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The Grand Convention - One Vote · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Season 16 of American Political History.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Grand Convention.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: One vote.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: On Monday, June 11, 1787, back in the convention's second week of debate, with the Virginia plant barely opened, Judge Roger Sherman of Connecticut rose from his seat with a proposal.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: William Pierce's private sketchbook has the man as the room saw him.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Awkward, unmeaning, and unaccountably strange in his manner.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: That strange New England cant which runs through his public as well as private speaking.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And yet Pierce wrote, He deserves infinite praise.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: No man has a better heart or a clear head.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Madison wrote it down that the proposition of suffrage in the first branch should be according to respective numbers of free inhabitants, and that in the second branch, or Senate, each state should have one vote and no more population in the House, one state, one vote in the Senate.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Half for the large states, half for the small, each side sovereign in one chamber.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention did not debate it.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: The equal vote in the second branch was put to the question and defeated, six states to five.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the committee moved on with other business the same day.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman had offered the room a settlement, and the room had walked right past it.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: On june eleventh, through the last week, the Convention refought the spring.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Committee of the Whole's work was done, the House was going over every resolution a second time, and the small states contested the grounds clause by clause.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was one quiet, Sherman side victory in that stretch.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: On june twenty fifth, the Convention agreed nine states to two, that the members of the second branch would be chosen not by the people and not by the House, but by the state legislatures.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the Senate became, the states themselves would fill it.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Before the vote, Charles Pickany had risen with the longest set speech of the week and made an argument nobody could make in London or Paris.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: The efficacy of the whole system, he said, would depend on this article, and to judge it rightly, they had better examine the situation of the country more accurately than they had yet done.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: The people of the United States are perhaps the most singular of any we are acquainted with.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Among them there are fewer distinctions of fortune and less of rank than among the inhabitants of any other nation.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every freeman has a right to the same protection and securities, and a very moderate share of property entitles them to the possession of all the honors and privileges the public can bestow.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Hence arises a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country, and an equality which is more likely to continue.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it was likely to continue, he argued, because of the land.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: A new country with immense tracts of uncultivated lands, and industry rewarded competency would have few poor and fewer dependents.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: That was the answer to every man who wanted the second branch modeled on the House of Lords.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: A House of Lords required lords.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: America had merchants who depended on planters and planters who depended on merchants, and no order of men above either.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: The next day the convention settled how long the senators would sit.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nine years was motioned for and lost.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: The term was fixed at six, with the seats divided into classes so that a third would rotate out every two years, a body that would never turn over all at once.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And weeks later, on july twenty third, the design was finished with a quiet inversion, moved by Gary and Sherman together.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: The two senators would vote per capita, each man casting his own vote, not each state speaking with one voice.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: As the summer heat settled in, the windows stayed shut.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: On june twenty seventh, Luther Martin of Maryland took the floor on the question of representation, and he kept it.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: He spoke for the rest of the day, and when the convention assembled on the twenty eighth, he rose and resumed two days, one speaker, one argument.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: The general government was meant for the states, not the people.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the states must stand equal.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Madison's notes record the speech's substance, and uncharacteristically, its texture.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was delivered, Madison wrote, with much diffuseness and considerable vehemence.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Major Pierce had warned his notebook that Mr.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Martin never spoke without tiring the patience of all who heard him.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: The convention now had the proof, at two days' length, in the heat of late June.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: When Martin finally sat down on the twenty eighth, Madison answered him, then Dr.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin asked for the floor.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: He was eighty-one, and his great speeches that summer were written out in advance.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: This one addressed to the President's chair, to George Washington, and it began with an accounting.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: The small progresses we have made after four or five weeks close to attendance and continual reasoning with each other are different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many nose as eyes, is methinks a melancholy proof of the imperfection of human understanding.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then he ransacked history for help, he said, and came back empty.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: We indeed seem to feel our want of a political wisdom, since we have been running around in search of it.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: We have gone back to ancient histories for modes of government, and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with the seeds of their own disillusion, no longer exist, and we have viewed modern states all around Europe, but find none of them, their constitutions, suitable to our circumstances.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then the old philosopher turned the room toward the one direction it had not looked.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: In the situation of the assembly, groping as we are in the dark to find a political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the father of insights to illuminate our understanding.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room of divine protection.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men, and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, it is probable that an empire can rise without his aid.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: He moved that prayer be held in the assembly every morning, and that one or more of the city's clergy be asked to officiate.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Judge Sherman seconded him.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then the Convention did something stranger than either accepting or refusing.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander Hamilton and several others, Madison recorded, expressed apprehensions.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: However proper the measure might have been at the start, to adopt it now, five weeks in, would tell the public that embarrassments and dissensions inside the Convention had suggested it.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: The doors were locked, but a sudden parade of clergymen through them would be legible to the whole city.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson of North Carolina, who had Presbyterian ministers training in his past, ended the debate.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: The true cause of the omission could not be mistaken.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention has no funds.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: That same day, William Blunt of North Carolina wrote home to his brother, saying everything the secrecy rule let him say.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: I am not at liberty to say what is done or doing in convention, but I can say things are so much an embryo that I could give you no satisfactory account if I was ever so much at liberty.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, june twenty ninth, Hamilton spoke on the great question, and it was nearly the last thing he said that summer.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: It had been agre it had been argued, he observed, that if the small states renounce their equality, they renounce their liberty with it.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: He denied that equation flatly.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The truth was it was a contest for power, not for liberty.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Delaware with forty thousand souls would lose power if she held a tenth of the votes allowed to Pennsylvania's four hundred thousand.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: But would the people of Delaware be less free if each citizen of Delaware had an equal vote with each citizen of Pennsylvania?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he left the room with a warning.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was a miracle that we are now here exercising our tranquility and free deliberations on the subject.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: It would be madness to trust the future to miracles.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Within days, Hamilton was gone to New York City on private business, outvoted at his own table, his speech unanswered, his state's other two delegates a movable.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: He would be gone through the weeks that mattered most for the convention.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: That same morning, Connecticut took the floor with the motion itself.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth, the judge, who was so happy in a reply, moved that in the second branch of the legislature each state have an equal vote.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: He was not sorry, he said, that proportion had carried in the first branch.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: He hoped that vote would become a ground for a compromise.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: The government they were building was not one thing or the other.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: We were partially national, partially federal.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Proportion in one house for the nation's people, equality in the other for a confederation of states.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was Judge Sherman's june eleventh proposal, standing back up, with a theory attached.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Saturday, june thirtieth, was the day the room came closest to breaking.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: It opened with a confession of weakness.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Judge Barley of New Jersey moved that the president write to New Hampshire, whose delegates had never arrived, urging their immediate attendance.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: New Hampshire was small, and her vote would land on the small state side of the question.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: The motion lost two states to five, Maryland divided.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And when it was put, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Georgia were not even on the floor.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: The convention attendance was becoming scarce in the summer heat.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Then Mr.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth motioned was resumed, and James Wilson came at it.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: The votes cast the day before against proportional representation, he told the room, represented twenty two people out of every ninety in America.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Give the states an equal Senate, and seven states holding twenty-four parts in ninety of the people could override the rest forever, less than a third governing more than two thirds of the population.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then Mr Wilson asked the question underneath the entire summer.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Can we forget for whom we are forming a government?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is it for men or for imaginary beings called states?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: The question he sent would come to this Shall less than a quarter of the United States withdraw themselves from the Union, or shall more than three quarters renounce the inherent, indisputable, and unalienable rights of men in favor for this artificial system of states?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if the minority forced a separation on that point, he added, it could never happen on better grounds.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Ellsworth answered him.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a novel thing?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: he asked, that the few should hold a check on the many?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Was that not the British Constitution whose wisdom so many gentlemen had united and applauded?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: A House of Lords, a small population of the nation holding a veto in defense of this particular right?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: No Confederacy had ever existed without an equality of voices among its members, and then the judge from Connecticut gave the crisis its lasting image.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: We are running from one extreme to another.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: We are raising the foundations of the building when we need only repair the roof.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Raising the foundations when a roof wanted repair.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: His state, he reminded them, held the middle rank.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: His remarks were not the pleading of the smallest.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Madison rose, commenting on the able reasoning of the gentleman of Connecticut, and then took his argument apart and reached for Connecticut's own record.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The party demanding fidelity to the compact, he observed, ought to be guiltless of violating it.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And of all the states, Connecticut was perhaps the least able to urge the plea.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature of that state had, by a pretty recent vote, positively refused to pass a law for complying with the requisitions of Congress, and had transmitted a copy of the vote to Congress, positively refused and then mailed Congress the refusal.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Ellsworth answered for his state's honor with its war record.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever might be thought of Connecticut's representatives, the state was entirely federal in her disposition.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: The muster rules would show that we kept more troops in the field than Virginia herself.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: If she has been delinquent, it was from inability of their losses, and no more so than other states.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Judge Sherman put in a lawyer's word for the old Congress itself.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Congress was not to blame for the faults of the states.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Its measures had been right, and the only thing wanting was further power to make them effectual.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then Dr.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin asked for the floor for the second time in three days.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: The diversity of opinions, he observed, turned on two points.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: If representation were proportional, the small states feared for their liberties.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: If it were equal, the large states feared for their money.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: When a broad table is made to be and the edges of planks do not fit, the oddist takes a little from both and makes the good joint.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: He had even drafted a proposal and read it out, equal delegates from every state on equal voice, whenever state sovereignty was touched, and votes proportioned to contribution whenever money was drawn from the treasury.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Where a ship has many owners, he observed, that was the rule for deciding on her voyage, and he remembered aloud that as the ministers of France during the war, he would have been very glad of a vote in distributing the money he had helped borrow.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: The proposition was left to lie on the table, but the table image stayed in the room.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Rufus King rose.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: The report and the motion were both mendable, he argued, but if the equal votes was fixed and unalterable, then the truth should be plainly said.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were in fact cut asunder already, and it was in vain to shut our eyes against it.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: His feelings, Madison recorded him saying, were more harrowed, his fears more agitated for his country than he could express.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: This was the last opportunity of providing for its liberty and happiness, and he could not comprehend renouncing a just government within reach out of attachment to the phantom of state sovereignty.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, at twenty six, the youngest man in the convention, answered the luminary of the present age to his face.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: When assertion is given to proof, he said, and terror substituted for argument, they would have no effect, however eloquently spoken.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: As for the system of the table, I consider the system on the table as a novelty, an amorphous monster, and was persuaded that it never would be received by the people.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: An amorphous monster, half national, half federal, at home in neither element.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin needed only one sentence that day.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: I would never confederate if it could not be done on just principles.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then Gunning Bedford of Delaware stood up, the bold and nervous speaker, warm and impetuous in his temper, delivered the speech Major Pierce's sketch had been waiting for.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: If political societies possess ambition and avarice, Mr.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Bedford began, if any gentleman doubts it, let him look at the votes.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Have they not been dictated by interest and by ambition?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Are not the large states evidently seeking to ingrandize themselves at the expense of the small?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: They think, no doubt, that they have a right on their side, but interest has blinded their eyes.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: He called the role of motive state by state to their faces.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Georgia, small today, actuated by the prospect of soon being great.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: South Carolina, moved by present interest and future prospects both.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: North Carolina the same, Virginia follows, Pennsylvania a direct and future interest, Massachusetts a decided and palpable interest in the part she takes.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Give the opportunity and ambition will not fail to abuse it.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: The whole history of mankind proves it.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: We must, he told them, like Solon, the Athenian who wrote not the best laws, but the best laws his people could receive, make such a government as the people will approve.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: They had been told with a dictatorial air that this was the last moment for a fair trial of good government.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: It would be the last indeed, he answered if the committee's propositions went out to the people.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: The lodge states dare not dissolve the Confederation.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: If they do, the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith who will take them by the hand and do them justice.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: That is the speech as Madison heard it, smothered into careful third person.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Robert Yates of New York was sitting a few feet away keeping his own notebook, and Yates' page had Bedford speaking straight at the large states.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: I do not, gentlemen, trust you.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: A foreign ally, a delegate to a convention of the United States standing in the room where independence was declared, telling the largest states that little Delaware could shop for a European protector.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: He did not mean by it, he added, at once, to intimidate or alarm.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a natural consequence, to be avoided by enlarging the federal powers, not annihilating the federal system.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth, in the middle of that storm, explained the small state's side in the quietest terms it ever got.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Under a national government, he said, he would share in national security.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: But that was all.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: What he wanted was domestic happiness, and a national government could not descend to the local objects it depended on.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: He turned his eyes for the preservation of his rights to the state governments.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Happiness depends on their existence as much as a newborn infant on its mother for nourishment.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: It fell to Rufus King to close that Saturday, and he closed it on Mr.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Bedford in the words Madison preserved.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was not he who, with a vehemence unprecedented in that house, had declared himself ready to turn his hopes from a common country and court the protection of some foreign hand.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was grieved that such a thought had entered into his heart.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was more grieved that such an expression had dropped from the member's lips.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: The gentleman could only excuse it to himself on the score of passion.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: For himself, whatever might be his distresses, he would never court relief from a foreign power.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: On that, the convention adjourned for the Sabbath.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason wrote to Virginia that same day that two or three days would determine whether the convention could agree on any sound or effectual system at all.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: On Monday morning, June 2nd, Mr.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth's motion, the equal vote in the Senate, was put to the question at last.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the states answered the role.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Connecticut, I, New York, I, New Jersey, I, Delaware, I, Maryland, I.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Maryland's I was an accident of attendance.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Daniel Effects.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: St.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Jennifer, the good humored bachelor who leaned with the large states was absent from that floor that warning, which left Luther Martin holding Maryland's entire vote alone and casting it in his way.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts, no, Pennsylvania, no, Virginia, no, North Carolina, no, South Carolina, no.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then Georgia, and Georgia divided.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: William Houston voted no with the large states, where Georgia's ambitions pointed, and Abraham Baldwin, the Connecticut born transplant with the accommodating turn of mind, voted aye.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Georgia's vote canceled itself, and the tally stood finished.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Five states for equal vote, five states against, one divided.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: A tie.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: The convention had been sitting for five weeks, and on the question underneath every other question, America was split exactly in half.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was Judge Sherman who named where they stood We are now at full stop, and nobody meant that we should break up without doing something.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: General Pickany of South Carolina rose into the silence and proposed the last device a deliberative body owns, a committee, one member from each state to devise and report a compromise.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Madison and Wilson objected.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Committees decided nothing that the floor could not.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: They were nearly alone.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: The states approved it nine to two, and the two no's were New Jersey and Delaware, small states so certain of their ground they wanted no bargaining at all.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: After the tie, Governor Morris rose with a speech about what the second branch was for.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: The Senate's purpose was to check the Democratic branch, and it should therefore be aristocratic outright, wealthy appointed for life, because the rich were coming for power no matter what anyone wrote.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: The rich will strive to establish their domination and enslave the rest.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: They always did.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: They always will.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: The proper security against them is to form them into a separate interest.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Put the rich in one visible chamber, he argued, and the two branches would watch each other.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: The committee was elected by ballot, and the ballots told their own story.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry of Massachusetts, Ellsworth of Connecticut, Yates of New York, Patterson of New Jersey, Franklin of Pennsylvania, Bedford of Delaware, Martin of Maryland, Mason of Virginia, Davy of North Carolina, Rutledge of South Carolina, and Baldwin of Georgia.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: No Madison, no Wilson, or one of the other men who had carried the proportional argument all summer.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: The convention has chosen a committee of peacemakers and then adjourned for three days so the committee could work over the Fourth of July weekend.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: The committee met at Dr.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin's house, by the account that survives, under the mulberry tree's roof in the Garden Court off Market Street.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was Dr.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin who put forward the package that became the report.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And well they worked, Philadelphia celebrated July 4th, 1787.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Eleven years to the day.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Bells, cannons, militia companies in the street at the city tavern two blocks from the State House, an advertisement that promised the most elegant fireworks that have ever been exhibited, and to prevent accidents, there were no rockets.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: On july fifth, mister Jerry delivered the committee's report, two parts, one bargain.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: First, in the first branch, representation by population, and every bill for raising or spending money shall originate in the first branch, and shall not be altered or amended by the second.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Second, in the second branch, each state shall have an equal vote.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: The equal Senate, the small states demanded, the purchase was the power of the purse, the people's house would hold the power of money.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Madison rose against it, the money bill clause, he argued, was no concession at all, and the equal vote was the old injustice with a ribbon on it.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Governor Morris rose against it with the darkest speech of the summer.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: He had come there, he said, as a representative of America.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: He flattered himself.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: He came there in some degree as a representative of the whole human race, for the whole human race would be affected by the proceedings of this convention.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: And to the state attachments filling the room he answered with a forecast.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: This country must be united.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: If persuasion does not unite it, the sword will.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Elbridge Jerry, no friend of the report he had just delivered, answered both sides with the fear underneath everything.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: They were, he said, in a particular situation, neither the same nation nor different nations.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: If no compromise took place, what would be the consequence?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: If we do not come to some agreement among ourselves, some foreign sword will probably do the work for us.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: For eleven days the convention ground across the report.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: The apportionment of the first house was fought, committed, recommitted, and tangled through all of it unresolved ran the question of counting the slaves.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: On july 10th, Judge Yates and Lansing of New York packed and left Philadelphia.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: They did not return.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Clinton's men had seen where the convention was going, equal Senate or no equal Senate, and declined to legitimize another day of it.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: New York's delegates had no quorum without them.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: Its commission required two delegates on the floor to cast the state's vote, and if Hamilton returned, he would be a delegate who could speak and never vote.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: From July 10th forward, the state of New York had no voice on the floor.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And on the same day, George Washington sat down and wrote to Hamilton in New York.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of the Convention, and do therefore repent having any agency in the business.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: I am sorry you went away.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: I wish you were back.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: The crisis is equally important and alarming, and no opposition under such circumstances should discourage exertions till the signatures are fixed.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Despair in the first sentence, and in the last, exertions till the signatures are fixed.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: He repented the business and had no intention of leaving it unfinished.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: The man who had staked the most valuable reputation in the world on the room now wished he had never walked into it.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: The North Carolina delegation, riding home to Governor Caswell, described the same darkness.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: A very large field presents to our view without a single straight or eligible road that has been trodden by the feet of nations.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had done this before, and for two weeks in July it looked like nobody would.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: By the middle of July, the convention had become the thing to see in America.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: A spectacle made of a closed door.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: The Reverend Messiah Cutler, a New England clergyman in town that week lobbying for the Ohio Company's Western land purchases, kept a journal of what a visitor could actually get.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: He dined at the Indian Queen on july thirteenth with a table full of delegates, Strong, Gorham, Madison, Mason, and his son, and recorded that on the business of the convention the gentlemen were under an obligation of secrecy, and he could learn nothing.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: The next evening he was with doctor Franklin's garden under the mulberry tree, where the doctor produced a curiosity for the company, a snake with two heads, preserved in a vial, and began to observe that it put him in mind of a debate then before the convention, in case the two heads should disagree, and was checked midstory by the reminder of the secrecy rule.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: The most famous talker in America stopped in his own garden in front of his own jar.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: The watchers were not only tourists, the French charged d'affaires was reporting to the Convention to Versailles, and the British Council to London, foreign courts reading dispatches about a room nobody could see into.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Lobbyists, like Philadelphia's Tenchcox, worked the delegates at their lodgings and dinners.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Noah Webster, teaching in the city that summer, dined among them and kept his own diary.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the newspapers, with nothing to print, printed the door itself, the centuries, the silence, the rumors.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: The convention had become an event, and the event was the secret.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, july fourteenth, the large states made their last motions against the report, and every one of them failed.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: The grounds were exhausted.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: On Monday, july sixteenth, the question was called at last.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: The committee's whole report.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: The equal vote and the money pursed together, one vote up or down.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Connecticut aye.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: New Jersey aye.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Delaware aye.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maryland aye.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: North Carolina aye.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: The large states had cracked.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: North Carolina crossed over.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Pennsylvania no.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Virginia no.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: South Carolina no.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Georgia no.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: And Massachusetts?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Divided.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: mister Jerry and Mr.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Strong voted aye.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: King and Mr.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Gorham voted no.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: The state that had furnished the report's chairman split down the middle, canceled itself, and by canceling itself, it decided everything.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Five states to four, one divided.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: The report was adopted.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Each state would have an equal vote in the Senate of the United States, and the power of the purse would be in the People's House.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: One vote.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Sherman's June eleventh settlement defeated six five, had returned as Ellsworth's June twenty ninth motion, tied five five, and passed on July sixteenth, five four because Mr.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Jennifer missed a morning because Baldwin split Georgia because Strong and Gary broke from King and Gorham because North Carolina crossed the aisle.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: The rule that governs the Senate to this day carried by the width of a single state, assembled out of accidents.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph rose, the vote he said, had embarrassed the business extremely, and he suggested the Convention adjourn, that the large states might consider what was proper to be done in the present solemn crisis.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: William Patterson took the floor and agreed.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: If Governor Randolph meant an adjournment, why not an adjournment forever?
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Dissolve the Convention.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Patterson would second him with all his heart, and the rule of secrecy could be rescinded besides, so the people could see where matters stood.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph, alarmed, clarified at once he had never meant an adjournment of the Convention, only until tomorrow.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Before the session on july seventeenth, the delegates of the large states gathered by themselves, a caucus of the defeated, meeting to decide whether to resist, to propose a plan of their own, to walk away from the convention.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Madison was in the room, and Madison wrote down what happened.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: The time was wasted in vague conversations on the subject without any specific proposition or agreement.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Some were for yielding nothing.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Others thought the compromise once passed should stand.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: No plan was formed, no motion agreed, no lines drawn, and several small state members invited to attend and standing in the room listening, watched the large states discover in each other's company that they would do nothing.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: The equal vote would stand.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: The session opened, nobody moved to reconsider.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: The convention picked up the next resolution and went back to work.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share the show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.