Editing Constitutional Convention (section)

== Major Debates and Compromises ==

The convention quickly exceeded its mandate to revise the Articles, instead undertaking to write an entirely new constitution. Edmund Randolph of Virginia introduced the Virginia Plan, drafted primarily by James Madison, which proposed a strong national government with a bicameral legislature apportioned by population. This plan favored large states and provoked opposition from smaller states, who countered with the New Jersey Plan preserving the existing structure of equal state representation. The deadlock threatened to dissolve the convention until the Great Compromise (or Connecticut Compromise) established a bicameral legislature with proportional representation in the House of Representatives and equal state representation in the Senate.<ref name="rakove"/>

The question of slavery generated some of the convention's most difficult debates. Southern states sought to count enslaved persons for purposes of representation while not counting them for direct taxation; the Three-Fifths Compromise counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person for both purposes. The convention also agreed to prohibit congressional interference with the slave trade until 1808 and to require the return of fugitives from labor—provisions that would haunt the nation until the Civil War. These compromises reflected the political reality that Southern states would not join a union that threatened slavery, but they embedded a fundamental contradiction in a Constitution premised on liberty and equality.<ref name="waldstreicher">{{cite book |last=Waldstreicher |first=David |title=Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification |year=2009 |publisher=Hill and Wang |location=New York}}</ref>