to travel to Philadelphia, saying “I smelt a rat.”21 Samuel Adams thought himself too old to travel and stayed in Boston, where he served as president of the state senate. More than any other state, Rhode Island had cheapened its currency to benefit debtors; and no one from that state showed up. An apologetic Rhode Islander told Washington that most of the state’s legislators were “licentious . . ., destitute of education, and many of them, Void of principle.”22
THE VIRGINIA PLAN
As the delegates arrived in Philadelphia, one thing was clear to all of them, and most of all to those from Virginia: as the most populous state, the Old Dominion would play a leading role in the Convention. Virginia was the oldest overseas colony of Britain, and until the early 1780s laid claim to all the land from Kentucky to Manitoba. It supplied much of the revolutionary leadership and four of the first five presidents. Without Virginia, the American Revolution would have been an isolated revolt by Massachusetts hotheads, easily suppressed by Britain.
In addition, the impetus for the Convention had come from Virginia. Under the Articles of Confederation the national government lacked the power to regulate interstate commerce, and after the Revolution the states began to levy tariffs on each other’s goods. Virginians, including George Washington and George Mason, wanted to open the Potomac up to trade, but the river lay almost entirely within the borders of Maryland, and navigation rights were disputed between the two states. A trade agreement made sense, and delegates from the two states met in Alexandria in March 1785 to relax trade barriers (even though the Articles of Confederation prohibited interstate treaties of this kind).
The conference was so successful that, when it ended at Mount Vernon, the Virginia delegates proposed a further conference of all thirteen states. This was held in Annapolis in September 1785. John Dickinson from Delaware was chosen president; James Madison and Hamilton attended. Eight states stayed away, however, and five states was too small a quorum for a national agreement. A third conference would be needed, and was called for May 14, 1787, in Philadelphia. Hamilton drafted the Annapolis conference report. The delegates, he said, were unhappy with the “important defects” in the Articles of Confederation, which had rendered “the situation of the United States delicate and critical.” The Philadelphia Convention would be charged with remedying these defects, a task that would require “an exertion of the united virtue and wisdom of all the members of the Confederacy.”23
The Virginians arrived in Philadelphia before any of the other out-of-state delegates. James Madison was there on May 5, and the rest of the Virginians arrived by May 17. A quorum of seven states was not in place until May 25. Had everyone arrived on time, the Convention would likely have begun cautiously; but having arrived early, the Virginians used the opportunity to steal a march on the other delegates. Madison later recalled that “on the arrival of the Virginia Deputies at Philada, it occurred to them that from the early and prominent part taken by that State in bringing about the Convention some initiative step might be expected from them.”24 And so they met as a group for two to three hours a day to prepare a plan for a new constitution.25
The first day of substantive business was May 29. The delegates arrived at the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), where eleven years before eight of them had signed the Declaration of Independence. Shuffling in, they took their places at Windsor chairs arranged by state in semicircles around a raised dais, before tables covered in green baize, in a room small enough that every delegate was visible and every ordinary conversation audible. The delegates looked about, at the room, at each other, with anxious surmise, knowing that everything for which they had struggled, as far back as the Stamp Act, had led to this place and this time, and that all their efforts might be for naught if they failed to reach an agreement.
At ten o’clock, the door was closed behind them by sentries who stood watch to ensure that none but the delegates could enter. Washington had been unanimously elected the president of the Convention, and he ascended the dais to open the session. James Madison took a seat next to him to take notes of the proceedings. Stately, plump Edmund Randolph, Virginia’s governor, stood up, and Washington nodded at him to speak. What Randolph would read came to be known as the Virginia Plan. It proposed scrapping the Articles of Confederation, and the debate over it dominated the Convention for its first six weeks.
Randolph was a member of one of Virginia’s most prominent families, and a second cousin of Thomas Jefferson. He was bluff and well-spoken, but seemed almost apologetic as he began to read off the resolutions the Virginians had prepared. The plan was not from Randolph’s pen, but principally from that of Madison, the man at Washington’s side, and Randolph did not wish to claim the credit for drafting it. But Madison was halting in speech and spoke so lowly that his voice was often lost. At five and a half feet, he was a full head shorter than George Washington. Clearly, he was not the man to present a plan for a wholly new constitution for the country.
Few of the other delegates were prepared for the Virginia Plan. When Congress had joined the call for the Convention, in February 1787, it proposed that the delegates meet “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the states render the federal government adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union.”26 This was a call to tinker with the Articles, nothing more. Some delegates argued that, since it exceeded the mandate from Congress, the Virginia Plan was out of order. As the Convention continued, bitter words were exchanged. Several delegates threatened to walk out in protest, and some indeed did so.
Nevertheless, the delegates continued talking. The prestige of the Virginia delegation, and the presence of Washington, made it difficult to ignore the Virginia Plan. It was also that which had sorely been lacking: a plan, a serious attempt to amend the defects of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by the thoughtful James Madison. And it was backed by a core of nationalists from Virginia and Pennsylvania, the two largest states.
Madison had outlined his thoughts about government in an essay entitled Vices of the Political System of the United States, written a month before the Convention began,27 and the imprint of the essay can be seen throughout the Virginia Plan. The problem, he argued, was that government under the Articles was both too decentralized and too democratic. The ultimate authority rested with the states, and the decisions of Congress were little more than recommendations. In addition, state governments were excessively democratic, and the honest delegate too often “the dupe of a favorite leader, veiling his selfish views under the professions of public good, and varnishing his sophistical arguments with the glowing colours of popular eloquence.” Sadly, the voice of (ahem) “individuals of extended views, and of national pride” were silenced by the demagogues.
For an answer to these ills, Madison borrowed two ideas from David Hume, whom he had studied at Princeton.28 Hume had proposed, in a 1754 essay on the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, a highly artificial scheme of government that began with a division of Great Britain and Ireland into one hundred counties, each with one hundred parishes, and built up from there with parish meetings, county-town assemblies, county magistrates, and senators. It would be difficult to imagine anything more at odds with Hume’s empiricism, with his belief that political arrangements were the product of messy historical quarrels that owed more to contingent conventions and accidental arrangements than to abstract reasoning; and one is permitted to wonder whether the essay was only half-serious, and meant in part as a satire on political theorizing—a possibility that surely would have escaped the humorless Madison.
And yet Hume’s essay was something more than a satire. He believed that some constitutions were better than others,29 and that speculations about the best kind of constitution were “the most worthy curiosity of any the wit of man can possibly devise.” It would be foolish to propose radical changes to existing, benign constitutions, like that of Britain, he thought. But what if
