ernor of the Old Dominion, standing nearly six feet tall and possessed of a magnetic air of aristocracy and erudition, Virginia’s Edmund Randolph rose and, in the words of James Madison, “opened the main business.”
After spending the previous day hammering out the rules (“this was an age of formal manners,” observed Catherine Drinker Bowen), the delegates were ready to hit the ground running, revising — they thought — the Articles of Confederation.
Randolph and his Virginia colleagues had another idea, however. In consultations at the Indian Queen pub held prior to the opening of the “main business,” Randolph and his fellow Virginia delegates received from James Madison a draft of a plan of a federal government (the Virginia Plan) that scrapped the Articles altogether, replacing it with Madison’s vision.
Within the 15 resolutions of the Virginia Plan, a new national government was proposed. A government of three branches — legislative, executive, and judicial — was laid out. The legislative branch would be bicameral, with an upper and lower body.
Although Hollywood has portrayed the reaction of the representatives at the convention as one of shock, the reality as reported by Madison and Robert Yates of New York was much more sangfroid.
In his chronicle of the convention, Yates adds one detail that Madison omits. According to Yates, Edmund Randolph made no secret of his intent (and by extension, the intent of James Madison) to see the Articles of Confederation supplanted by a new, more robust, national government.
Yates quotes Randolph admitting that the resolves of the Virginia Plan “were not intended for a federal government — he meant a strong consolidated union, in which the idea of states would be nearly annihilated.”
Despite Yates’ flair for the dramatic, it is all but certain that Randolph neither made that comment nor did he or any of his fellow Virginians desire such a destruction of the states.
The aforementioned recipient of Washington’s wrath — Gouveneur Morris of Pennsylvania — wrote a letter evincing the prevailing preoccupation of repairing of the union without throwing the baby of state sovereignty out with the dirty bathwater of weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. Morris wrote that the dilemma facing the convention was “how to arrange a National system of Government of sufficient strength to operate in despite of State opposition, and yet not strong enough to break down State authority.”
Over the next three and half months, the 55 (or fewer, on any given day) men gathered at the State House in Philadelphia would confront that very issue over and over again.
There were among them those with more nationalist tendencies (Alexander Hamilton) and those who would have preferred a less dynamic union (George Mason). This difference would define the convention day in and day out as the various “resolves” of the Virginia Plan were debated.
It is impossible to know what final form the Constitution would have taken — if any — had the press and the public been given access or information. History is not typically kind to secrets, particularly the kind that create new governments.
Our own experiment with self-government and federalism continues and ironically, the government established by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 too often envelops itself in a similar shroud of secrecy, worn to mask its efforts to dismantle the very freedoms protected by the product of that historic convention.
Over the next few months, a series of articles in The New American will chronicle the clashes and compromises that seeded the soil from whence grew the very tree of a federal government that now bears such poisonous fruit.
Originally published at The New American and reposted here with permission from the author.
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