When the delegates arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they had one goal: to revise the Articles of Confederation. But it quickly became clear that fixing the Articles would not be enough. The problems ran too deep. Within days, the delegates made a bold and controversial decision to scrap the Articles entirely and build something new. Two New York delegates were so outraged by this decision that they walked out and went home.
The debates that followed were intense and often bitter. One of the earliest and most divisive conflicts was over representation. Under the Articles of Confederation, every state had one vote in Congress regardless of its size or population. Larger states argued this was deeply unfair. If the goal was a truly representative government, they said, then states with more people should have more of a say in how the country was run. Smaller states disagreed strongly. They feared that a system based on population would allow a handful of large states to steamroll the rest, leaving smaller states with almost no influence at all. Neither side was willing to back down, and by mid-July the convention had reached a dangerous standstill. Some delegates felt so discouraged that they packed up and left Philadelphia. Washington himself wrote to a colleague that the convention was going nowhere and that he deeply regretted having made the long journey to Philadelphia at all.
Slavery was another source of deep conflict. All delegates recognized the tension between slavery and the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But southern states made their position clear: they would not join a new government that threatened the institution of slavery. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia said their economies depended on enslaved labor. They insisted that abolition was not an option for them. Many northern delegates were against slavery. However, they didn’t push for abolition. They feared it would split the convention and make it impossible to form a new government.
The debates over representation and slavery were also deeply connected to one another. Southern states wanted enslaved people counted in the population when determining how many representatives each state received in Congress. This would give them significantly more political power in the new government. Northern states resisted, arguing it made little sense to count people who had no rights or voice in that government. These disagreements revealed just how different the states were from one another and how difficult it would be to create one government that all of them could accept.
The delegates had arrived in Philadelphia to fix a broken system. Instead, they found that the disagreements between the states were much deeper than anyone had expected, and it was necessary to build something completely new.