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  | The United States of America is governed according to a set of principles which have been written up in a Constitution. The Constitution was put together by a group of distinguished men representing twelve of the thirteen individual states in existence after the War of Independence.
These states had been forming as the country swelled with immigrants and frontiers expanded. The representatives met during the summer of 1787 in the city of Philadelphia .
The states did need an effective union. A priority was that they needed to be able to defend themselves. The War of Independence had only recently been won and people still worried about losing their freedom. What if the British decided to try and re-conquer the territory?! Effective defence meant being able to raise taxes to pay for an army. That required central co-ordination. | | |
 | At this time, there was no clearly understood relationship between an individual person and government. People were not inclined to give too much power to one central authority. Their experiences in Europe , at the hands of kings and queens, had left them distrusting and fearful. Too much power in the hands of too few might threaten the rights of the people, especially minority groups. That relationship had to be sorted.
The kind of people who were settling in the New World were of an independent mindset and did not take kindly to authority being imposed upon them. The men writing the Constitution needed a system of government which could be accepted by everyone. Bear in mind, at this point, in the late eighteenth century, people don't even really think of themselves as Americans.
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 | The other underlying challenge was to satisfy the different and often conflicting interests of the individual states and at the same time make sure that the union could work. The thirteen individual states which existed at the time of the framing of the Constitution were very different. Their populations and economic foundations differed quite a bit and this meant that disputes were common.
Merchants and traders favoured a strong central government which, they believed, would stimulate trade. Trade was particularly important to the economy of Massachusetts , for example, and those active in politics tended to come from the merchant classes.
By contrast, in Virginia , the economy was based on farming, principally of tobacco which was exported to Britain . Farmers had been left with enormous debts after the war. They thought more in terms of protecting crop prices rather than opening up trade borders. They did not want strong central government. They believed their own state governments would respond better to their local needs.
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  | | The states also differed greatly in terms of population size. Smaller states did not want to have their interests overwhelmed by larger ones. Each state wanted their idea of a fair say in government.
It had already been decided that Congress should be modelled after the Parliament of Great Britain and have two Houses, a system known as bicameral legislature. The initial proposition was that states would have a varying number of representatives in each house, in proportion to their population. But smaller states, which would have had fewer representatives, were afraid that they would have less influence in Congress, so they argued for every state to have the same number of representatives, regardless of size.
The representatives arrived at the “Great Compromise”. In the House of Representatives (the lower house), representatives would be allocated to each state according to the size of the population. In the Senate (the upper house), each state would have equal representation, regardless of its population.
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 | The issue of slavery threatened to prevent agreement. The Southern states had large numbers of slaves, in some cases up 30% of the population. If a slave counted as a member of the population, this would increase the number of representatives from that state (in the lower house) and, therefore, its influence in the law making process.
The Northern states were opposed to this. They had a comparatively small slave population and many Northern delegates were opposed, in principle, to slavery. At the same time, the Northern states were anxious to bring about a new, strong system of government, so the representatives arrived at another compromise: five slaves were to count as three voters. This was known as ‘The Three-fifths Compromise'.
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 | Eventually the Constitution of the country was composed in such a way that the structure of government made allowances for everyone's demands without entirely satisfying anyone. This explains a variety of apparent anomalies and contradictions which you will come across when you study different political issues in the US . The arrangements were deliberate. The results were not always predictable.
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