Confederation Compromises

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Our founding fathers realized that the Articles of Confederation were greatly flawed, and took on the great responsibility to write a brand new Constitution from scratch. There were a few minor bumps along the way, resulting in three compromises. These three compromises were, The Great Compromise, the Three Fifths Compromise, and lastly the Executive Branch Compromise. The first issue people debated was how many votes should each state get in Congress. The two sides in the debate were the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. The Virginia Plan said that the number of votes per state should be determined by population, meaning states with higher population would have more votes in Congress, and states with less population would have less votes in Congress. This favored the big states (states with higher population) because they got more power in the Congress. The smaller states (states with lower population) didn't like this though because they didn't get as much power in the Congress, so they proposed the New Jersey Plan. The New Jersey plan said that each state would get an equal number of votes in Congress no matter their population. Neither side could seem to come to an agreement, until a man named Roger Sherman suggested that there be two houses in the Congress. One house would be based on population, which was called The House of Representatives. The other house would have an equal number of legislatures per state, called the Senate. This satisfied the big states because they got the House of Representatives, and the little states because they got the Senate. The second issue people debated was The how would slaves be counted to determine votes in the House of Representatives. The two sides of this debate were the North and the South. The North said that they shouldn't count any …show more content…
Some people wanted one executive, because the president could be more efficient in a crisis, while three presidents would be too slow to act in a crisis because the president would take too long to agree on a solution. While people who wanted three presidents said that one president could potentially rule like a king. With three presidents that couldn't happen because they could keep each other in check. The compromise that was reached was that there would be one executive, but the president would be kept in check, because they would be limited to a 4 year term and the Congress would have power to impeach the president. Both sides were satisfied with this arrangement because the people who wanted one president, got one president, and the people who wanted 3 presidents got one president that was limited to a four year term and could potentially be impeached by Congress. This made it extremely difficult for the president to rule like a king, which satisfied the people who wanted 3 presidents. If these compromises never had been made, then our country today would be very different. Without these compromises, people with opposing ideas would probably go to war with each other, causing a Civil War. At the time, our country was too fragile to handle this, so our economy would've collapsed, and Great Britain or France would've come in, and perhaps picked up our remains, claimed our land as their own, so the United States of America would never

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