In attempting to resolve such issues, as well as problems arising from the payment of debts from the Revolutionary War and other domestic issues, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention created a model of government that relied upon a series of checks and balances by dividing federal authority between the Legislative, the Judicial, and the Executive branches of government. The framers of the Constitution had originally imagined a weak presidency and a strong legislature divided into a House of Representatives and the Senate.
Under the Articles of Confederation, considerable minor paperwork had bogged down important business enough that legislators decided to establish an executive branch to deal with routine paperwork.
When writing the Constitution, the framers expected the Senate to handle important issues, particularly the ratification of treaties, while the Executive would attend to matters of lesser consequence. However, as deliberations continued, the Executive branch acquired more power to deal with some of the issues that had been a source of sectional tension under the Articles of Confederation—and so the President acquired the authority to conduct foreign relations.
The two-thirds clause for ratification of treaties in the Senate, as opposed to a simple majority, allowed the South a greater voice in these matters and assuaged concerns about the attempts to abandon navigation of the Mississippi. The Constitution does not stipulate existence of departments within the executive branch, but the need for such departments was recognized immediately.
Congress passed legislation creating the Department of Foreign Affairs in its first session in , and in the same year changed the name to the Department of State after it added several additional domestic duties to the Department. After the ratification of the Constitution in , the machinery of state had been designed, but not yet tested and put to use.
The provisions for management of foreign affairs would be put to the test in , when the Senate had the opportunity to accept or reject the controversial treaty with Great Britain negotiated by John Jay. Menu Menu. Home Milestones Constitutional Convention and Ratification, — Milestones: — For more information, please see the full notice. Those gathered in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House during the summer of faced a formidable task.
Yet somehow, in the space of slightly less than four months, they managed to pull off an extraordinary accomplishment. The Constitution they drafted has been successful for most of U.
And it has brought remarkable stability to one of the most tumultuous forms of political activity: popular democracy.
The challenge that all nations in the world have faced not only in drafting a constitution, but also creating a form of government that both provides stability to its nation and sufficient civic responsibility and liberty to its people, is enormous. Indeed, among the more than constitutions presently operating in the world today, few have been as successful in creating that delicate balance between governmental power and personal liberty among the citizens ruled by their government.
The remarkable achievement of the fifty-five men gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of was by no means inevitable. Looking back on their work that summer, we can identify a few factors that enabled them to achieve their success.
Certainly among the most important was the quality of leadership among those most committed to strengthening the American government. The ringleader was the thirty-seven-year-old James Madison. Standing only a few inches over five-feet tall, scrawny, suffering from a combination of poor physical health and hypochondria, and painfully awkward in any public forum, Madison nevertheless possessed a combination of intellect, energy, and political savvy that would mobilize the effort to create an entirely new form of continental union.
The Pennsylvania and Virginia delegates then met frequently during the days leading up to May Together these men would forge a radical new plan, the Virginia Plan, which would shape the course of events during that summer of By seizing the initiative, this small group of nationalist-minded politicians was able to set the terms of debate during the initial stages of the Convention—gearing the discussion toward not whether , but how —a vastly strengthened continental government would be constructed.
On May 28, , the state delegations unanimously agreed to a proposal that would prove invaluable in allowing men like Madison, Wilson, and Morris to move their plan forward. But the rule of secrecy gave to delegates the freedom to disagree, sometimes vehemently, on important issues, and to do so without the posturing and pandering to public opinion that so often marks political debate today.
And it also gave delegates the freedom to change their minds; on many occasion, after an evening of convivial entertainment with one another, the delegates would return the following morning or even the following week or month, and find ways to reach agreement on issues that had previously divided them.
The rule of secrecy helped make the Constitutional Convention a civil and deliberative body, rather than a partisan one.
It helped make compromise an attribute of statesmanship rather than a sign of weakness. It also became immediately clear that, however bold and innovative the plan may have been, there were many delegates in the room who had grave misgivings about some aspects of it.
For nearly four months, the delegates attempted to work through, and resolve, their disagreements. The most divisive of those issues—those involving the apportionment of representation in the national legislature, the powers and mode of election of the chief executive, and the place of the institution of slavery in the new continental body politic—would change in fundamental ways the shape of the document that would eventually emerge on September 17, The delegates haggled over how to apportion representation in the legislature off and on for more than six weeks between May 30 and July Those from large, populous states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania—supporters of the Virginia Plan—argued that representation in both houses of the proposed new congress should be based on population, while those from smaller states such as New Jersey and Delaware—supporters of the New Jersey Plan—argued for equal representation for each state.
The compromise that eventually emerged, one championed most energetically by the delegates from Connecticut, was obvious: representation in the House of Representatives would be apportioned according to population, with each state receiving equal representation in the Senate.
In the final vote on the so-called Connecticut Compromise on July 16, five states supported the proposal; four opposed, including Virginia and Pennsylvania; and one state—Massachusetts—was divided.
James Madison and many of his nationalist colleagues were disconsolate, convinced that the compromise would destroy the very character of the national government they hoped to create. In The Federalist No. In this, as in so many areas, the so-called original meaning of the Constitution was not at all self-evident— even to the Framers of the Constitution themselves.
The debate among the delegates over the nature of the American presidency was more high- toned and more protracted than that over representation in the Congress. They urged their fellow delegates to give the president an absolute veto over congressional legislation. In the end, it was compromise that once again won the day—the delegates agreed to give the President a limited veto power, but one which could be over-ridden by a vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress.
Most of the delegates initially thought that the executive should be elected by the national legislature; still others thought the executive should be elected by the state legislatures or even by the governors of the states.
James Wilson was virtually the only delegate who proposed direct election of the president by the people. He believed that it was only through some form of popular election that the executive branch could be given both energy and independence.
They voted against some version of the proposal on numerous occasions between early June and early September of , only agreeing to the version contained in our modern Constitution modified slightly by the Twelfth Amendment grudgingly and out of a sense of desperation, as the least problematic of the alternatives before them. The other obvious solution—election by members of a national Congress whose perspective was likely to be continental rather than provincial—was ultimately rejected because of the problems it created with respect to the doctrine of separation of powers: the president, it was feared, would be overly beholden to, and therefore dependent upon, the Congress for his election.
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