Other Moderate Advocates of State Sovereignty

David Brearly

Others in this category included David Brearley and Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey and no doubt others who did not speak up.  As commented before, Charles Pinckney was not impressed with their arguments.  “[T]he whole comes to this, as he conceived. Give N. Jersey an equal vote, and she will dismiss her scruples, and concur in the Nat’l system.”  Pinckney turned out to be right, as did Madison in his arguments that small states benefited most from strong central government because it would protect them from large states.  Once the Great Compromise was reached, Paterson and his followers dropped all resistance.  The hot-headed Bedford not only signed the Constitution, but proposed to expand Congress’s powers to all cases “in which the harmony of the U. States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual legislation,” which even Edmund Randolph thought was going to far.  Paterson argued against a more centralized government by pointing out that the small states of New Jersey and Maryland had been the ones that most resisted the Articles of Confederation, but he undermined his own case by acknowledging that they resisted the Articles not because the central government under them was too powerful but because it was not powerful enough – New Jersey (lacking a major port) wanted to give Congress authority over foreign trade and Maryland wanted federal control of the western land.

John Langdon

John Langdon of New Hampshire is particularly revealing in this regard.  New Hampshire was absent during the fierce debate over representation, indeed, at one point the small state representatives; indeed, as the deadlock grew, small state delegates moved to contact New Hampshire and call for a delegation, which they expected to be an ally.  As it turned out, the New Hampshire delegation arrived on the very day the Convention settled on having two Senators for each state, and after that New Hampshire consistently voted to increase federal power.  Langdon favored a Congressional veto of state laws, federal authority over state militias, payment of the national legislature from the federal treasury,  and authorizing federal intervention in state rebellions without the invitation of the state legislature.  

The final proof, however, that Pinckney and Madison were right, was during the ratification debates in the states after the Constitution was presented.  Although Delaware and New Jersey offered the most resistance to the increase in federal authority in Convention, their state conventions were the first and third, respectively to ratify the Constitution, and both conventions ratified unanimously with little debate.  Connecticut, which consistently resisted increasing federal power in the Convention was fifth to ratify, and with very little controversy or resistance.  In the end, small states felt less threatened by a stronger central government than by their larger and more powerful neighbors.