&nb sp;   Today in class, we watched the movie “A more perfect union” which is about the history of the American government and particularly the writing and acceptance of the Constitution. I think it is amazing to see how these men decided to gather together in order to develop and improve the government of the US. Even more amazing is the way it happened. When the different States realized that the Articles of Confederation were not working well, the result was an economic crisis along with revolts, they wanted to amend them in order to provide for the security of the new nation. However, one man James Madison decided to come with a brand new plan, requiring abolishing the former Articles of Confederation. This was a bold move, which led to a lot of debate in the Congress. The simple fact of abolishing the Articles was against the mission of delegates of each States, behind this first difficulty laid another bigger one. In fact, Madison envisioned a government composed of two chambers each with representatives in proportion to the population of each State, this idea came from the principle of fairness in the representation of the people’s opinion. This was evidently favored by the big States with a large population which were hoping for a more important role in the government; nevertheless, the smaller States were strongly opposed because they saw this project as one leading to the end of their influence. The debates lasted for many weeks over this issue, each side stayed firm in its opinion because most of the representatives were thinking in term of interests of States instead of people. Finally a compromise was reached: one of the chambers was to be with proportional representation, in the other each States had two votes without consideration of the size of the State. This brought a whole new kind of government, one which was democratic and represented the people, with a central government having power, but also divided in States, each of which also had power. This genius compromise led to the actual writing of the Constitution. I am amazed by the process those persons went through in the sole purpose of developing the new nation and finally ended up writing a masterpiece of government.

Tags: Constitution Writing Congress Articles Of Confederation

Bookmark: