The Constitutional Convention

NARRATOR: So with our young nation on shaky ground, the states sent their best and brightest representatives to Philadelphia. They came to fix the Articles of Confederation and also to make sure that 200 years later, this city would have a booming constitutionally-themed tourist trade. 

(Narrator taking photos of tourists) Everybody smile. General, General, look severe. Here we go. One more, one more, excellent, oh, yeah, One, two, three... - Oh, that was... - Yeah, that's good. - All right, here we go. Thank you. 

This is the place where it happened back in 1787, Independence Hall, where the delegates, our Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution, gathered to—well, to do what exactly? To find out, I'm meeting with historian Richard Beeman, who literally wrote the book on the Constitutional Convention. 

RICHARD BEEMAN, Historian: As best we know... 

NARRATOR: Yeah.

BEEMAN: ...it's south to north. 

NARRATOR: Right. 

BEEMAN: South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and here's the Massachusetts, New Hampshire delegations. 

NARRATOR: Who called the convention? Who decided? Was there an individual who said, we must gather together? 

BEEMAN: Well, a group of delegates from the Continental Congress, most notably Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. They had seen the ways in which the government under the Articles of Confederation had put this fragile union in danger. 

NARRATOR: Right. 

BEEMAN: The lack of the power to tax, a deepening debt. Nine states had their own navies. Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts. So there's civil unrest. 

NARRATOR: People actually rising up against the government. 

BEEMAN: That's right, so they really do have a sense of crisis that they've got to do something to strengthen this government. 

NARRATOR: So how soon into the beginning of their deliberations did they arrive at the consensus that it wouldn't be enough to fix the Articles; they needed to scrap them and start again? 

BEEMAN: This is James Madison's great strategic ploy. He had come to the convention with his own plan that he'd worked on much of the spring of 1787. And that plan called for a scrapping of the Articles altogether and the creation of, in their words, a supreme national government with a supreme legislature, executive, and judiciary. And that set the tone for the debate from that time on. 

NARRATOR: They deliberated in secret with the windows and doors closed to prevent leaks. The arguments and debates proceeded for four summer months in a room without ventilation, air conditioning, or indoor plumbing. And everybody was wearing wool vests. And they managed to create a whole new form of government. Never before have so many owed so much to people who smelled so badly. 

Madison's goal of creating a strong central government met stiff opposition at the start because the states didn't want to lose their power and autonomy. Besides, they didn't really trust each other. The slave states of the South were suspicious of the free states up North, and a big state like Virginia could step on a small one like Delaware on its way to have a beer with New York and never notice. 

It took weeks of rancorous debate just to come up with a plan for how the states would be represented in the new Congress. But they finally forged a compromise. In the House, there would be representation based on population, giving more power to the larger states. But in the other chamber, each state would have two, and only two, senators. So in one house, the states would have power proportional to their size. In the other, all would be made equal. Try stepping on Delaware now. 

Once they finished hammering it out, the new constitution created a government that was very different from the one it replaced. Under the Articles, there was no chief executive. Now, there would be an elected president. (That's me.) And there would be a federal judiciary, too, with a Supreme Court. (Hello! Hello!) Unlike the old Confederation Congress, this new government would have the power to raise an army on its own and levy taxes to pay for it all. It could issue currency, control foreign trade, and regulate commerce among the several states, that is, interstate commerce. It could also make all laws necessary and proper to carry out its assigned powers. And the framers added what we call the supremacy clause. Federal laws would trump state laws. 

But by listing the government's powers, the framers of the Constitution also limited them. They said this is what the government can do and no more. The states would have their own police forces, control elections, run their schools, make and enforce their own laws as they saw fit. So while the federal government could, say, raise an army and invade Canada if it liked, it couldn't arrest people for littering or give them a parking ticket. 

The framers were striving for a balance of power. Did they come up with the perfect compromise? That is, one that makes absolutely everyone unhappy? 

There's two conflicting points of view. That the Constitution created a limited federal government that could only do things X, Y, and Z, the enumerated powers, or the Constitution was intended to create an enormously powerful federal government. Can you resolve that in terms of the intent of the framers? 

BEEMAN: No. (chuckles) - (chuckles) 

NARRATOR: Fat lot of good you are, sir. 

BEEMAN: Nor could they, because that was their fundamental dilemma. They did not want to create a government of enormous power, but they did want to create a government with real energy.