A Senate of the States: July 14th, 1787

Article V Blog ^ | November 30th 2017 | Rodney Dodsworth

[Jacquerie]

As of this Saturday in mid-July, the familiar enumeration of specific powers in Article I § 8 and prohibitions in Sections 9 & 10 didn’t exist. Delegates had agreed to a single executive, a judiciary, a House of Representatives proportioned by population, and little else. From Madison’s notes it appears that most delegates assumed the new government would act only on the people, and not the states. Without knowing if the new government was to act on just the people (a national government) or the people plus the states (mixed national and federal), today’s proceedings were somewhat murky and confusing as delegates could not quite settle their minds around the idea of concurrent governments, that of the preexisting states together with the new government.

Indeed, Imperium et Imperio, the question of a state within a state, was the source of vexing problems which led to the American Revolution and afflicts the United States today. Only fourteen years before the convention, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson told the General Court, “I know of no line than can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies; it is impossible there should be two independent legislatures in one and the same state. The consequence is, either that the colonies are the vassals of the Parliament, or that they are totally independent.”

The accepted impossibility of a lasting state-within-a-state republic was perhaps the Anti-Federalists' best bludgeon against ratification of the Constitution. Ultimately, the decision to design either a national or compound national/federal system in which each government was supreme in its sphere of authority was central to the task of the convention: secure the common defense, liberty, and general welfare of the union.