Madison’s Opponents and Constitutional Design
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outside Madison’s original coalition resolutely opposed slavery. Connecticut now played a pivotal role
by defending the South’s policy prerogatives. Sherman argued that, “as the States were now possessed of
the right to import slaves, as the public good did not require it to be taken from them, & as it was
expedient to have as few objections as possible to the proposed scheme of Government, he thought it best
to leave the matter as we find it” (RFC August 22, II: 369, 372-5). Yet another committee developed a
grand compromise on these sticky issues of commercial authority. The committee’s “understanding”
allowed the import of African slaves until 1800 while requiring only simple legislative majorities to enact
commercial treaties (RFC August 24, II: 400). This compromise more clearly demarcated the spheres of
national and state policy authority. The national government could provide commercial treaties required
by national sovereignty, but it could not interfere with the way a state managed economic assets it
considered vital, even one as reprehensible as slavery (RFC August 29, II: 449-53).
Sherman also successfully fought back proposals by Madison and others to authorize national
canal construction, corporate charters, a national university, and militia regulation (RFC August 18, II:
326, 330-3; September 12, II: 587-8; September 14, II: 615-6). Sherman, though, showed no hesitation to
use national law to limit negative externalities of policy made by other states. He supported an absolute
national prohibition on states’ power to issue currency (RFC June 8, I: 165; August 28, II: 439).
Protecting State Agency in National Policy-Making. After July 16, the struggle to control the
national policy-making process focused on specific choices about the powers and selection of Congress,
the President, and the courts. Once the Convention had agreed to make the Senate the agent of the state
governments, Madison and several allies took up the fight to make the President independent of Congress,
or, as Madison put it, to give the President “free agency with regard to the Legislature” and to broaden
Presidential powers (RFC July 17, I: 34; 19, I: 56). Confident that the most vulnerable states had a
credible defense in the Senate, Sherman advanced proposals to make national policy makers as dependent
on the Senate as possible (RFC July 17, I: 29; July 18, II: 41-43; August 24, II: 405-406). The Committee
of Detail’s August 6 draft was more consistent with Sherman’s preferences than Madison’s. State
legislatures would directly choose U.S. Senators and would determine voter qualifications, districts and
Convention