The Great Compromise the Virginia and New Jersey Plans

¶ … Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan, the Great Compromise, and the Three-Fifths Compromise lead our current form of Congress? 300 words The Virginia Plan, the New Jersey and Plan and the Great Compromise all essentially contributed to the way in which Congress is today by setting the parameters of representation. The Virginia Plan was put forward by John Adams and basically urged that Congress should consists of representatives that were based on the population of each state.

Thus, if a state had more people, it would have more representatives in Congress; if it had fewer, its number of representatives would be fewer. It was feared, of course, by smaller states that because of their smaller population size, they would have less voice in the course of governmental affairs. Thus, the New Jersey Plan was developed as an alternative. This plan suggested that every state should same the same number of representatives to Congress, no matter what its population size was.

The Great Compromise was, in effect, a compromise between the two views: Congress became bi-cameral -- that is, it had two houses -- one to accommodate the Virginia Plan (this was the House of Representatives) and one to accommodate the New Jersey Plan (this was the Senate). Both would consist of legislators who would be indispensible in the crafting of new laws that would impact the country as a whole. Today, Congress is still made up of this same Compromise.

The Three-Fifths Compromise was related to the Virginia Plan portion of Congress in that it ironically allowed the South to count every slave as up to three-fifths of a person, thus ensuring that the slaves were "represented" in Congress, too -- even though they really were not. This was just enacted so that Southerners could feel as though they were not being short-changed in the government on account of Northerners have more representative power in Congress than they. 2. Explain the reasons behind the failure of the Articles of Confederation.

Describe the part Shay's Rebellion played in the decision to revise the Articles. 300 words The Articles of Confederation were weak and intentionally so -- the states did not want a strong central government that could tyrannize them individually or collectively. The states wanted to be autonomous, have their own legislature and be only loosely united to one another in their overall, common aim. The Articles were not designed to do any more than provide a loose-knit framework for the individual states to follow.

As Patterson (2012) notes, "Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had no judiciary and no independent executive. All authority was vested in the Congress, but it was largely a creature of the states" (p. 29). The way the Articles were set up, they could only be amended if all the states unanimously agreed. Thus, the Articles were established more out of necessity than out of practicality.

The struggle for Independence from Britain had given rise to that necessity -- now that Independence was one, what to do with it and how to maintain order among the states was the new question. Shays' Rebellion, which was the result of the former Revolutionary War soldiers (farmers).