The Connecticut Compromise Passed by One Vote on July 16, 1787

Five states to four. That was the margin. Not five hundred votes, not five thousand: five delegations against four, with one more split down the middle and unable to vote at all. On that thread hung the United States Senate, the House of Representatives and, quite possibly, the Union itself. People who call the Senate an outdated mistake should know how close we came to having no Constitution to complain about.

The vote came on Monday, July 16, 1787, after six weeks in which the Federal Convention argued about a single question: should the states be represented in the new Congress by population or as equals? The answer, an equal Senate and a proportional House, is called the Connecticut Compromise because Connecticut's delegates, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth above all, kept proposing it until the Convention ran out of alternatives. Here is how it happened, and why the Founders made its core the one provision in the Constitution that ordinary amendment cannot change.

The question that would not go away

The Articles of Confederation gave each state one vote in Congress. Delaware, with a small population, counted the same as Virginia, with many times as many people. When the Virginia Plan was introduced on May 29, it proposed to end that: both houses of a new national legislature would be apportioned by population or by contributions to the treasury.

The large states, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, liked this for an obvious reason. The small states, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut and Maryland among them, saw the same reason from the other side. Under a purely proportional Congress, three large states acting together could come close to running the country.

Both sides argued from principle, and both principles were honourable. James Madison and James Wilson argued that the new government would act on individuals, so individuals should be counted equally; it was unjust for a citizen of Delaware to weigh more than a citizen of Pennsylvania. The small-state men answered that the states were the parties to the Union. They had declared independence together, fought the war together and signed the Articles as equals. They had not agreed to dissolve themselves into a national mass.

Sherman's idea arrives early and loses

Roger Sherman of Connecticut was a self-taught lawyer and former shoemaker who had signed the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. He would go on to sign the Constitution, too, the only man to sign all three of those documents along with the Continental Association of 1774. He was not a dazzling speaker. He was something better: persistent.

On June 11, Sherman proposed that the first branch be apportioned by the number of free inhabitants and that in the second branch each state have one vote. The Convention voted that day to apportion the first branch by population. Then it voted on whether the second branch should have equal suffrage, and Sherman's idea lost, five states to six. The Convention went on to approve proportional representation in the second branch as well.

It is worth stopping on that. The solution that eventually saved the Convention was on the table in the second week of June. It lost because the large states believed they had the votes and did not need to share. That is a pattern every generation of politicians repeats: the majority rejects the deal it will later be grateful for.

The New Jersey Plan and the hardening of positions

On June 15, William Paterson presented the small states' alternative, the New Jersey Plan, which kept the one-state, one-vote Congress of the Articles and added new powers to it. On June 19 the Convention, sitting as a Committee of the Whole, voted to proceed with the Virginia resolutions instead, seven states to three with Maryland divided. The small states lost on paper. They did not give up.

Through late June the debate turned bitter. On June 29 Oliver Ellsworth, Sherman's Connecticut colleague, moved that the second branch have equal representation. He called the proposal a middle ground: the government would be partly national and partly federal, with proportion in one house and equality in the other.

On June 30 Gunning Bedford Jr. of Delaware gave the speech that everyone in the room remembered. He accused the large states of acting from ambition and warned that if they tried to dissolve the confederation and impose their plan, the small states might look abroad for a foreign ally that would treat them with more good faith. It was an extraordinary thing to say in a room presided over by George Washington, and Bedford later explained that he had spoken in the heat of debate. Rufus King of Massachusetts answered him sharply. The Convention was not a seminar. It was a room full of men who believed their states' survival was at stake.

July 2: a tie, and a committee

On Monday, July 2, the Convention voted on Ellsworth's motion for equal suffrage in the second branch. The result was a tie, five states to five, with Georgia divided. A tie meant the motion failed, but it also meant the large states no longer had a majority to impose their plan. The Convention was stuck.

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina proposed a committee of one member from each state to look for a solution. The Convention agreed. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts chaired it, and Benjamin Franklin sat on it. The delegates then adjourned over the Fourth of July, which must have been an uncomfortable holiday.

The committee reported on July 5. Its proposal, often credited to a suggestion by Franklin, paired two things. In the first branch, each state would have one member for every 40,000 inhabitants, and all bills for raising or appropriating money would originate there and could not be altered by the second branch. In the second branch, each state would have an equal vote. The large states got control of the purse; the small states got equality in the other chamber.

The large-state leaders hated it. Madison and Wilson argued against it for days. The Convention spent the following week fighting over the details of House apportionment, including how to count enslaved people and how to adjust seats as the population grew. By the middle of July, the delegates had been in Philadelphia for seven weeks, and two of New York's three delegates, Robert Yates and John Lansing, had gone home.

The vote of July 16

On July 16 the Convention voted on the committee's report as a whole, including equal suffrage in the second branch. Ten states were present to vote. Here is how they went.

Five to four. Massachusetts split because Elbridge Gerry and Caleb Strong voted yes while Rufus King and Nathaniel Gorham voted no, and a divided delegation cast no vote. New York had no vote: Yates and Lansing had gone home, and Hamilton alone could not cast the state's vote. New Hampshire's delegates had not yet arrived. Rhode Island never sent anyone.

Do the arithmetic. If either Gerry or Strong had voted no, Massachusetts would have voted no, and the motion would have failed five to five. If North Carolina had held with the large states, as it had on other votes, the result would have been four to five. The equal Senate passed by the width of a single delegate's conscience.

The next morning the large-state delegates met on their own to decide whether to walk away. They did not. They agreed on no common plan, and the Convention went back to work. That decision is as much a part of the compromise as the vote. Losing gracefully is a constitutional skill, and they had it.

Why Article V guards the equal Senate

The small states did not trust that their victory would last. A future Congress and three-fourths of the states could, in theory, amend the Senate into a population-based body. So the Convention put a guard on it. Article V, after describing how amendments are proposed and ratified, ends with this proviso:

Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

The first part, tied to the slave-trade clause, expired in 1808. The second part is permanent. It is the only provision of the Constitution that cannot be changed by the ordinary amendment process. A state can give up its equal vote; nobody can take it.

Madison, who lost the fight, defended the result in Federalist 62. He wrote that the equal vote "is at once a constitutional recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in the individual States, and an instrument for preserving that residuary sovereignty." He also observed that no law could pass without the concurrence first of a majority of the people and then of a majority of the states, an additional check against improper legislation. The man who argued against equality for weeks ended up explaining why it was wise. That is what a good loser does in a republic.

The objection, answered

Today's critics of the Senate make an argument that Madison and Wilson would have recognised. Stated at its strongest: the Senate violates one person, one vote. A senator from a small state represents a fraction of the citizens a senator from a large state represents, so a citizen in a small state has far more influence over national law. In a democracy, that is unjust, and the Senate should be reformed or abolished.

Here is the answer, in four parts.

1. The Senate was never meant to represent individuals. It represents states as members of a federal union. The House represents individuals and is apportioned by population, with Article I, Section 2 requiring a census every ten years to keep it so. Criticising the Senate for not counting people is like criticising a jury for not being a legislature. It was built for a different job.
2. One person, one vote is a rule for districts within a single legislature, not for a federal structure. The Supreme Court applied it to state legislatures in the 1960s. It has never held that the Senate, which the Constitution itself creates, must follow it, and it could not, because Article V expressly protects the Senate's equality.
3. The compromise was the price of the Union. The record is plain: the small states would not join on any other terms, and the vote on July 16 was five to four. A purely proportional Congress was never one of the options. The real alternative was no Constitution, or several confederacies.
4. The equal Senate protects every state's citizens, including large states'. Interests that a national majority might ignore, farming regions, mountain states, small coastal states, get a hearing because the states are equal there. And the Senate's longer terms and staggered elections slow the rush of temporary majorities, which protects everyone. Federalist 62 and 63 make that case at length.

The verdict: the Senate is undemocratic in the same way the Constitution is undemocratic. It is republican. It filters, slows and divides power on purpose. For the longer form of this argument, see Calling the Senate Undemocratic Misses Why It Was Built to Represent States.

What the vote still teaches

Three things stand out from the story of July 16.

First, the Founders were not demigods who agreed on everything. They were stubborn men who almost failed. That makes the achievement greater, not smaller. The Constitution was not handed down; it was negotiated.

Second, the compromise worked because it was structural. Neither side gave up its principle. The House embodies the people's equality, and the Senate embodies the states' equality, and both chambers must agree before anything becomes law. That is the difference between a good compromise and a bad one. A bad compromise waters down both principles until neither means anything. A good one gives each principle its own room.

Third, the system has outlasted every attempt to tidy it up. The 17th Amendment of 1913 changed how senators are chosen, from state legislatures to popular election, but it did not and could not touch the equal vote. The structure Sherman proposed on June 11 and the Convention adopted on July 16 is still the structure of the United States Senate.

For the wider set of rival plans the compromise resolved, see The Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan and the Final Constitution Compared. For how Federalist 39 describes the mixed national and federal design, see Federalist 39 Shows the Constitution Is Partly National and Partly Federal. And for the argument that slow, divided power is the Constitution working rather than failing, see Gridlock Is the Constitution Working, Not the Constitution Failing.

The case in brief

1. The Convention spent six weeks deadlocked over whether states should be represented by population or as equals.
2. Roger Sherman proposed the answer on June 11 and lost; Oliver Ellsworth renewed it on June 29; a tie on July 2 forced a committee that reported a compromise on July 5.
3. On July 16, 1787 the equal Senate and proportional House passed five states to four, with Massachusetts divided and New York unable to vote.
4. Article V makes the Senate's equal suffrage the one provision no state can lose without its consent.
5. The Senate represents states in a federal republic, and the complaint that it fails to count people mistakes its purpose.

What you can do: read Article I, Sections 2 and 3, and the last clause of Article V on the Constitution page, then look up your two senators on My Representatives and ask each what the equal Senate means for your state.