CON - Key Features of the Constitution (Lesson)

The Articles of Confederation was designed around a weak central government. Having fought the American Revolution, the colonists created a wartime government that did not have power stemming from a central authority or ruler. Thus, the Articles of Confederation focused on the rights of individual states. However, that over-reliance on states’ rights created issues for which government leaders found themselves meeting to strengthen at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Mending the Articles of Confederation was the intended goal of the Constitutional Convention; however, the delegates wound up creating an entirely new document—a decision that was ironically “unconstitutional” since the Articles of Confederation required the unanimous support of states and in fact not all of the states were represented at the first meeting.

The delegates were influenced by political thinkers of the era. Charles de Montesquieu’s thoughts on separation of powers had a big influence on the Constitution’s limited government. Powers were divided between the national government and state governments. The Constitution called for three branches of government: the legislative branch to make laws, the judicial branch to interpret laws, and the executive branch to enforce laws. Limited government divided the powers amongst the three branches and provided for a system of “checks and balances,” so that one branch did not have more power than another branch. This limited government approach was indicative of people’s fears of a strong central government.

The Articles of Confederation had one branch of government: a congress with representation based on one vote per state without regard to the population of each state. Delegates at the Constitutional Convention debated how the new government would be represented in the legislative branch. James Madison proposed the Virginia Plan which called for a bicameral (two-house) legislative branch with representation based on a state’s population. This formula benefited large states since their population resulted in an increase in power in the legislative branch—the more people in a state=more representatives or votes in Congress. In opposition, smaller states wanted a one house congress with equal votes per state. This equal representation benefited the small states since the large states’ power in Congress would be limited. The smaller states plan was recognized as the New Jersey Plan.

The issue of representation in the legislative branch was settled with the Great Compromise, also known as the Connecticut Compromise, as it was presented by Roger Sherman of Connecticut. In this decision, a bicameral (two-house) legislative branch would exist. Each state would have an equal number of representatives in the Senate while representation in the House of Representatives would be based on population. Any piece of legislation would have to pass with a majority in both houses before becoming law.

Slavery was an issue debated during the establishment of the Articles of Confederation in the 1770s and once again faced scrutiny as the Constitution was being drafted. Southern states had an economy based on the plantation system and Southern planters needed slave labor. The plantation system required large amounts of labor to function at the level to maintain the Southern economy even though large plantations only represented about 10% of the total number of farms in the South. As such, many states in the South had large populations of slaves. The the Great Compromise allowed states with larger populations to have more representatives in the House of Representatives.

The Southern states favored this decision because it was an opportunity to increase their legislative power in Congress (and in presidential elections since a state’s number of representatives in the House is also the state’s number of electoral votes in presidential elections.) Northern states argued that a state’s slave population should be counted towards taxes if they were going to be counted toward a state’s number of representatives . The two arguments were resolved with the Three-Fifths Compromise. This compromise provided that three-fifths of a state’s slave population would be counted towards representation and towards taxation.

Furthermore, the Three-Fifths Compromise allowed for slave trade to continue for twenty years and provided for fugitive slave laws to return runaway slaves in the North to their owners in the South. (January 1, 1808, was the first date that Congress could decide to ban the trans-Atlantic slave trade under the Constitution.)