forging a new government creating a new constitution would not be easy for the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787. the 55 delegates that crammed into the tiny room and the hot sweaty months uh were forced to bind middle ground with one another they were forced to compromise and that meant that the Constitution that the United States has today is largely the result of compromises among Northerners and Southerners among uh uh idealist and uh realist it was a compromise among a great variety of talent and mindsets and attitudes from the various states that the delegates represented and so the work done here in Philadelphia needs to be focused then on these compromise efforts now there were dozens upon dozens upon dozens of compromises that went on at the Philadelphia Convention we're only going to talk about a cup a few of them uh because one is very important of course understanding how the Constitution came into existence but a couple of others helped establish themes throughout the remainder of this course uh and we'll come into play later on uh so we're going to pick up in our timeline here by talking about the Virginia plan of government then the Great Compromise something called the three fist compromise and then something known as the slave trade compromise but let's start by just kind of reviewing about the framers of this Constitution and who these people were as I previously mentioned the the framers of the Constitution uh were a group of very talented individuals and and and some of them were obviously more important than others we previously talked about how George Washington uh was very important to this convention in terms of being the president he was unanimously elected as the presiding officer of the convention uh now he participated very little in debates because he didn't want people to take his opinions too seriously he was very very aloof he's very stoic uh enri Kata also about Benjamin Franklin who was the eldest of the delegates now he was in such poor health here that he actually had to be carried to the meetings in a special chair which I find kind of funny uh and we talked a little bit about somebody named Roger Sherman who's going to come into play and uh in just a little bit in this lecture uh but of course the most active of all the delegates at the convention was James Madison from Virginia uh he was by far the ableist political theorist of the entire group and at 36 years old he was an attorney that owned a huge tobacco Plantation in Virginia called montpierre which wasn't actually too far from Thomas Jefferson's Plantation of Monticello Monticello now Madison arrived in Philadelphia with a whole bunch of boxes and Trunks of books about government and philosophy but he also arrived in Philadelphia with a head full of ideas he stood barely five feet tall and he weighed only 130 pounds a colleague once claimed that he was no bigger than a half piece of soap and Madison was frail and he was sickly uh and two frail and sickly to serve during the Revolutionary War uh Madison quote speaks low his person is a little an ordinary and he was quote too timid in his politics remarked the gentleman by the name of Fisher Ames of Massachusetts but however shy and however soft-spoken Madison was he had a sharp and Agile Mind uh a huge appetite also for Learning and a commitment to Public Service which was uh ideal for his uh uh position at this convention now he served as I mentioned the Continental Congress uh as the secretary of the convention so he took extensive notes uh and it was during this convention he became what we would call just a full-throated full-blooded nationalist uh when the convention began James Madison had already drafted the framework uh that would frame the discussions of the Continental Congress or of the constitutional convention uh he wanted the convention to focus Less on amending the Articles of Confederation any one of the convention to focus on his radical suggestions for a brand new government a new Constitution and the framework that he produced is referred to as the Virginia plan of government now we could go into great detail about all of the aspects of the Virginia Planet government and I'm going to mention some of them in just a little bit but for the most part the Virginia plan of government was going to be the basic framework or the basic blueprint for the United States Constitution that the United States has today so what was in it well when when we kind of start to dissect what was in the Virginia plan of government it becomes very apparent that Madison's proposal here his plan of government is designed to fix a lot of the problems associated with the Articles of Confederation so let me briefly just kind of describe this Virginia plan of government how Madison envisioned the government being created and it working unlike the Articles of Confederation Madison's Virginia plan of government was going to create three branches of a federal government now this meant we would have a legislative branch like we had with the Confederation Congress however this legislative branch uh the members of the Regis the legislative branch would be the states would be given representation in the legislative branch based upon a state's population um this meant that the more populated states would have more influence and more control over the legislative branch which is exactly what Madison believed the country needed because under the Articles Confederation uh representation was based upon equality he was also proposing the creation of a Judiciary Branch or a judicial branch which would interpret laws that the legislative branch would would craft and make and then he also was proposing the creation of an executive branch whose primary function would be to enforce the laws that the legislative branch worked so he was proposing then this new form of government right which was not a single Branch like the Articles of Confederation but instead a three branch system of government uh and all of these branches would be armed with specific Powers uh and even checks over the other two branches which leads me to kind of the Crown Jewel of the Virginia plan of government was that Madison wanted to prevent one of these branches from becoming too powerful so he worked into the Virginia Plan a government something known as checks and balances it's also known as the separation of powers and and what the checks and balances of the Constitution are and what the separation of powers is it takes the power of a national government and uh separates it among the three branches uh in ways that the branches then can check the power and influence of the other so that not one branch becomes too powerful so for the for the most part then the Virginia plan of government was the basic framework of the United States Constitution today there were some notable differences there were some things that needed to be hashed out of course among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention but we don't have we're not going to go into great detail about every single one of those disagreements and and compromises that produce the Constitution but it is important I think to recognize that the Virginia plan of government uh was going to be the basic blueprint for the United States Constitution that the United States has today now within this Virginia plan of government there was a lot of disagreements obviously which I just mentioned but there was one big disagreement uh that had the effect of threatening to uh dissolve the entire convention uh and and no and no Constitution no no new government created and the one issue uh or the big issue involved with the Virginia plan of government concerned the legislative branch uh according to Madison's Virginia plan of government he envisioned the creation of a legislative branch in which the states would be represented based upon their population uh and what that meant then is that this is called proportional representation meaning the the states would have a certain number of votes in this legislative branch proportional to their representation as a whole in terms of the country so this meant then that if a state had more population than another state than the more populated state would have more representatives in the legislative branch and therefore more votes more power more influence and Madison believed that this was the proper remedy for some of the problems associated with the Articles of Confederation he believed that this would result then in a government that was more reflective of the will of the American people rather than the will of the individual people of the states and this is what I was talking about earlier when when I talked about Madison being a real nationalist right Madison was proposing a plan in which he wanted people to stop seeing themselves as Virginians or or New Yorkers and start seeing them themselves as Americans right so he's proposing a plan of government that's going to result in a legislative branch being kind of more uh responsive to the will of the American people right rather than based upon equality and and allowing a small population of the country to stifle the interest of a larger portion of the American population so this is a direct rebuttal right of the Articles of Confederation where the states were represented equally now this map kind of shows you then the population density at the time of the Constitutional Convention and as you can see the the more populated states were States like uh New York uh Pennsylvania um uh uh uh Virginia um Massachusetts right and under then Madison's plan of government it would be the more populated states that would have a very much larger control over the Affairs of the federal government and therefore the Affairs of the nation and then again that's what Madison believed was the proper remedy needed here um now this influence would go even further because according to Madison's plan you know the states were going to choose the president so that meant that the more populated states would have a bigger say in who would be president right and if the more populated states had more Representatives than the more populated states have bigger say in influence over the types of laws that will be passed right uh and they'll have a bigger say than of over the president that will enforce those laws and and also according to the Virginia Plan we're going to have the president having the power to appoint justices through the Supreme Court which means that uh the more populated states will have kind of a more important you know more influence over that decision as well uh and to someone like Madison uh who of course was from Virginia a more populated state this just made more sense to him right this was this was what was needed right this is what the country required to kind of bring the country together now the reason I'm harping so much on this part of the Virginia Plan is that this created the big disagreement at the Constitutional Convention because the Lesser populated states right States like New Jersey States like New Hampshire States like the Carolinas States like Georgia uh these were states that under this plan of government by Madison's were now going to have diminished influence in the national government uh their their voting power would not equal that of the more populated states like it did under the Articles of Confederation so in the end what happened here is well there was disagreements over some of the finer points of Madison's plan there was a large disagreement over this part of Madison's plan uh uh discussing representation in the legislative branch the more populated states favored the Virginia Plan the Lesser populated states favored an alternative plan in which the legislative branch would once again be based upon equality uh and so we had a political deadlock here at the convention and it was a big one in fact it was so big that if you couldn't overcome uh this disagreement between the Lesser populated states and the more populated states there was really no point in continuing on with any other uh figuring out any of the other disagreements you had to overcome this one otherwise the whole thing wasn't going to work um and the disagreements here between the Lesser populated states and and more populated got pretty nasty it got pretty heated uh and the Lesser populated states you know they threatened to walk out of this convention and so there was a moment here at this convention where it was all about to fall apart um but it didn't uh and it didn't because well we ended up getting a compromise and this compromise is referred to as the Connecticut Compromise but it was such a big compromise that it is more commonly referred to as the Great Compromise the architect of the Connecticut Compromise or the Great Compromise is of course Roger Sherman who we mentioned in a previous lecture a delegate from Connecticut Roger Sherman was the architect of what became known as the Great Compromise that had the effect of saving this convention uh and allowing the convention to continue forward now what he's what he does here is he sits down with delegates from the Lesser populated states such as his own and delegates from the more populated states and he brokered an agreement between them a compromise now a compromise means that neither side of a disagreement wins everything but they don't lose everything either so what Roger Sherman ended up doing here to overcome this disagreement is he got in place agreements among the delegates to create a legislative branch that would have two houses to it a lower house and an upper house and in the lower House of the legislative branch which would be called the House of Representatives the states would be proportionally represented meaning the states would be represented based upon their population now that meant then in the House of Representatives the more populated states were going to have a greater influence of control over not only the that part of the legislative branch but of that part of the government but the compromise also was going to create an upper House of the U.S Congress which was going to be called the U.S Senate and in the U.S Senate every state would be represented equally by uh two members from each of those States and of course the Senate has powers over the House of Representatives in the House of Representatives has powers over the Senate but the idea here was that we needed to placate the Lesser populated states who were worried about being dominated politically by the upper or by the more populated states and so the compromise was that in the Senate lesser populated states would have the same voting power and same influence as the more populated states but in the House of Representatives in the House of Representatives the more populated states were going to have a bigger say in that part of the legislative branch and so this was the Great Compromise which was adopted in the middle of July of 1787. now the reason this compromise is so important is for many many reasons it had a great effect on the development of the country and also a great effect on the convention itself so let's talk for a second about the effect it had on the convention the effect it had on the conventions that it saved it it prevented the convention from falling apart and the work stopping and and and nothing being done about the problems facing the country so one reason the compromise is worth remembering and the effect it has is that it saved the convention another effect it had on the convention was that once the delegates were able to get this agreement in place it kind of opened the floodgates on more and more agreements and compromises because once both sides had overcome this problem you really had a good level of trust among the delegates here uh and a willingness then to compromise on other issues and so another reason the compromise uh is important is that kind of opened the floodgates on more and more measures of compromise but the the effect that the Great Compromise had on the long-term development of the United States is that it established a political tradition in this country and the political Traditions established by the Great Compromise is that whenever this country has faced political Deadlocks whenever the country has become deadlocked over political issues political is the key word here this country ever since the Great Compromise has had an uncanny ability to find compromise on these political issues that avert danger and keep the country moving forward and over the course of this course you're going to learn about a great many of these compromises like the Missouri Compromise the compromise Tariff of 1833 the Compromise of 1850 the compromise of 1877 compromising is a political tradition in this country that goes all the way back to the Great Compromise of 1787. okay a couple more compromises I want to talk about here because they have an impact on things coming later in the course the first one is uh the most famous or inFAMOUS of the compromises here at the convention it's called The Three-Fifths Compromise so let's talk about this one first the Three-Fifths Compromise involves the issue of slavery but not the morality of slavery uh it involves the political ramifications of slavery so let me begin uh here's that map again showing you the population density of the United States well the you know we've solved the issue of the Lesser populated states becoming dominated by the more populated states but uh only in the U.S Senate some of the southern states where the population was very thin and I say white population very thin some of the southern states started looking at the new agreements here and this Virginia plan of government and they started recognizing that they are dramatically outnumbered by the more populated states of the north and they became fearful that the under this Virginia plan of government they were going to have a greatly diminished influence over the federal government and that concerned them uh that concerned them because of their economic interests uh concern them because of their political interests and they were just worried about being dominated by northern states uh that in the words of one Southern delegate we just didn't trust you um so the southern states started to make the case that they would like to count their slave population in addition to their white population whenever it came time to determine how many representatives a state would get in the House of Representatives now if you look at this map this shows you the enslaved population and according to the 1790 census now if the states allowing slavery uh which by this point are pretty much confined to the South are allowed to count their slaves for purposes of representation this is going to have the result of giving them a lot more voting power than in the U.S Congress and the fact that they're counting uh enslaved people that were not part of the political process not considered to be uh afforded the rights and privileges under the Constitution that's being debated here northern northern delegates uh obstructed this idea they said this is a ridiculous idea we're not going to go along with this because you know Southerners were claiming that their slaves were property well property doesn't vote property's not something you represent in a government you represent people in a government uh and if the southern states are claiming that their slaves are property they can't have it both ways and so there was a disagreement here among the northern states and the southern states about the idea of allowing a state's slave population to be counted ultimately we got a compromise here that allowed the southern slave holding states to count a a portion of their slave population uh and the ratio they were allowed to count was three-fifths of their total slave population this became known as The Three-Fifths Compromise it's sometimes known as The Three-Fifths Clause it's found within article one of the Constitution section two in which it says here that Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union according to their respective numbers which shall be determined by adding the whole number of free persons excluding those Bound for service right or terms of service meaning you're in in prison excluding Indians but including three-fifths of all other persons now when you exclude people who are bound to service for terms of years and you exclude uh uh I'm sorry including when you include people bound to service for a term of years you're referring to Slaves okay uh and this Clause then is saying that if a state allows slavery that a state can take three-fifths of its total slave population and add that to the whole number of free persons living in that state and that's the number then that we will proportion representatives from so here's a great graphic that kind of illustrates this for you uh now a lot of people like to say the three-fist compromise was the founders of the Constitution the framers uh saying that uh enslaved persons were three-fifths of a human being that that's not the case at all um what they were saying is that a state's total slave population they were allowed to count three for every five people so of the free persons living in a state you have five people that's five people counted if you have five enslaved people you can count three of them and add that to the five so this is going to have the result then of kind of boosting the political power right the voting power of some of these Southern States and I want to show you some graphs that illustrate to you what happened here over time uh this three-fist Clause was going to result in additional representation for southern slave holding states which was going to translate into voting power which was also going to translate into Electoral College power right which is the apparatus we use to choose the president in essence what's going to happen here is that southern states slave holding states are going to get additional representation that is disproportional to their free population because they're being allowed to count three-fifths of their slave population as I mentioned this is going to give them more voting power right in the in the Congress and it's also going to give them more power and say over who's going to be president of the United States let me show you a graph that illustrates that now the reason I'm telling you all this about the three-fist compromise is that the Three-Fifths Compromise is important for a couple of reasons it has some some very big effects on the development of the country number one I just showed you that three-fist Clause well that three-fifth Clause while it doesn't use the word slave or doesn't use the word slavery it's very clear by the language of that three-fist Clause that it's referring to slaves and that's important because it means then that the U.S Constitution that will be produced here acknowledges the existence of slavery in the United States that's going to have huge ramifications moving forward the other reason the Three-Fifths Compromise is important concerns these two graphs I just showed you here at the time delegates to the convention were willing to uh accept this compromise and put it in place to appease southern slave owning States in order to Garner their support for the Constitution as a whole but over time right as the years go by the northern states we're going to look back on this Three-Fifths Compromise as a colossal Mistake by the fire by the founders of the Republic by the framers of the Constitution and the reason these northern states are going to look back on it and say this was a colossal mistake is that it's giving these southern slave holding States uh disproportional representation based upon their free population uh it's what northern states will come to call the slave power and what that meant is that over time northern states believed that their interest which was the will of the majority will continuously be stifled and obstructed by the southern slave holding States who represented a lower free population of the country and that they were able to obstruct the efforts of the majority of the North through their additional voting power they also of course had a bigger say than they should have had and who would be president and so you're going to see most presidents during the Early Republic come from the south right um and and over time Northerners are just going to make the case that this was a big mistake it needs to be fixed somehow uh because it's it's it's not in line with what this country is supposed to be about in terms of the will of the majority should govern uh they will continuously say that the will of the majority which is in the north is continuously being obstructed uh by Southern slave holding States who are using this three-fist Clause gaining additional influence and control over the government to obstruct it uh and this will become then a major criticism of the northern states in the years and decades leading up to the American Civil War and as we go through the course you're going to start to recognize this three-fist compromise will continuously be a problem uh as the country goes through What's called the Annie bellamara the 1820s to the 1860s uh so that's the three-fist compromise uh there was one more compromise I think that's worth mentioning here it involves the slave trade and uh when I when I say the slave trade what I'm actually talking about here is something known as the Atlantic slave trade the Atlantic slave trade was the importation of slaves the importation of people from the continent of Africa who were taken against their will kidnapped and forced into the institution of slavery and sold uh in the new world either in the Caribbean or in the southern states um of the United States at the convention the slave trade had already been banned by uh uh 11 of the 13 states the only states that continuously allowed it to happen uh were Georgia and South Carolina who claimed they were very dependent on the continued importation of slaves now the problem with the Atlantic slave trade is that it was clear to everybody this is you know this is a very nefarious thing uh people are being kidnapped against their will separated from their families brought across the Atlantic um many of them died in this voyage across the Atlantic they were chained to the floors of ships uh and it was just uh it was it was just a humanitarian disaster and a lot and most of the delegates at the convention recognize that but they they formulated a and there was a willingness among most of the delegates to ban the Atlantic slave trade or the continued importation of slaves to the United States um but to appease Georgia and South Carolina uh a compromise was reached in which the importation of slaves would be allowed to continue in the United States for a period of 20 years after the ratification of the U.S Constitution uh and after that 20-year period it would then fall to the privy of the federal government to decide what to do with it if the federal government wanted to ban it universally in the country it could if the government wanted to continue to allow the states to determine uh this question for themselves it was that that was fine it was up to the federal government now this compromise is found again within Article 1 Section 9 Clause 1 in which it says the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states shall existing now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year 1808 by a tax or Duty May impose on such importation not exceeding to know okay this was the slave trade compromise and what it did is it allowed the individual states to determine for themselves for a period of 20 years whether or not they wanted to continue engaging in the Atlantic slave trade now as I mentioned 11 of the states weren't going to do this they had already banned it as a result of the American Revolution but this was going to allow Georgia and South Carolina to continue this until January 1st 1808. now on that date January 1st 1808 and act prohibiting the importation of slaves was passed by the U.S Congress at that time and signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson and so the Banning of the Atlantic slave trade here in the United States uh uh completed itself in 1808 but it began with a compromise here at the Constitutional Convention and so I I think it's important for students to understand this is how the Atlantic slave trade or the international slave trade came to an end here in the United States okay so those are some of the major compromises uh that help establish things later on in this course um we now need to look at how the Constitution went from the convention to being ratified by the states and becoming the law of the land