Practice questions: The Constitutional Convention and Ratification

Answer: (B) Backcountry farmers who distrusted distant and wealthy officeholders.

1. Merchants in the port towns generally wanted the Constitution, because it let Congress regulate commerce and set uniform import duties.
2. Opposition to ratification was strongest among small farmers who feared that lawyers and creditors would run a distant national government.
3. Creditors who held war debt wanted a government able to collect taxes and pay what it owed, the opposite of this warning against moneyed men.
4. The Annapolis convention of 1786 was organized by nationalists, including Madison and Hamilton, who then pushed for the Philadelphia meeting and for ratification.

Answer: (D) Indebted farmers' armed resistance to state taxes and debt collection in 1786–1787.

1. The British army left Boston in March 1776, more than a decade before this speech, and the speaker is describing disorder among his own neighbors.
2. Fighting in the Ohio country was real in these years, but the disorder he describes was neighbors in western Massachusetts taking up arms against their state government.
3. The whiskey tax and the western Pennsylvania rising against it came in 1794, six years after this convention met.
4. In 1786–1787, farmers who could not pay debts and taxes in hard money closed Massachusetts courts, an uprising remembered as Shays's Rebellion, and that shock pushed many listeners toward a stronger national government.

Answer: (A) A large state's refusal threatened the ratifications still required.

1. By late January 1788 only Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut had ratified, and Article VII required nine conventions, so a no from a large state such as Massachusetts was widely treated as able to sink the rest.
2. The new government was not organized until 1789, after a ninth state had ratified and elections had been held.
3. Article VII set the threshold at nine ratifying conventions, not at unanimous approval by all thirteen.
4. Article VII gave the decision to special conventions, and no single state cast a vote that bound the others.

Answer: (C) Congress had no reliable way to fund the government or pay the war debt.

1. The clause left collection with the state legislatures, so the complaint was that the states had kept the taxing power, not that they had surrendered it.
2. In the Confederation Congress each state cast one vote, so population did not decide who dominated.
3. Congress could request money, but it depended on thirteen legislatures to lay and collect the taxes, and through the 1780s those requisitions went unpaid.
4. The Articles created no national court system and no executive, so there were no federal courts to overturn state laws.

Answer: (A) It based representation on population or taxes paid, instead of an equal vote for each state.

1. Under the Articles each state had one vote in a single house; the Virginia Plan, offered on May 29, 1787, proposed to weight representation by what a state paid or by its free population.
2. One vote per state in one house was the Articles' rule and the heart of the New Jersey Plan, which the delegates rejected in June, seven states to three.
3. The resolution distributes seats among the states; it does not hand the legislature's votes to governors.
4. The reservation of powers not expressly delegated is Article II of the Articles, not a change proposed in this resolution.

Answer: (D) Private notes kept by James Madison and published long after the Convention adjourned.

1. The secrecy rule forbade printing what was said, and Philadelphia papers did not carry a daily transcript; the Constitution itself was published only after the signing, on September 19.
2. The Confederation Congress was a different body and did not keep the record of the closed debates in the State House.
3. Delegates were not free to carry the debates home for publication that summer, and no set of legislative hearings from those months became the record.
4. Madison took detailed notes for himself, and they remained unpublished until 1840, after his death, which is why they are the main window on the debates.

Answer: (B) A population-based House paired with a Senate that gave each state an equal vote.

1. The three-fifths rule settled a fight over whether enslaved people would swell a state's population count, not the fight over large states swallowing small ones.
2. On July 16, 1787, the Great Compromise, also called the Connecticut Compromise, passed by a margin of a single state: House seats by population, and two senators for each state.
3. The Electoral College, settled later in the summer, answered how to choose the president, not how many votes a small state would have in Congress.
4. The ban on export taxes was part of the commerce bargain between North and South, not the remedy for equal state votes.

Answer: (A) An equal vote for each state in the Senate.

1. The Senate kept the Articles' equal state voice: each state received two senators, however large or small its population.
2. Population-based House seats were the break with the Articles, the large states' side of the July 16 bargain.
3. A state's electors equal its representatives plus its senators, so the number varies with population rather than staying at one vote per state.
4. The three-fifths ratio adjusted how enslaved people entered a population count; it did not give each state one equal vote.

Answer: (B) A bargain about state size would still leave the conflict over slavery unsettled.

1. The speaker separates the two divisions: size was one fight, and slavery, not the size of the state, was the deeper sectional one.
2. The Senate bargain allotted power among states by size; the fights over counting enslaved people, the import trade, and fugitives still had to be bargained in August.
3. Northern states had begun gradual abolition, but in June 1787 slavery had not ended in all of them, and the great majority of enslaved people lived in the South.
4. Equal Senate seats divided power among state governments; they gave enslaved people neither the vote nor citizenship.

Answer: (C) It increased slaveholding states' House seats without giving enslaved people a vote.

1. The fraction is a rule for apportioning seats and direct taxes, not a ballot cast by any person.
2. The count includes all free persons, not only voters, and then adds three-fifths of the enslaved population.
3. Adding three-fifths of the enslaved population raised the House strength of slaveholding states, while those people themselves could not vote.
4. Equal numbers belong to the Senate; House seats follow this population count, which is why Virginia's initial allotment was far larger than Delaware's.

Answer: (D) An import ban had to wait until 1808, while escapees from bondage were to be returned.

1. The date limited only Congress's power to stop importation; slavery in the states, and the domestic trade that let Virginia sell people south, continued long after 1808.
2. The clause stopped Congress from banning what an existing state chose to admit; it did not order any state to keep the trade open.
3. The delegates did not set emancipation for 1808; when South Carolina asked to move the date from 1800 to 1808, the extension passed 7–4, with the New England states voting yes.
4. Article I delayed a congressional ban on importation until 1808, and Article IV separately required that a person who escaped bondage be delivered up on the claimant's demand.

Answer: (A) Protections for slavery were accepted to keep the Lower South inside the Union.

1. South Carolina treated the slave trade as the price of staying in the Union, and the delegates then protected importation until 1808, counted three-fifths for seats, and required the return of fugitives.
2. No vote at Philadelphia set a date to abolish slavery in the states; the 1808 date limited only a future ban on importation.
3. The North did not vote as one bloc: the New England states voted with the Lower South to extend the import protection from 1800 to 1808.
4. Southern delegates wanted enslaved people counted toward House seats, which is why the fight was over what fraction to add, not over leaving them out.

Answer: (C) Elector totals included House seats shaped by counting three-fifths of enslaved people.

1. A state's electors equal its representatives plus its two senators, so Virginia's total was far larger than Delaware's.
2. The three-fifths figure never became a ballot; enslaved people gained no vote for electors or for Congress.
3. Article II ties electors to House seats plus senators, and the three-fifths count enlarged Southern House delegations, so it also enlarged the South's weight in choosing the president.
4. The Constitution created no permanent claim on the presidency for Virginia or for any other state.

Answer: (D) Declarations of rights in the state constitutions written after 1776.

1. The Articles listed no bill of rights; their structure was a league of states with a one-house Congress.
2. Federalist No. 10 appeared in November 1787, after Mason wrote, and it argues about faction, not about copying state declarations.
3. The Declaratory Act of 1766 asserted Parliament's power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever; it did not grant a list of liberties.
4. After independence, most states wrote constitutions that included a declaration of rights, and that was the model Mason invoked when he asked for a federal list on September 12.

Answer: (B) States ignored Congress's requests for money and taxed one another's trade.

1. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 already set a path from territory to statehood, so admission was not the gap these two clauses filled.
2. Under the Articles, Congress could neither tax nor regulate trade, requisitions went unpaid, and some states taxed goods from their neighbors.
3. The Confederation Congress voted by state, one vote each, not by population.
4. The Articles created no national courts, so none were striking down state laws.

Answer: (A) Persuade New York to ratify the Constitution proposed in Philadelphia.

1. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay published the eighty-five essays, signed Publius, to win New York's ratifying convention for the Constitution.
2. Keeping the Articles and only amending them was the ground of many opponents, not the aim of Publius.
3. A second convention was what some opponents, including New York's convention after it ratified, still hoped for; the essays argued for accepting the plan already written.
4. The Democratic-Republican party took shape in the 1790s, during fights over the bank and foreign policy, and did not exist when these essays were addressed to New York.

Answer: (C) Listed powers made a bill of rights unnecessary, and a partial list risked weakening rights left off it.

1. Supporters defended a division of power between the nation and the states, not the abolition of the states.
2. The Articles contained no guarantee of a free press, and they were the frame opponents said was too weak, not a shield for printers.
3. Federalists said a government of named powers had no authority to invade the rights listed by critics, and they warned that writing some rights down could be read as surrendering the rest, a worry the Ninth Amendment was later meant to meet.
4. The Electoral College chooses the president; it does not restrain interference with religion or printing.

Answer: (B) Montesquieu's view that a republic survives only in a small territory.

1. Mercantilism was an imperial trade policy from before independence, not an argument about how large a republic can be.
2. Brutus was using the Enlightenment claim, associated with Montesquieu, that republics stay free only when the territory is small, against Madison's case for an extended republic.
3. Divine-right monarchy was the theory republican writers of the Revolution had rejected, and it is not the source of this warning about size.
4. Republican motherhood concerned women's role in educating citizens, not the geographic limits of a republic.

Answer: (D) A two-thirds vote of each house overrides a presidential veto.

1. Election of senators by state legislatures was a real feature of the original Constitution, but it did not set one branch's ambition against another's.
2. Sending the Constitution to conventions rather than legislatures was a rule of ratification, not a check inside the new government.
3. The three-fifths ratio shaped House numbers and electors; it was not a device by which one branch blocks another.
4. The veto lets the president stop a bill, and the two-thirds override lets Congress pass it anyway, which is the kind of mutual restraint Federalist No. 51 defends.

Answer: (A) The convention ratified the Constitution and recommended amendments to be sought afterward.

1. On February 6, 1788, Massachusetts assented by 187 to 168 and, in the same instrument, recommended amendments, the pattern of ratifying now and trusting a bill of rights to follow.
2. The assent came first; the recommendations did not postpone ratification until amendments were adopted.
3. One state convention could not amend the Constitution; Article V requires proposal by two-thirds of both houses and ratification by three-fourths of the states.
4. Massachusetts did not void its vote or demand a second convention within a year; a call for another convention came later, from New York, and no such convention met.

Answer: (C) Pressure from creditors and merchants after western Massachusetts farmers closed the courts.

1. Federalist No. 51 is a structural argument about liberty and separated power, which fits the ideological reading rather than a creditor-versus-debtor story.
2. Demands for conscience and a free press treat rights and concentrated power as the issue, which is Interpretation 2.
3. After indebted farmers closed the Massachusetts courts in 1786–1787, Boston merchants paid for the militia that scattered them, and creditors and merchants then pressed hardest for a government that could tax, pay its debts, and keep order.
4. State declarations of rights grew out of republican worries about government power, evidence for the ideological reading rather than Beard's economic one.

Answer: (B) Those two states held too much population and trade for a working union to leave them out.

1. New Hampshire's vote on June 21, 1788, met the nine-state threshold; Article VII did not wait for the remaining four.
2. Virginia and New York were among the most populous states and sat on the main commercial routes, and supporters believed a union that left them outside could hardly function.
3. Article V sends amendments to three-fourths of the states, not to Virginia and New York alone.
4. Neither convention threatened a return to British rule; the fight was over whether to ratify and on what promise of amendments.

Answer: (D) Amendments that the first Congress proposed and the states ratified in 1791.

1. Virginia ratified on June 25, 1788, by 89 to 79, and did not withdraw.
2. New York's convention asked for a second general convention, and Madison moved amendments in part to head that off; no second convention met in 1789.
3. No Court in these years struck the three-fifths, slave-trade, or fugitive clauses, and the 1791 amendments left them in place.
4. Congress proposed twelve amendments in September 1789, and on December 15, 1791, Virginia supplied the last vote needed for ten of them, the Bill of Rights.

Answer: (B) Uniform national rules for trade and for duties on imports.

1. The Constitution protected the import of enslaved people until 1808, and the procession celebrated ratification, not an immediate ban.
2. City merchants and artisans wanted Congress to regulate commerce among the states and with foreign nations and to set import duties that would be the same throughout the country.
3. Article I, Section 10, barred the states from issuing paper money, so marchers were not celebrating a power the Constitution took away.
4. The commercial bargain let Congress tax imports, while forbidding taxes on exports; ending import duties would have removed a power supporters had just won.

Answer: (C) Promises, made to win ratification, that protections for rights would be added.

1. No court in 1789 ordered a bill of rights, and the Supreme Court was only just being organized.
2. Unanimity was the Articles' amendment rule, which the Constitution replaced; it was not what bound Madison to offer amendments that summer.
3. Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York had been carried with assurances that amendments would follow, and Madison told Peters that Virginia would have rejected the Constitution without those assurances.
4. The pressure came from American ratifying conventions and from constituents, including Virginia Baptists, not from London.

Answer: (A) Congress lacked power to charter a bank the Constitution did not list.

1. The motion Madison beat would have reserved to the states every power not expressly listed; the later claim that a national bank was unconstitutional because no clause named it is that same strict reading, and Madison himself used a version of it against Hamilton's bank in 1791.
2. Hamilton's 1791 case for the bank, that it was necessary and proper to listed powers, matches the implied-powers position Madison defended in this 1789 debate, not the position he was opposing.
3. The Supremacy Clause settles conflicts between federal and state law; it is not a claim about whether unlisted powers exist.
4. Equal Senate seats were the July 1787 bargain over state size, already in the Constitution before this amendments debate.

Answer: (C) The Fourteenth Amendment, later used to hold states to most Bill of Rights protections.

1. The Tenth Amendment, ratified with the Bill of Rights in 1791, reserved undelegated powers; it did not extend federal rights guarantees to the states.
2. Marbury v. Madison (1803) confirmed that the Court may set aside a federal statute that conflicts with the Constitution; it did not apply the Bill of Rights against state governments.
3. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and in the twentieth century the Court used it to apply most Bill of Rights protections to the states, which is the change from the limit Marshall describes.
4. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 drew a latitude line for slavery in the territories and did not change whether the Bill of Rights bound the states.