The Great Compromise
Selase Buatsi & Taddie Cook
Description
The Great Compromise solved the issue of how representation would be decided in the new Constitutionally run government. It combined the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. The Virginia Plan would decide representative based on population, which would benefit the larger state, while the New Jersey Plan would give each state an equal amount of votes, which would benefit the smaller states. Proposed by Roger Sherman from Connecticut, the plan created two houses of Congress. The first house, the Senate, would have two members from each state selected by the state legislature, and the second body, the House of Representatives, would have representation based on population, originally one representative for every thirty thousand people in the state. The representatives were redistributed every ten years based on the census. The House was directly voted on by the people of the state, and would be the location where bills originated. While the compromise solved the question of how the legislature would be composed, it spurred on the question of how should be counted as people for the number of appointed representative, leading to the 3/5 compromise. The Great Compromise was passed on July 16, 1787 by one vote.
Roger Sherman
Sherman created the Great Compromise, or the Connecticut Compromise, along with Oliver Ellsworth
Oliver Ellsworth
Ellsworth was the co-creator of the Great Compromise
Consitutional Convention
Michael Angelo Wageman's Painting of the Constitutional Convention
Significance
The Great Compromise established the legislative branch through a compromise that every state could agree with. If the Great Compromise had not been proposed, the delegates at the Constitutional Convention may not have been able to come up with a system to determine representation in Congress and the Constitution may not have ever been ratified. By setting up representation in Congress, the Compromise determined how much population affects the government which indirectly determined what laws would been passed. If representation had been divided differently in the government, different laws would have been passed by Congress.
Citations
Great Compromise. Digital image. Great Compromise. Bipartisan Policy Center, n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
Kennedy, David M., Lizabeth Cohen, Thomas Andrew Bailey, and Thomas Andrew Bailey. The American Pageant: A History of the Republic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Print.
Roger Sherman. Digital image. Signers of the Declaration of Independance. Ushistory.org, n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
"The Crucial Decade: 1780s." The Crucial Decade 1780s. Rollins College, n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
"1787: A Great Compromise." Senate History. United States Senate, n.d. Web. 11 Oct. 2014.