hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit one of the ap government curriculum and in this video it's time to talk about the ratification of the constitution so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked with a good deal of compromise well then let's get to it okay in this video here's what we're aiming to do explain the ongoing impact of political negotiation and compromise at the constitutional convention on the development of the constitutional system okay so here are two things the constitutional convention and the compromises necessary to create the constitution so let's look at each in turn okay first the constitutional convention in the last video we talked about america's first constitution namely the articles of confederation and how basically it was kind of a hot mess of a governing document and had more weaknesses than you could shake a stick at so to remedy these problems a constitutional convention also known as the philadelphia convention was called in 1787 and the stated purpose of this convention was to shore up the weaknesses of the articles of confederation but thanks to the work of folks like alexander hamilton the convention quickly became an effort in drafting a new constitution that would strengthen the federal government and eliminate the weaknesses of the articles if you've watched my other videos on this topic you know that there was a terrific debate over this new constitution not only in the ratification stage but also just to get the thing written and out for ratification okay now let's have a look at some of the main compromises that you need to know from the constitution and by the way the us constitution is one of your required documents for this course so i have a whole video on it you can check it out right here here we're only going to consider the compromises embedded in it the first compromise you need to know is the great compromise and the debate here was over how the people would be represented in the new congress remember the constitution would establish a republican-style government in which representatives of the people did the work of government so the main question was how do we decide how many representatives each state gets and there were two opposing solutions to this problem first was the virginia plan which argued that representatives ought to be apportioned by population so in that case bigger states would have more representatives and smaller states would have less and it's not hard to understand why virginia would want a plan like that since it was among the most populous states of the union now on the surface that sounds pretty fair right but think about it for a moment if the big states always had more representatives then the interests of the small states would never prevail like just because of their size the small states would never win under this system so the virginia plan favored large states okay now second was the new jersey plan which argued that representatives ought to be apportioned equally each state gets one vote so in this case small states have the advantage it's not hard to understand why if you have two groups and then the first group is 10 people and the second group is 10 000 people and each one has one vote clearly the group with 10 has way more power than the one with 10 000 and of course the big states like virginia would lose in the system so the great compromise took both of those plans and brought them together in a bicameral legislature which is to say a congress with two houses in the house of representatives the people's representatives will be apportioned by population so big states have more and small states have less in the senate representatives would be apportioned equally with each state no matter the size granted to senators now that debate had a lot of heat but so did the compromise over how the president was going to be elected in this debate there were again several options some groups argue that the president should be elected by the people others argue that the president should be elected by state legislatures then still others argue that congress should be responsible for this task and the compromise they ultimately agreed upon for presidential elections was the electoral college system in this system each state is given the same number of electors as they have representatives in congress and it is the electors who put the president into office now states can make their own decisions about who those electors are going to be but regardless the presidential election is in their hands and in no one else's now there are two more compromises you need to know and they both deal with slavery which as you can imagine was a topic that got a little uh tense the first compromise on slavery was known as the three-fifths compromise the debate was over how enslaved people would count for representation in the house of representatives northern delegates to the convention said that representation ought to be reckoned by the free population only and that makes sense right like if the whole institution of slavery was as southerners claimed built on the fact that enslaved people were property not people then northerners wondered why should you count them for purposes of representation to which the southern delegates said well son don't go pointing out contradictions in our world view that ain't polite anyway this argument got so heated the southern delegates threatened to leave the convention and if they did that there would be no constitution so the compromise they eventually came to was to count three-fifths of the enslaved population for purposes of representation and they would also count three-fifths of them for the purposes of taxation as well so if you want more representatives you're about to get more taxes too the other compromise on slavery was about the importation of slaves people some delegates wanted to officially abolish the slave trade in the constitution and those from the south you probably already know what they thought about that so a deal was struck that the slave trade wouldn't be touched for another 20 years after which it would be abolished which it was in 1808 so those are some of the main compromises you need to know but you also need to know that in the process of those debates some of which almost brought the convention to the breaking point the framers of the constitution became convinced that a method of amending the constitution was needed now remember how difficult it was to amend the articles of confederation it required unanimous agreement from all 13 states and even if 12 states agreed you know who's about to come in and mess this whole thing up right it's always your fault anyway the framers of the constitution recognized the impossibility of the amendments under the articles and so laid out in article 5 of the constitution a more attainable means of amending it so there are two stages to amending the constitution proposal and ratification so how is an amendment proposed well either congress can propose an amendment or special state conventions can and a two-thirds vote is required to pass the amendment on to the next stage once that happened the proposed amendment must be ratified or accepted by three quarters of the states and that can be done either by state legislatures or state ratifying conventions if three quarters of the states vote to approve it becomes an official amendment to the constitution and just for poops and giggles it might be helpful for you to know that the constitution has been amended 27 times although the first ten are the bill of rights and those were added all at once okay now despite all the fighting and compromise necessary to get the constitution in its final form they finally hammered it out and presented it to the states for ratification and it took until 1790 for all the states to ratify and you're never gonna guess who was the last state holding out to the last possible moment to say yes was it south carolina it wasn't south carolina no it was rhode island it was anyway the debate over the role of the central government the power of state governments and individual rights which essentially summarize the debate of the convention still goes on to this day and let me just mention two areas in which we still see this debate government surveillance and education and what the curriculum is trying to get you to see here is that these debates weren't just confined to a moment of time when the ratification of the constitution was at stake or the writing of the constitution was at stake these debates have followed us to this day so with respect to government surveillance let's talk about what happened in the wake of the terrorist attacks of september 11 2001. on that day terrorists representing the group known as al qaeda crashed passenger airliners into both towers of the world trade center in new york another into the pentagon and another crashed into the pennsylvania countryside now these men had been living in the united states learning to fly and coordinating their plans for upwards of 18 months and after the attacks were carried out it was shocking to discover that these men had lived among americans for so long like how could we have missed what they were up to so in order to make sure that didn't happen again congress passed the usa patriot act which aimed to find and stop future terrorist attacks and hey that's great well how are they going to do that well by tapping a butt load of phones and monitoring americans emails but eventually a public outcry started growing regarding the patriot act and its potential to violate fourth amendment rights to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures so there you have the old debate about central power versus individual rights now this debate also rages around the topic of education now historically education falls within the domain of state authority but in 2001 congress passed the no child left behind act which stipulated that in order to receive federal funding schools would have to meet certain criteria and as it turns out those benchmarks were very much out of reach for a lot of teachers in schools and when they didn't pass muster the federal government imposed sanctions on those states and here we have the same debate again as states were slapped with federal sanctions there was an outcry from the states that this law represented way too much federal overreach into the dominion of state power so at the end of the day the debates which created our nation are the same debates we're still having today okay that's what you need to know about unit 1 topic 5 of the ap government curriculum if you need help getting an a in your class and a five on your exam may then click right over here and grab a view pack if you want me to keep making these videos for you then the way you let me know that is by subscribing heimler out