Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787

The most important question at the Constitutional Convention was how to balance power between the states and the federal government. Practically everyone agreed on the need for a new institutional arrangement, given the acute weaknesses of Congress under the Articles of Confederation. Classical republican theory held that government should be as localized as possible so as to mirror the local population’s character and interests. As things currently stood, the states were in fact the sovereign power, and at that time it was common to refer to the United States as a plural entity (singular pronouns were not common until after the Civil War). Given that many people “mistrusted a strong central government and preferred some version of the old Confederacy, where Congress could be controlled by the states” (105), the Convention could only produce slight revisions to address discrete problems. It could not innovate a new form of government with no historical precedent. As Bowen explains, “innovation was a word that had been in bad repute for centuries. It meant something impulsive, a trifle addled, the work of an enthusiast and certainly an infringement on the law” (12). Anything that went too far outside of established strictures was considered neither permissible nor prudent.