State representation disputes deadlocked the Articles of Confederation.
Evidence
“Let the smaller Colonies give equal money and men, and then have equal vote,” Franklin said to open floor debate on representation. “But if they have an equal vote without bearing equal burthens, a confederation upon such iniquitous principles will never last long.” He proposed that each colony (or future state) should receive votes in Congress proportional to their population. Other big-state delegates backed him. “The question is not what we are now but what we ought to be,” John Adams replied to those who argued that every colony currently had one vote each. “The confederation is to make us one individual only; it is to form us, like separate parcels of metal, into one common mass.” Taking aim at Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Maryland, Stephen Hopkins of tiny Rhode Island shot back, “The four largest would contain more than half the inhabitants of the Confederating states, and therefore would govern the others as they should please.” Pennsylvania’s James Wilson responded, “It is asked Shall nine colonies put into the power of four to govern them as they please? I invert the question and ask Shall two millions of people put it in the power of one million to govern them as they please?” In a process requiring a supermajority to conclude anything, these numbers ordained deadlock, eliciting a folksy biblical allusion from Franklin. While some feared “that the whale would swallow Jonas,” he concluded, “Jonas had swallowed the whale.” — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 292
Categorization
- XREF: Direct rehearsal of the great-state/small-state dispute later settled by the Connecticut Compromise — core course material on representation theory. — connects to: Disputes over slavery, size, and western lands delayed the Articles for years. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 296; The debate arose over the fundamental question of the source of federal sovereignty. Did the Union derive its authority from the states, or the people acting through the states, or the people acting directly, or from its predecessor (the Confederation or the British Crown)? Historians have drawn the connection between the Republican and Federalist sides of this debate to the older Country and Court parties of eighteenth-century English politics, but it is Powell who, with characteristic legal insight, links this debate with the choice of constitutional interpretive modes. Republican partisans campaigned for a stringently textual approach to constitutional interpretation, construing grants of congressional authority narrowly vis-à -vis the states and more broadly against the Executive.