page_title: Oliver Ellsworth
section_title: Constitutional Convention
hierarchical_section_title: Oliver Ellsworth / Constitutional Convention
caption_attribution_description: English: Oliver and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth by artist Ralph Earl
context_page_description: Oliver Ellsworth was an American lawyer, judge, politician, and diplomat. He was a framer of the United States Constitution, a United States Senator from Connecticut, and the third Chief Justice of the United States. Additionally, Ellsworth received 11 electoral votes in the 1796 presidential election.
  Born in Windsor, Connecticut, Ellsworth attended the College of New Jersey where he helped found the American Whig–Cliosophic Society. In 1777, he became the state attorney for Hartford County, Connecticut and was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress, serving during the American Revolutionary War. He served as a state judge during the 1780s and was selected as a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, which produced the United States Constitution. While at the convention, Ellsworth played a role in fashioning the Connecticut Compromise between the more populous states and the less populous states. He also served on the Committee of Detail, which prepared the first draft of the Constitution, but he left the convention before signing the document.
context_section_description: Ellsworth participated in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a delegate from Connecticut along with Roger Sherman and William Samuel Johnson. More than half of the 55 delegates were lawyers, eight of whom, including both Ellsworth and Sherman, had previous experience as judges conversant with legal discourse.
  Ellsworth took an active part in the proceedings beginning on June 20, when he proposed the use of "the United States" to identify the government under the authority of the Constitution. The words "United States" had already been used in the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation as well as Thomas Paine's The American Crisis. It was Ellsworth's proposal to retain the earlier wording to sustain the emphasis on a federation rather than a single national entity. Three weeks earlier, on May 30, 1787, Edmund Randolph of Virginia had moved to create a "national government" consisting of a supreme legislative, an executive, and a judiciary. Ellsworth accepted Randolph's notion of a threefold division but moved to strike the phrase "national government." Since then, the "United States" has been the official title used in the Convention to designate the government. The complete name, "the United States of America," had already been featured by Paine, and its inclusion in the Constitution was the work of Gouverneur Morris when he made the final editorial changes in the Constitution. 
  Ellsworth played a major role in the adoption of the Connecticut Compromise. The Convention was deadlocked over the question of representation in Congress, with the large states wanting proportional representation and the small states demanding equal representation for each state. During the debate, he joined his fellow Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman in proposing the bicameral Congress in which two members of the Senate would be elected by each state legislature, while membership in the House of Representatives would be apportioned among the states based on its share of the whole population of the states. The compromise was adopted by the Convention on July 16, 1787.
  On the contentious issue of whether slaves would be counted as part of the population in determining representation of the states in Congress or would instead be considered property and so not be counted, Ellsworth voted for the eventual Three-Fifths Compromise. Later, stressing that he had no slaves, Ellsworth spoke twice before the convention, on August 21 and 22, in favor of slavery being abolished. He also played an important role in keeping the concept of judicial review out of the Constitution.
  Along with James Wilson, John Rutledge, Edmund Randolph, and Nathaniel Gorham, Ellsworth served on the Committee of Detail, which prepared the first draft of the Constitution, based on resolutions that had already been passed by the Convention. The Convention deliberations were interrupted from July 26 to August 6, 1787 while the committee completed its task.
  Though Ellsworth left the Convention near the end of August and did not sign the final document, he wrote the Letters of a Landholder to promote its ratification. He also played a dominant role in Connecticut's 1788 ratification convention, when he emphasized that judicial review guaranteed federal sovereignty. It seems more than a coincidence that both he and Wilson served as members of the Committee of Detail without mentioning judicial review in the initial draft of the Constitution but then stressed its central importance at their ratifying conventions just a year preceding its inclusion by Ellsworth in the Judiciary Act of 1789.
caption: Oliver and Abigail Ellsworth by Ralph Earl
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