American Political History

No question defeated the Constitutional Convention like the question of how to choose a president. Across the summer of 1787 the delegates balloted on it some 60 times — popular election crushed 9 states to 1 after George Mason compared it to referring “a trial of colours to a blind man”; election by Congress condemned by Gouverneur Morris as “the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals”; electors adopted in July and unwound 5 days later; a motion for a president serving for life that d...

On June 1st, 1787, the Constitutional Convention reached the resolution nobody had wanted to write: a national executive. James Wilson moved that it consist of a single person — and the room went silent, long enough that 81-year-old Franklin had to coax the delegates into speaking. The reason for the silence sat on the dais: every man present was measuring an office for General Washington, in his presence, weighing out loud how much power one man could be trusted with while the man himself sa...

The most notorious fraction in American history did not begin as a claim about personhood. It began as a tax formula — proposed in 1783, in the same Philadelphia room, by James Madison himself, to settle how slave states would be billed for the war debt. In that fight the North demanded the enslaved be counted in full, and the South demanded they barely count at all... because the count meant money. Four years later, James Wilson lifted the dead amendment’s exact words into the plan of the ne...

On June 11th, 1787, Roger Sherman proposed the settlement — population in the House, one vote per state in the Senate — and the Constitutional Convention voted it down without a debate. This is the story of the 5 weeks it cost to walk back: Luther Martin’s 2-day endurance speech; Benjamin Franklin, 81 and unchurched, asking a deadlocked room why it had never once prayed — and the convention adjourning without a vote because it couldn’t afford a chaplain; Gunning Bedford telling the large stat...

In the second week of June 1787, the small states stopped losing votes politely. David Brearley proposed erasing every state boundary and redrawing America into 13 equal parts. William Paterson declared New Jersey would never confederate on proportional representation — “I would rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate” — and James Wilson answered that Pennsylvania would never confederate on anything else. This is the story of the counterstroke: the New Jersey Plan, 9 reso...