today's lesson is the Constitutional Convention and the ratification process and I want to start by talking about the conditions leading up to the convention and the writing of the Constitution and why some people thought it was necessary so first just an overview of either the Continental Congress period or the Confederation period this is the period for about 13 years from the Declaration of Independence until the ratification and implementation of the Constitution so on June 4th 1776 I think I mentioned this last time uh in the second continental congress there was a resolution to declare independence from Great Britain and then they appointed a committee Jefferson Franklin Adams uh Sherman and Livingston I think to write to the Declaration and then on June July the fourth Independence was formally declared and the Declaration was adopted now the Declaration was not a government though it was a declaration of independence but it was set up no structure to form the government so uh it ended up being the Articles of Confederation that provided that governance so the Articles of Confederation were approved by Congress on November the 15th 1777. and they were sent to the 13 states for ratification and they weren't ratified for four years they were finally ratified in 1781 and formally took effect during those four years that they were waiting for the ratification process to conclude they treated the Articles as their working government so they went ahead and used it uh in anticipation that eventually would be uh approved by everybody so a little bit of an overview the Articles created a loose Confederation of 13 states in a way you could think of it as being more like an alliance like a military Alliance than a Modern Nation like you think of the United States today because the states the individual 13 states retained a whole lot of power that they don't have now they could have their own tax policies they could print their own money they could make their own trade policies in the government the national government created by the Articles um it was much different than the federal government we have today and much much weaker there was only one branch of government that was a legislature there was no executive branch there was no judicial branch so there were no federal courts no National courts no National No president or anything like a president there was just Congress that was the Federal Government um and that Congress function quite differently um there was only one vote in Congress per state so there were 13 states there were 13 votes at the most on every issue big States like Virginia which was Virginia Massachusetts were the two biggest at the time they had no more power than tiny States like Rhode Island or Delaware or Maryland there were all equal in power because it was assumed they were all sovereign states Nations basically and they were equally represented in this Alliance um one really big deal is that there was no National Power and attacks the Congress created by the Confederation could not force any state or individual to pay a tax it could requisition money meaning ask for money from the states it could send requests and the states frequently ignored ignored those requests even during the war even while they were trying to defeat uh Great Britain if you remember I mentioned Valley Forge last time and how Washington troops were starving they didn't have proper clothing for the winter uh they were vulnerable to disease and all of that happened because there wasn't enough money to properly feed and clothe them not because there wasn't enough food available in Pennsylvania there was plenty but there wasn't enough money available to buy the food and the clothing and the shelter they needed that's because Congress couldn't tax they couldn't do anything to raise money all it could do was borrow or print money and it printed money a lot it printed so much money that the money became worthless by the end of the war so like I said Congress or the Congress of the Confederation was the sole organ of the national government uh no president no judicial no courts so there was no executive branch to enforce the laws there was no executive there were no National courts to interpret the laws um whenever Congress decided to do something it was basically up to each individual state to decide whether or not to go along with it and many times they didn't in fact because they were left to handle their own tax and tariff policies states often had disputes with each other disputes that would be impossible today so for example if today Texas could have its own tariffs on imports from Oklahoma and Louisiana and vice versa our Commerce would be chaotic and that was kind of the situation then uh Congress could mediate and judge between disputes between the states but I had no power to force anybody to accept his decisions so Congress was just kind of impotent kind of powerless generally speaking there's one great legislative accomplishment of the Continental Congress this despite its weaknesses despite its limitations uh the Continental Congress did one thing really well and that was passed a Northwest Ordinance required to remember unanimous consent all of them had to agree to do this and the Northwest Ordinance set aside set up a plan for how to deal with new territory and this plan was basically the plan for the United States throughout the period of of growth Westward so first of all you have to understand what they didn't do they didn't decide that the 13 colonies would just extend Westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean there was some thought that that might happen but then you would have potential disputes between colonies claiming lands like Virginia and Pennsylvania might claim the same lands and that could even theoretically lead to war so they agreed that the 13 original colonies or original states would basically keep the size they already had and that new territories would gradually become states of their own equal in importance to the pre-existing States and the basic rules that the Northwest Ordinance created was win a territory had 60 000 people it could write a constitution for itself and apply for statehood so here you had all this territory that had been acquired from Great Britain at the end of the Revolutionary War and people were already starting to settle there and when Ohio for example had 60 000 people in it and could apply for statement and write its own constitutional there were a few limitations very few on what these constitutions could and could not do they had to set up a republican form of government so if Ohio said we'd like to be a monarchy uh the Northwest Ordinance said sorry that you can't have that um it had to be a republican form of government had to guarantee trial by jury and freedom of religion and due process of law those basic guarantees that are in our Bill of Rights and that we're in the Bill of would be in the Bill of Rights once the Constitution was adopted those had to be guaranteed by every state constitution and then last slavery must be prohibited so you can see there there was some interest in the Continental Congress a lot of interest and not letting slavery spread if possible to these new territories so I've kind of mentioned this idea there was a weak central government created by the Continental Congress right mostly because of this lack of power to raise money to support an Army Navy Etc one of the effects of this wheat government was that it could not back its policies with any military strength it couldn't enforce its foreign policies and one example of that is in the Northwest Territories the British had promised to take all their soldiers out of the Northwest Northwest Territory at the end of the revolution in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 they gave all of this territory to the United States they acknowledged that it belonged to the United States and they promised to uh to uh to leave basically to take all their soldiers out and Retreat up into what's now Canada today well they broke this promise there were British soldiers in the Northwest Territories even in the 1780s even after the war had ended even after they signed a treaty promising to leave and there was nothing the Continental Congress could do about it since they had no money for an army it could protest they could demand that they leave it could ask that they leave but couldn't force them to leave and the British stayed and actually traded with Indians gave them weapons and encouraged them to use those weapons against American settlers so the British kind of quietly kept going a guerrilla war in the 1780s 1790s all the way up until the war of 1812. in the South the Spanish kind of did the same thing I don't have a picture of Florida here but Florida was Spanish territory and they gave weapons to Indians and encouraged them to attack American settlers in that part of the country even worse in the South the Spanish refused to let American farmers use the port of New Orleans and that was crucial to their trade with the outside world especially those of them who settled on the western side of the app well it would by definition be those of them who settled on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains needed the Mississippi River in the port of New Orleans to communicate with the outside world to trade the outside world I've mentioned money um this is a Connecticut a continental uh dollar bill and the phrase became common you may have heard it yourself not worth a continental something that was truly and utterly worthless was not worth a continental because so many of them were printed that their value declined uh considerably now at one point in the 1780s there was an idea that might have saved the Articles of Confederation and might have saved the central government um someone proposed an amendment to the articles to allow to the Congress to create taxes in order to pay off its debt every state except Rhode Island agreed to the amendment but because it was required that you have unanimous agreement the amendment idea failed and this showed everybody a couple of things one most people realize that the lack of an ability to tax was fatal to the Continental Congress to the Articles of Confederation but if only one state held out and refused to change the system they couldn't change anything and so that was a big big weakness for the government States had their own problems with money one frequent problem was that many states just like the Continental Congress printed so much of it that they caused rampant inflation and all sorts of economic problems Rhode Island was the worst culprit the same state that refused to let Congress tax wanted to print as much dollar bills as they could and another problem well now the printing of the dollar bills the printing of so much money one of the problem you might say well what's the big deal who cares um Rhode Island was printing so much money and causing so much inflation that dead or wait creditors people who loaned money to others felt like they were being cheated they give you a very very simple dumbed down explanation of what I mean suppose I owe you I I loan you you're a farmer I loan you ten dollars and the idea is at the end of the year you're going to pay me back eleven dollars right so you're going to pay me with 10 interest and at the time I loaned you the ten dollars um we'll say this is worth 10 bushels of wheat I'm just making up stuff so you can get the idea and then Congress I mean excuse me we're in Rhode Island in Rhode Island decides to print a ton of money just a ton of money and the value of the dollar plummets and it now takes um a year later it takes a hundred dollars to buy 10 bushels a week now this has helped the person who took out the loan at the beginning of the year the reason is a year later they can sell 10 bushels get a hundred dollars pay off the eleven dollars they owe me and have an 89 left with eleven dollars they pay me is no longer worth anything at the time I loaned it it was worth almost a barrel I mean a bushel of wheat each now it's worth maybe one bushel total so the person who loaned the money the bank probably the merchant feels like he got cheated right the person who borrowed the money feels great right his debt was easy to pay off at the end of the year because the dollar that he owed is basically worthless now so that upset people it upset people like George Washington Alexander Hamilton James Madison many others uh and they thought this was chaotic and crazy every state having its own policy some states using inflationary policies like Rhode Island and others not another thing that borrowed people that bothered people is that in many states loyalists were treated badly now back during the revolution Patriots were people who supported independence loyalists were support people who supported the king of England right and the loyalists were often run out of the state they were forced to flee and their property was confiscated by the state because they were Traders now what bothered guys like Alexander Hamilton he won a famous case in New York defending a loyalist is that when they confiscated the property of the Loyalists they didn't give them any due process in other words they weren't accused of a crime they didn't have a chance to go to court and defend themselves their property was just taken from them because they had an unpopular political opinion right and so Alexander Hamilton and others thought if the states can do that to loyalists they can do that to anybody all right tomorrow they could decide they don't like me because I belong to the wrong political party and they could seize my party my property and so he wanted protections for civil rights for individual rights and the states weren't providing them in many cases I already mentioned debts and paper money um another thing that states did this is uh Virginia money I could have used in a Rhode Island example sometimes they force creditors to accept uh payments and dollar bills that they knew were worthless so I can't remember which state it was I think it was Rhode Island again but I might be wrong Rhode Island actually passed a law forcing people to accept paper money even though they knew it was worthless again something that rankled guys like Hamilton and Madison they considered this abusive now a lot of these problems came to a head with something like something called Shay's Rebellion so Massachusetts was a state that did not have an inflationary currency policy it didn't print paper money it also had high taxes and high interest rates on loans and this put a lot of pressure on poor farmers in Massachusetts and in 1786 about 4 000 of them under the leadership of a guy named Daniel Shays rebelled against the government Daniel Shays was a Bunker Hill veteran military veteran and he represented these poor farmers who were having their Farms foreclosed on in other words Banks were loaning the money to to run their Farms but at the end of the year they couldn't pay the loans back and they lost their property and what they wanted was um they wanted paper money to be printed they wanted inflationary policies they wanted a moratorium which means they halt on foreclosures so the farmers would stop losing their Farms um and they wanted a few lower taxes because that was part of what was squeezing the farmers and so Shays and 4 000 others rebelled and at one point they actually attacked the Armory the federal Armory in Springfield Massachusetts the Armory is where the federal weapons were were held and so the threat was they were going to seize more weapons and maybe literally overthrow the government of Massachusetts they were stopped but the interesting thing was Massachusetts stopped them with the state militia and with uh I want to say mercenaries but a privately paid Army but the Continental Congress did nothing while the whole crisis unfolded and the Rebellion raged in Western Massachusetts the Continental Congress was powerless to intervene because it had no Army and it had no money to raise an army and this alarmed uh many I thought I had the quote from Washington I guess I forgot it Washington says something like if this can happen in Massachusetts it can happen anywhere in other words the Rebellion can begin a rebellion can rage and the government in Philadelphia will just sit and watch powerless to do anything to intervene so this convinced these people that some kind of change was necessary well in 1785 this is before Shay's Rebellion but Washington Hamilton Madison they already think something's wrong and the Articles need to be amended in 1785 some delegates from Maryland Virginia met to discuss what to do about the waterways they had in common the rivers that were common to both they came up with something called the Mount Vernon compact formally the compact of 1785 this was an agreement about Tidewater navigation toll duties Commerce regulations fishing rights debt collection and this compact between Virginia and Maryland is still in effect today and then James Madison who was also a Virginian like Washington was so impressed by this compact by this agreement between Maryland Virginia he suggested to the Virginia General Assembly the Virginia government that they invite other states to come in and discuss Interstate issues as well so on January 21st 1786 Virginia invited all the other states to attend a meeting in Annapolis Maryland to describe to discuss trade barriers and other problems okay I'm gonna skip this one the meeting in Annapolis was kind of a dud there were five states who sent delegates four other states uh were invited and suggested some interest but there are delegates either arrived too late or decided not to attend and so the folks who did meet at Annapolis said let's just meet next year 1797 and Philadelphia they sent a request to all the other state legislatures seven states immediately agreed and appointed delegations Virginia New Jersey Pennsylvania North Carolina New Hampshire Delaware Georgia you don't have to memorize those names the seven states immediately agreed a few states were kind of iffy but would later come on board and so they've they decided to have a convention at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. that convention is what we today call the constitutional convention at the time it was just called the federal convention or the Philadelphia Convention or something like that 12 States sent delegates the only state that did not send delegates was Rhode Island you can see a pattern here Rhode Island of all the states for some reason was the one that had the least interest in doing what anybody else did or joining the larger group it wanted to keep going its own way so the resolution calling for the convention specified that its purpose was to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation but by mid-june it was clear that the convention would would propose a completely new constitution a little bit of an overview of the convention um it lasted from May 25th to September 7th 17th 1787. 55 delegates showed up and 39 eventually signed over half of them had legal training about a quarter of them practiced law for a living others were businessmen Farmers doctors a minister 29 of them so that's just over half were Veterans of the Continental Army and all but two or three of them had served in the government and the Confederate Congress the Continental Congress or at least in state governments most of them were wealthy but not all of them the first one to arrive was James Madison show you a picture of him in a second and George Washington was maybe the most important person to arrive he arrived uh the day before the opening of the convention it was supposed to open on May 14th but it was postponed until the 25th because there weren't enough people there uh the only people who got there on time were the Pennsylvania and Virginia delegates George Washington was elected the convention president this is a very important Point uh as convention president he did not take a major role in debating the substance of the Constitution he did sort of just preside over the discussions and but in doing that he performed a very important role because he was the most widely respected person in the United States without a doubt the fact that he had led the Army to success over the British and won the war for independence and the fact that he had also resigned voluntarily and given up his power at the end of that war made him somebody that everyone trusted even people who weren't crazy about the idea of getting a new constitution still trusted George Washington another interesting thing they did was a little controversial they voted to keep the debate Secret and they wanted to do this so that the delegates could speak freely negotiate bargain compromise and change their minds so no reporters were allowed inside basically and the doors and windows were shut even though it was supposedly like 100 degrees in Philadelphia in a year this is James Madison he is sometimes called the father of the Constitution he got there 11 days early and for several months before the Constitutional Convention he had been studying and preparing himself for this event his he was a close friend with Thomas Jefferson Jefferson was in France at the time as the American Diplomat in France and he sent Jefferson a wish list of books to buy for him on political Theory political history a big trunk full of them and Madison just poured over them studied the history of governments all around the world and his idea was to try to figure out why and throughout history no Republican democratic form of government had ever succeeded because he wanted to find a model that would succeed in America what Madison came up with was an idea called the Virginia Plan it was actually introduced into the convention by Edmund Randolph who was another Virginian so Madison was a Virginian Edmund Randolph was a Virginian George Washington was a Virginian the Virginia delegate was delegation was very strong the Virginia Plan set the basis for what would become the Constitution and the main thing to understand is that there was a call for a bicameral legislature that means two houses right in the legislature now initially Madison had a slightly different view than what we ended up with though but that was his initial plan a guy named William Patterson from New Jersey countered with the New Jersey Plan now the New Jersey Plan called for basically keeping the artist Articles of Confederation allowing every state in the Congress to have one vote just like they already had and only tinkering with it just a little bit the New Jersey Plan would have said you can have uh the power to tax for Congress and other than that we'll just basically leave things as they are eventually this was the major dispute and the people who like the Virginia Plan were the big States like Virginia and Massachusetts the people who like the New Jersey Plan were the small states like Delaware and New Jersey and Roger Sherman who's the guy in the painting on the right he brokered what is sometimes called the Great Compromise and sometimes called the Connecticut Compromise because he was from Connecticut so the compromise that Roger Sherman came up with was to set up the houses so there'd be a compromise the House of Representatives would be as it was originally envisioned in the Virginia Plan it would give more power to Big States because larger States would get more representatives in the House of Representatives based on their population so Virginia would have more Representatives than New Jersey but he proposed that in the Senate every state be equally powerful and so in the Senate um Maryland or New Jersey would get two votes and Virginia would get two votes despite being of unequal sizes and that is the system we have today basically and that resolved uh tolerably well the great dispute between big States and little states of the Constitutional Convention another issue that was hard to resolve at the convention with slavery there were lots of disputes and disagreements over this 25 of the delegates 25 out of the 55 owned slaves and some Southern States refused to support the Constitution if it Outlaws slavery so if they tried to outlaw slavery into the Constitutional Convention South Carolina for example in Georgia perhaps would just leave and Not only would they leave they would potentially go back to Great Britain which would undermine the chance of remaining independent so they had to come up with a few Clauses a few compromises one compromise was called The Fugitive Slave clause it said no person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another shall and consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor which shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due what this means in effect is a slave or an indentured servant but by now slavery was the main issue a slave who ran away and escapes to a different state maybe where slavery was no longer legal had to be returned to the state that he escaped from according to the Constitution this would be probably the most controversial part of the constitution for the next several decades and would create a lot of friction you'll see later another compromise was the slave trade compromise many of the delegates wanted to ban the slave trade if they couldn't ban slavery so no more importation of slaves and they decided to basically postpone the issue so no bans on the slave trade or the importation of slaves until 1808. and then when 1808 rolled around 20 years later they did ban the importation of slaves third major compromise is called the Three-Fifths clause so there was a big dispute about how to count slaves for purposes of Taxation and representation in the House of Representatives and I'm going to use imaginary fake numbers just to help you understand the the issue imagine for example the Massachusetts has a hundred people foreign people of course they really had a lot more than that I'm just using fake math there was a dispute right away about how do you count the people for determining how many seats each of these people gets in the House of Representatives right they have the same number of human beings living in each but in Massachusetts all of the people there are free in South Carolina 50 of them are free and 50 of them are slaves foreign South Carolina said we get the same number of people in the House of Representatives you do because we have the same number of people living here and we get the same number of votes for president because the the system of counting uh allotting them was the same Massachusetts said no that's not fair it's wrong for you to get this the same amount of power in Congress that we have when half of your people are are enslaved because effectively that would give these 50 people extra power for holding other people in bondage right they get the same number amount of power that the hundred of us have when we're not enslaving anybody so it's wrong to reward you for them with extra power in Congress and so a lot of people misunderstand the three Fest Clause today they think that the racists only wanted to count slaves as three-fifths of a person no the slave holders wanted to count slaves as equal the anti-slavery people didn't want to count slaves at all because that rewarded their owners with extra power so they finally came up with the Three-Fifths Compromise they said the slaves will count as three-fifths of a person for deciding how much how many representatives you get in Congress and how many votes you get for president so that was the Compromise another interesting issue was how much power to give to the president the national executive thanks there was a debate um some people like Roger Sherman from Connecticut Edmund Randolph from Virginia a guy named Pierce Butler from South Carolina said they would want it they wanted to see the executive power divided into two or three different positions so instead of one president like we have today he would have two presidents or three presidents or you'd call them consuls and the idea was by dividing the power you're less likely to have one president become tyrannical with all the power in his hands and so that was an interesting idea there were others their names were James Wilson Charles Pinkney John Dickinson you don't need to memorize those names today but others who said let's have one president and all the executive branch power will be in that one president's hands and they were comfortable with that and the funny thing was everybody knew who the president was going to be they all knew it was going to be George Washington and so everybody was talking and Ben Franklin said everybody speak your mind speak freely say whatever is on your conscience but a lot of them were afraid to say what they were thinking because they didn't want to hurt George Washington's feelings because they liked him so much there was even the people who were against the idea of having one uh unitary executive so they decided to take a vote Washington sat with the Virginia delegation and basically everyone watched to see how he would vote and when Washington voted to have one president a unitary executive they all kind of went okay that's the way it's going to be and they decided to go along with it and that's the system we have today and what that shows you is how much process they had basically the idea was well if Washington thinks that it's okay we trust him he'll do it right now so the Constitution after about three months or so and I want to just do an overview of some of the main features of it so I already mentioned there are two Chambers in the legislature a House of Representatives in the Senate a big change was that individual states were now forbidden to make treaties coin money have their own tariffs their own foreign policy all of that stuff they handed over now to the national government another big change was there would be a president chosen by an electoral college the Electoral College was real people and it is real people right so there would be no direct vote for the president even today how many of you voted for president at some point in your life that's it okay two people awesome okay uh you did not directly vote for president you know I think you did but you did what you did was you voted for an elector to vote on your behalf for president and that's the system we've had for over 200 years and most of the time you don't even notice there's a difference that person goes to our Capital Austin at some point in December they cast the vote and they vote for basically whoever you told them to uh if you were in the majority if you were in the minority they vote for whoever the other side told them to uh some other interesting things so the president was a new position that had not existed under the Articles the president was very powerful and very important the president had the power to veto legislation the power to nominate judges to Grant pardons the president was the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces the president had the power to make treaties but the senate had to agree two-thirds of the senate had to ratify treaties for them to go into effect another major Innovation for the Constitution is that ours now there is now a national Judiciary there are federal courts or national courts and the judges on these federal courts would serve for life or during good behavior meaning they couldn't be fired they could be impeached but only in the very rare circumstances and I'm trying to think I can't I don't think any federal judge ever has been impeached if I'm wrong I'll try to think of an example but over 200 years I don't think it's happened this shows you how unlikely it is another interesting rule they came up with the Constitution could be amended two-thirds of Congress could propose an amendment and then three-fourths of the states could agree to it and then it would be ratified and the Constitution would be changed not unanimous under the articles that had to be unanimous but that would be impossible right especially today try to imagine getting all 50 states to agree on an amendment it could never possibly happen these are some of the new powers granted to Congress I won't read them to you because you can see them for yourselves there might be a question or two on the review questions about them if you see it just look through the slide Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes that was the most important one that was the one everyone agreed almost everyone needed to be added to borrow money to regulate for in an interstate trade to coin money is a very important one look at number 11 to declare war a lot of people don't realize that the president does not have the power to declare war Congress to us now look at the very bottom number 18 says to make all the laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution Powers listed above and any other powers given in the Constitution this is called the elastic clause what it says is if there's something not listed here the the Congress needs to do in order to carry out one of these listed Powers it's okay I'll give you an example famous example that they argued over for many years a few years after this Alexander Hamilton said we want to create a bank someone looked at this list Jefferson and said nowhere on here does it say anything about establishing Banks or corporations Hamilton said aha but it does say the power of coin money and the power to collect taxes and the power to borrow money and a bank is necessary and proper for doing those things therefore it is implied by number 18 that we can do it and Hamilton won the argument Washington agreed with them years later the Supreme Court agreed with them and it and it happened okay the last concept I want to talk about is the ratification process so the rule they came up with was the Constitution would go into effect when nine states two-thirds of the states in the uh Confederation agreed to ratify quickly those who were in favor of the Constitution came to be called Federalists and those who were opposed came to be called Anti-Federalists they wrote essays criticizing each other articles criticizing each other here are two of the more famous Anti-Federalists Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams uh these were Heroes of the American Revolution but they didn't like the new constitution they wanted to keep the old the old way with the Articles of Confederation where the states were basically uh free to do their own thing there were very close votes and some states like Virginia the vote was 89-79 in Virginia so if five people had changed their minds there would have been a time in New York the vote was even close 30 in favor of the Constitution 27 against a very close book two people could have rejected the constitution in New York and since these were very big States everyone knew you have to have Virginia and you have to have New York otherwise the whole thing is going to fail now the last point to mention in some of these big States like Virginia and New York and Massachusetts a few people agreed a crucial few people agreed to support the Constitution but only if one thing was added a Bill of Rights a lot of the Anti-Federalists were upset that as originally written at the convention in Philadelphia there was no Bill of Rights the First Amendment freedom of speech freedom of religion it wasn't there yet and they said you have to add this or we're not going to go along with it and James Madison agreed he kind of deal with some Anti-Federalists he said if you promise to ratify the Constitution I promise that the very first thing we do Under the new government will be to add a Bill of Rights and they did enough of them did to make the Constitution ratified and go into effect Madison kept his promise first thing he did and the new House of Representatives was suggest a bill of a Bill of Rights and it got ratified and it's in place today that's where we're going to stop