Constitution of United States of America

The Framers refers to the body of representatives who collaboratively authored the Constitution at a convention held in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall during the summer of 1787. The states, except for Rhode Island, nominated 70 delegates. Fifty-five delegates attended, and 39 signed the Constitution. Many of these men had played significant roles in the American Revolution and securing independence from the British crown. They included Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and others.

The Framers sought to create a government for the United States founded on Enlightenment ideas such as sovereignty of “the people,” natural rights, the belief that government should protect those rights and the prerogatives of individual liberty, and the idea that a careful division of government powers could systematically thwart the abuse of power. They thought, too, that a written Constitution could represent the will of the people and constitute said government, all without a monarch or other source of legitimacy and power. Their ideas were drawn from a variety of sources, from the classical world to John Locke to Montesquieu and Rousseau to the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Framers produced in the US Constitution a document of global historical importance. It was the first of its kind, establishing a new form of government, and it led to the creation of similar constitutions around the world.

Most of The Framers were men of wealth, so “commoners” played little role in the Constitution’s crafting. Because of their experience, the Framers were careful to draft a constitution that separated powers, and that rejected elements of the English legal tradition, like refining the definition of treason, which in Britain included disloyalty to the monarch.

James Madison, a staunch Federalist, and eventually fourth president of the United States, served as an influential delegate from Virginia. Madison introduced his “Virginia Plan” at the convention. He argued for three branches of government with a bicameral federal legislature, allotting delegates proportionate to each state’s population. This plan would have given a strong advantage to large states. The “New Jersey Plan,” by contrast, proposed a unicameral legislature. In this version, each state would have equal representation regardless of the population. The two plans seemed impossible to reconcile, but Roger Sherman of Connecticut proposed a winning solution. His plan, called the “Great Compromise” or the “Connecticut Plan,” proposed two houses of Congress, one that resembled the Virginia proposal (the House of Representatives) and the other that resembled the New Jersey one (the Senate).