Essay: American politics

In 1787, the agreement at the end of the Constitutional Convention that the United States would have a two house legislature plan, (with both an upper and a lower house) was far from predictable. The standard narrative is that in the end, both Federalists and Antifederalists came to an agreement in order to make the Constitution. Ravoke challenges the image of the convention as a “cumulative process of bargaining and compromise in which a rigid adherence to principle was subordinated to the pragmatic tests of reaching agreement and building consensus.” Through The Great Compromise: Ideas, Interests, and the Politics of Constitution Making, Jack Ravoke disputes the standard interpretation of the forming of the Constitution by arguing that the deliberations over representation was very much an unconventional and complicated process. Although it may appear that the decisions made at the Federal Convention were predictable, in reality, “the Great Compromise was a compromise in name only.”

James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Federalist Papers, was in favor of a strong central government and promoted the Virginia Plan. This plan was supported by large states as it advocated that each state should receive representation based on population. This plan was in stark contrast to the New Jersey Plan, which was favored by the smaller states because it called for equal representation coming from each state. At the heart of Madison’s argument was the idea small states did not need nor deserve representation. Madison’s theory was that “states themselves were not real interests deserving representation. As political entities they were mere units of convenience that ultimately embodied only the fictitious legal personality of all corporations. States possessed interests, but these interests were rooted in the attributes of individuals: in property, occupation, religion opinion.” He concluded that “the new government had to be empowered to act not indirectly through the states but directly upon their populations. Stripping the states of what might be called their federal functions would undermine their major claim to a right of equal representation.”

Madison’s “extend the sphere theory” was certainly unique to the American Revolution, which support’s Gordon Wood’s theory that the American Revolution was radical due to resulting changes in people’s conceptions, such as property and labor. Wood emphasizes that as a historian he has taken important care to “set these issues in their proper context for fully understanding them,” which helps to explain how for the time, conclusions made at events such as the Great Compromise were certainly not ordinary for this time in history. The ideas and mentality that sprung from the Constitutional Convention were revolutionary for the time, even though they did not result in “substantive change in the lot of those who were most oppressed, subjugated, or marginal in the society.”

For example, Madison’s conceptualization of a large republic as being beneficial for the “great and aggregate interests” stemmed from Federalist 10. This theory explains how a republic can be successful when it is made up of a more diverse population and take in a “greater variety of parties and interests.” Historically, republics such as Rome and Britain had been a failure, so the push for the United States to try for one was both risky and revolutionary. The “well-constructed union” would thus serve as a safeguard against domestic faction and insurrection within a large republic. In this sense, the larger the republic, the better because the country would be more likely to get more ideas and avoid factions. A small republic would result in only a majority rule and would produce “the danger of sectionalism,” which can be seen through the mobs that arose in the colonies during the war. Madison’s idea of extending the sphere thus drives the behavior of Western Expansion because at this point, for the large republic to succeed the United States would need more immigrants.