Informative Essay: The Constitutional Convention
The constitutional convention helped solve many issues between the states through compromising. However, it also created many problems. The four main issues discussed were; What form will our government take to avoid any one person or group having all of the power? How will we structure the government to keep each ruling group or person from becoming corrupt? How will the states be represented? And lastly, should this new government outlaw slavery? In our Constitutional convention, we decided to have different branches of government in charge of separate actions, following the Connecticut/Sherman plan. There would be a bicameral legislature; a congress with a lower and upper house, which make up the legislative branch, the judicial
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This is also included in the Connecticut plan. No one could agree on if representation should be based on population or if it should be equal. Impressive points were made on both sides, such as, how population based representation could result in only a few states running the country, while the smaller ones have no say. On the contrary, bigger states that have more people have more viewpoints from their state, creating the need for more representation. In the great compromise, proposed by Roger Sherman, the lower house delegates would be determined by population, and the upper house would be an equal amount of representatives from each state. One minor topic discussed along with this was if slaves should count as population. This was just to gain power, as many states had about as many slaves as they did citizens. I particularly loved what Benjamin Franklin said about the proposal. “If you treat them as people, they count as people.” However, he apparently was not influential enough and the 3/5s compromise was made. This allowed each slave to be worth 3/5s of a person when determining population. There were definitely many problems with this, one being the fact that you can actually buy political power, but it was the only thing almost everyone could settle
This is also included in the Connecticut plan. No one could agree on if representation should be based on population or if it should be equal. Impressive points were made on both sides, such as, how population based representation could result in only a few states running the country, while the smaller ones have no say. On the contrary, bigger states that have more people have more viewpoints from their state, creating the need for more representation. In the great compromise, proposed by Roger Sherman, the lower house delegates would be determined by population, and the upper house would be an equal amount of representatives from each state. One minor topic discussed along with this was if slaves should count as population. This was just to gain power, as many states had about as many slaves as they did citizens. I particularly loved what Benjamin Franklin said about the proposal. “If you treat them as people, they count as people.” However, he apparently was not influential enough and the 3/5s compromise was made. This allowed each slave to be worth 3/5s of a person when determining population. There were definitely many problems with this, one being the fact that you can actually buy political power, but it was the only thing almost everyone could settle