Can we agree that our education of the younger generations
has been less than stellar concerning our civic heritage? What does the typical
high school graduate—or college graduate, for that matter—know about our
Constitution, for example?
Let’s do a bit of remediation today.
Going back in time, to 1787, just over a decade
post-Declaration of Independence from rule under the British monarch, and just
four years after the end of the Revolutionary War, it was increasingly evident
that the original agreement among the states, the Articles of Confederation, was
inadequate.
James Madison persuaded delegates from the original states
to gather that summer to address the inadequacies. Ostensibly they were coming together
to tweak the Articles of Confederation, but in reality they would meet to
totally replace the Articles with something altogether new. It was a dangerous and
daring undertaking, when the United States was still a fledgling nation. It
helped that Madison persuaded the well-respected George Washington to both
attend and preside.
The Great Compromise
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| "The Connecticut Compromise" by Bradley Stevens |
The Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia
from May 25 to September 17, 1987. A lot of discussion went on during those
months. A thorny question was how to distribute power among the states. What
was in it for the little states, if the big states held all the power by virtue
of their population size? But how could there possibly be fairness, if tiny
states like Rhode Island were held equal to large states like Virginia? The
voter in the small states would have far more voting power than the voter in the
large states.
A bicameral legislature wasn’t a totally new idea, because
Britain had upper and lower houses of Parliament, and several of the states did
as well. But it was in using these two houses to balance out the inequities of
size that made it possible to unite the states while also keeping them
separately sovereign.
The Great Compromise, sometimes referred to as the
Connecticut Compromise, was put forward by the delegates from Connecticut, who
combined the Virginia large state proposal with New Jersey’s small state
proposal. The compromise was to use proportional representation in the lower
House of Representatives, and give states equal representation in the upper chamber,
the Senate.
Originally, as now, the congressional representatives in the
House were voted directly by their constituents in the various states. Large
states would of course have more representatives. The Senate, however, was set
up to be appointed by state legislatures. The Senate, then, would literally be
representing the interests of the states, while the House would be representing
the individual local voters in the various states.
Senators began to be elected by direct vote within their
states following passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913—which arguably
means senators are also responding to the clamor of voters rather than state
interests. Nevertheless, the Senate is a slower moving, more deliberative
legislative chamber, by design.
Because of the Great Compromise, we are indeed a nation of
United States, and not just a large centrally governed nation of majority rule.
If we did not have something to balance out pure democracy,
then large population centers would have all the controlling power. An
additional discussion for another day is about the Electoral College, which
uses the power of states, rather than population centers, to elect the
president.
Imagine if only tyranny-leaning high population centers had
all the power. That’s what we’d have without the compromise to partially
balance power for smaller populated areas. California and New York would reign
over us all. Texas gets included as one of the big states, but you’d be giving
power to the big cities in Texas: Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, all of
which are usually run by Democrats. And you’d be ignoring the many millions who
live in rural, less densely populated areas.
The cry “one person one vote” makes sense, until you realize
that your vote gets ignored if you’re not going along with the typical urban
voter, who gets to meet the candidates, who end up not actually representing
you or your interests.
The Other Compromise
There’s another important compromise in the Constitution,
that is even less understood. It is an anti-slavery compromise.
This came after the Great Compromise, so it was already
agreed that the House of Representatives would be by population. The question
was about whether to count slaves, who could not vote. If they were counted,
that would give more seats in the House to slave states, which would mean
greater influence from those states to maintain the institution of slavery.
The men who wrote and signed the words “all men are created
equal” found slavery out of line with their grounding philosophy. They saw
slavery as something imposed on them by the British crown. Delegates in only
three of the colonies vocally advocated for slavery: North and South Carolina
and Georgia. Many of the founders who had been slaveholders as British citizens
freed them as Americans: George Washington, John Dickinson, Caesar Rodney,
William Livingston, George Wythe, John Randolph, and others.
Washington, whose property was acquired by marriage,
arranged in his will to free the family’s slaves upon his wife’s death. But,
knowing that freeing them was his purpose, Martha freed them right away. Jefferson
introduced a bill to outlaw slavery. In his state, until they were free to
change the law, it was illegal to free slaves, although he wanted to. John
Adams made it clear he never had and never would own a slave; his son John
Quincy Adams was called “the hell hound of abolition” for his anti-slavery exertions.
The strong majority of the founders were anti-slavery, and
were seeking ways to rid the culture of that evil. Wallbuilders catalogs a good
list of the founders views on slavery, here.
The Three-Fifths Compromise, counting three out of every
five slaves as a person, gave the southern states 33 perfect more seats in Congress—and
Electoral College votes—than if the slaves had been ignored, but significantly
fewer seats than if the slaves had been counted equally with free people.
It was a tough thing to compromise on. But, without it,
there would have been no United States. So the compromise was intended to allow
for movement towards abolishing slavery, not to continue it.
Historian Carol Swain explains in this PragerU video:
Compromise isn’t something people of principle like to do.
Isn’t it better just to persuade the people who are wrong to convert to seeing
things the right way? In theory, yes. In practice, no. Many people are easily
persuaded by the wrong things—emotional stories, sound bites that fail to give
the whole picture, peer pressure to believe the way those around them believe.
That’s the problem with politics, which is about moving the masses of people in
a particular direction.
So, sometimes, when there’s a long-term ultimate goal, a
short-term compromise might be necessary.
But direction is important. A compromise that takes us north
on the Spherical Model—upward toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization—might
be necessary as a step toward the goal. The Three-Fifths Compromise went in the
right direction, toward freeing slaves, even though it didn’t outright do away
with slavery. It took longer for that, but we got there—as one of the singular
civilizations in human history to do so.
A compromise that just takes us less far down into tyranny—that’s
a harder compromise to justify. Let’s pray that, in working with people who are
not of the same mind we are, we can have our representatives use our founders
as a pattern and compromise only when it’s a step upward.
