in the United States is that it was some amazing and unlikely feat that the Constitution ever got signed at all.

One of the most famous and well read books on the Convention is named Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Dinker Bowen.

I, to be clear, am not setting this out here to be critical of Bowen's work.

The book is one of the ones that I'm using to write these episodes, but rather I want to discuss exactly what the miracle of the Convention really was.

That the Federal Constitution emerged from Philadelphia was not exactly surprising.

Quoting a line by historian John Fairling here that I really think hits the point, he writes that success was uncertain, but failure was unlikely.

This line by Farrelling hits at the crux of the question.

The Confederation government was no longer functioning, and if there was any hope to save the country, then they had little other choice.

The degree to which the Confederation was broken was not a surprise to any of the delegations either.

This is most clearly evidenced by the fact that there was never really much of a thrust to attempt to save the Confederation.

As a result of that nearly impossible task of achieving unanimous votes to amend the Articles, it was widely accepted that mere modification to the existing structure was never going to be an option.

We have spent numerous episodes already this season discussing the difficulty that came with trying to pass the imposts, a feat which was never successfully accomplished.

Now, with the assembled delegates wanting to seek out a far more radical redesign of the government, everybody understood that the changes were far too systemic to be addressed in mere amendments to the existing system.

The delegates also understood that the convention had not come together easily.

There was real animosity here between the states at this point for various reasons, some of which we have talked about, like Jay's treaty regarding the navigation of the Mississippi, as well as issues that we have not talked about, but will in the coming episodes.

Suffice it to say, there was a lot of bad blood building up between the states.

Although interstate relations were not in a good place, failure to reach some kind of a compromise seemed equally unthinkable.

Everybody understood that if they walked away and nothing had been done, it would be nearly impossible to convene another convention.

The political energy required for a second constitutional convention simply did not exist.

A failure could very well have meant the dissolution of the Union into a number of smaller, regionally based confederations, something that everybody was eager to avoid.

On May 25, after a few tense weeks of waiting, enough delegates were present for a quorum to be established.

There were still a handful of states missing.

New Hampshire was held up as the state legislature debated whether or not to grant travel expenses.

Maryland, likewise, was trying to get people to the convention as quickly as possible after the original slate of delegates had declined to attend, leaving the state to desperately look for replacements.

Rhode island being Rhode island, had outright decided to boycott the convention and had zero plans to send a delegation at all.

Although not ideal to begin the proceedings without everybody in attendance, a quorum could be reached with seven states, 10 were present, and it was time to get moving.

The first day of the convention was mostly made up of everybody setting up the procedures and rules for what was going to be coming in the next few weeks.

The convention was to be held in Independence hall, so named for the Declaration of Independence, which had been signed in that same hall a little more than A decade before.

Among the immediate decisions that were made was that it would be beneficial to keep the proceedings secret.

The need for secrecy was largely twofold.

First, as is most often the stated reason, secrecy would allow the delegates to speak freely, which would ideally promote open discussions of the issues.

There is something to say for the truth of this.

By keeping everything secret, the delegates would not be under the intense scrutiny for the topics that they were bringing up.

However, a second, often less discussed reason also did exist.

The confederation, as I think we have well established, was dead in the water by this point.

As it turns out, though, being dead in the water did not necessarily mean that it was unpopular.

Although this may sound counterintuitive.

After all, how can a government that essentially had ceased to operate remain popular?

Well, let's consider that question.

If men like Madison, Hamilton, or really much of the nationalist contingent got their way, significant power would be moved from the states towards the central government.

If an individual's most direct representation came at the local level, specifically in the states, that meant that any such move to abandon the Articles of Confederation Would necessitate a transfer of power away from the individual.

There had been frustration in some states over the unwillingness of the states to consider the individual grievances of the population.

Massachusetts is a prime example of this.

During Shay's rebellion, however, Massachusetts aside, recall that many states did give in to the demands of its citizens and participated in issuing paper money or requiring that worthless Confederation money be accepted as legal tender.

This ended up providing wide ranging debt relief in many of the states.

This is to say nothing of the fact that for many Americans, they were deeply attached to the republic.

Had they literally not just thrown off an overreaching monarchy in parliament?

And now you want a more centralized government?

No, thank you.

If the public was aware that the Articles of confederation, ineffective as they may be, were now in mortal danger, there was a real concern that the public uproar would threaten to upend the convention.

The other major decision made during that first day of the convention Was perhaps the easiest of the entire convention.

As it turns out, when George Washington shows up at your convention, you go ahead and elect him the presiding officer.

This was never really much of a debate either, Considering that not a single person was crazy enough to object to the general's appointment.

It was Robert Morris who would nominate Washington to be the presiding officer.

John Rutledge would then second the vote.

And then pretty much everybody just got on board.

The first several days of the convention were mostly busy work before the real heavy lifting of the convention could begin.

Ground rules had to be established.

There were rules regarding when delegates could speak, for how long and how often on a single topic.

Further rules of civility were put into place to ensure that the debates remained open and free from interruption.

For those members who decided to violate these sacred rules of civil debate, there was a variety of punishments that Washington could hand down in order to ensure that everybody remained in line with the preliminary setting of the rules taken care of, the most pressing issue quickly became deciding exactly what they were actually doing there.

Knowing what we know.

Having seen the resistance from so many states ahead of the convention to wide scale reform, it would follow that the decision to completely scrap the Articles of Confederation in exchange for an entirely new system of government would be a hotly contested issue.

In fact, the decision to scrap the old system of government for something entirely new was largely a revolutionary move.

The United States had a government, and now here was this convention filled with members that wanted to discard the old system in place of something different.

Therefore, on its face, it comes as something of a surprise that there was minimal pushback towards the complete abandonment of the Confederation.

To get a better idea of why this was, I want to focus on the first few days of the convention and examine just how the events played out following the first several days where housekeeping measures were taken care of.

This was that process of coming up with the rules and selecting Washington as the President of the convention.

By May 29, everything was in place and the delegates were ready to get down to the stated business of the convention.

One of the things that Madison seemed to intrinsically understand was the importance of being the first to make his case.

Madison believed, correctly, that the first proposal made would become the skeleton from which all debates and arguments would swirl around.

Sure, there were going to be modifications and fights to be had, but if he could establish from the very beginning that his position was the jumping off point, well, that would make his ultimate task that much easier.

It was on the 29th that Edmund Randolph stood and laid out the very well known deficiencies that existed within the Articles of confederation before proposing 15 resolutions that sought to modify that system into a more cohesive government.

This plan, Madison's plan, would become known as the Virginia Plan.

Now, interestingly, Here on the 29th, the call was for revision rather than a complete replacement of the system that would have to wait until the next day.

The next morning, Randolph would again rise and suggest that the expansion being proposed to the Articles of Confederation would not be enough.

There could be no treaty between individual sovereigns that would build a national Government sufficiently powerful.

He then moved that rather than moving forward on his suggestions from just the previous day, the chorus forward demanded that the delegates form an entirely new government which was to be made up of a supreme legislative, executive and judicial branch.

Randolph suggested that they postpone the vote on his recommendations in order to consider this new path.

In short order, the states voted unanimously to postpone the vote.

Now I'm going to pause for just a moment here to talk about something that I suspect you might all be wondering.

Heading into the convention, Madison had a clear idea of what he wanted to do and at no time did that include the survival of the Articles of Confederation.

Likewise, why wasn't Randolph doing the talking instead of James Madison?

As to the first part of this question, as we are going to see shortly, these maneuvers during the early days of the convention were largely top notch political theater.

We will see in a moment that the coming assault on the Confederation was a very well planned thing.

To the second question of why are we hearing from Randolph instead of Madison?

The answer was that Randolph simply had more political clout than did Madison.

As he stood at the convention, he was the sitting governor of the state of Virginia, the largest state in the Union.

He was a logical choice to deliver the message, even if he was not the one who came up with it.

The other thing to keep in mind is that just because between the 29th and the 30th, the scope of what they were doing grew substantially, that did not invalidate Madison's Virginia plan.

Although the convention quickly shifted from the expansion of the Confederation to its replacement, Madison's plan was still very much intended to provide the skeleton of the new system.

With the Virginia plan providing the framework of a new system, it was clear to everybody that significant changes were coming.

As George Mason would explain, the government now being discussed would change how the national government related to the citizens of the United States.

Under the pre existing federal government, as Mason described it, the central government could only act on the states, not on the individual citizens.

Under the new national government being proposed, that relationship would change profoundly.

The new government would be able to directly interact with the nation's citizens without interference from the previously sovereign states.

Now, throughout the day on the 30th, there were debates over Randolph's proposal for an entirely new government.

General Charles Codeworth Pinckney asked the obvious question of whether this was even something that they could legally consider.

Pointing out the obvious fact of hey, we already have a government and now we are actively engaging in discussions about overthrowing that otherwise legitimate government.

Gouverneur Morris chimed in here and retorted that there was really not any other option, that the Articles of Confederation were deficient in every way.

But specifically, whereas in the current system compliance was based upon the good faith of the parties, under a new national government, such compliance would become compulsory.

Roger Sherman would likewise find himself questioning the authority of the convention for what was unquestionably a radical move.

Sherman feared that the convention simply lacked the power and authority to make such an extreme move.

Neither the question by Sherman nor earlier by Pinckney were unreasonable questions either.

If you will recall, the only authority that Congress had actually granted the convention was to make recommendations for reform.

Really, though, at the time that Sherman stood to encourage moderation, it was already too late.

Sherman went on to argue the practicality of attempting such a sweeping change, saying that there was no chance that the states would be willing to go for it.

Sherman argued that if the states shoot down this plan to abolish the former government, then there was little hope for reform.

Reform that he agreed, was necessary.

There was a final attempt by George Reid to stop the now swelling tide.

Reid made a motion to postpone a vote on Randolph's recommendation.

This vote, although close, failed.

Next came the vote on Randolph's recommendation for the establishment of a more robust government made up of an executive, legislative and judicial branch.

Of the states present only Connecticut voted against the proposal.

Within the convention, at least, any thought of modifying or amending the Articles of Confederation was now officially dead in the water.

They were going to be discussing the framework for an entirely new government.

This brings up an interesting issue.

We know how much pushback there had been to the convention in the first place.

So why were the Articles of Confederation so nonchalantly cast aside?

We know that there were fierce Republicans who were dedicated to the cause of protecting the existing government.

This is also a good moment for a quick aside that when I use the term Republicans here, I'm talking about the small R Republicans.

The political party big R Republicans are still 60 or so years away from existing in any meaningful form.

Back to our question.

If we know that there were those out there fighting for the Articles, well, where exactly were they?

As it turns out, they were not at the convention.

Patrick Henry had decided not to participate at the convention, instead deciding that he wanted to wage war against the recommendations from the outside.

Nor were any of the Rhode island delegates there.

A state which opposed the convention so strongly that they declined to attend.

Samuel Adams was not there.

Those decisions to boycott the convention meant that many of those who would fight to save the confederation had Absolutely no voice in the room.

As historian Carol Birkin points out, there was the New York delegation, who, aside from Alexander Hamilton, were staunch opponents of radically reforming the government.

However, neither of these two men carried any significant amount of political sway or respect.

This means that when the crucial decision came up for a vote on the 30th, nobody in the room really represented that faction of the opposition to the nationalists.

As a result, the Articles of Confederation went out with little more than a whimper.

Okay, great.

Everybody was mostly on board with ditching the Articles of Confederation.

That was a pretty monumentous decision.

And now that it was behind them, from here on out, it is sure to be easy sailing.

Yeah, just kidding.

Although the convention had made the decision to go in a completely different direction than the Articles of Confederation, in many ways, that would prove to be the easy part.

The vast majority of those at the convention understood the dire need for significant reform to the government.

Significant enough reform that an entirely new government was required.

As we just discussed, those who stood most opposed to such reforms boycotted the convention and therefore had no voice in the debates.

This would not be the case moving forward, though.

Madison's Virginia plan did a fantastic job of giving the delegates a skeletal framework that they could get behind.

However, that is really all it gave them.

The plan was barebones and gave virtually no details beyond those structures.

It was going to be up to the delegates to flesh out all of the details.

It is also right around here where Madison comes off looking awfully short sighted in terms of what people would be willing to accept.

As we will see, the question over representation was going to prove to be the most contentious of the entire convention.

Recall that Madison had believed that the smaller states would really have no say in the matter and would simply be bent to the will of the larger states.

Unsurprisingly, the smaller states had zero interest in voluntarily watching their power erode away to the benefit of their larger neighbors.

In the case of Delaware specifically, they had anticipated that there would be a push at the convention for proportional representation.

Delaware's leadership was not terribly keen on this, considering that it would significantly reduce their own authority.

Unlike Madison's predictions, though, that the smaller states would just get on board because, well, reasons.

Delaware had other ideas.

Their delegates had been instructed that any threat to the current one state, one vote policy was going to be a non starter.

Although Madison had believed that ultimately the smaller states would cave into pressure from their larger neighbors, he never specifically stated exactly how that was going to happen or what incentive they had to sacrifice such a substantial amount of their own authority.

Part of the problem is that James Madison had zero interest in keeping with the one state, one vote rule.

His plan called for a bicameral legislature.

The lower house would be popularly elected, keeping with those republican values that were so core to all the delegates, while the upper house would be selected by the state legislatures from delegates elected to the lower house.

Critically, both houses would feature proportional representation.

Now, more than just concerns about seeing the states having their power largely stripped away, there was the secondary issue that came with exactly what proportional representation meant.

What was it proportional to?

Although questions of suffrage would continue for the better part of the next century and a half, and arguably longer, it was always agreed that all free citizens counted towards a state's population.

Probably unsurprisingly, the southern states were all for counting the enslaved as part of the population.

We are going to spend some significant time in an upcoming episode looking more closely at this question and examining how attitudes towards slavery and shifted over the decades since the Revolution, a shift that would largely be defined by regional associations.

Concerns likewise remained when it came to questions over the position of that chief executive.

If you will recall, the Americans had just a decade before fought a war to rid themselves of a chief executive in George iii.

Surely there would be concerns when it came to giving a single individual such significant amounts of power.

Some, specifically John Dickinson, would have actually supported a limited monarchy, essentially copying the British system.

However, and probably not a surprise to anybody here listening, such a plan was politically dead in the water before it was ever proposed.

In any event, Madison always envisioned that the position of the chief executive would be largely tempered.

He was not interested in creating a position for an enlightened monarch with absolute rule.

Today, I would venture that most people living in the United States view the president as being the central point in the government.

Sure, we all learn as children that the system is balanced out.

Three equal branches operating like the three legs of a stool.

However, in practice, I would wager to bet that the executive branch is seen as being more equal than the other two branches.

James Madison himself never really envisioned that the branches would be equal.

He believed that it was the legislature that would be the cornerstone of the entire government, and that it, rather than the executive, would be the true source of power in the country.

After the first few days of seeing everybody more or less work in concert with one another, that harmony would be broken.

On June 1st.

Although everybody was in agreement that the confederation had to go, and that the Virginia plan would provide the broad outline for what would replace it.

The specifics of just how all this would work would consume the delegates in the weeks to come.

As we are going to see in the coming episodes, the decisions to toss the Articles of Confederation into the garbage heap of history would prove to be the easy part.

With that decision now out of the way, the states would find themselves fighting to determine not only what a new national government would look like, but what they themselves would look like under a revised union.

Even if everybody understood that a sacrifice of sovereignty was going to be necessary for any meaningful reform to take place, that does not mean that the smaller states were eagerly wanting to sacrifice their own power to the advantage of their larger neighbors.

The battles that are going to ensue will provide the backdrop for so much of the trajectory of the country moving forward, as some of the compromises reached will have very wide ranging effects.

We are going to wrap it up a little bit early today, however, when we come back, we are going to begin examining just how these stumbling blocks were to be resolved.

Next time, we will return to Philadelphia and begin our examination over those issues that threatened the cohesiveness of the Convention and the compromises that would be reached to help form the Constitution.

Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you back here next time as the delegates begin to hammer out a new government.