Free The Genius of America by Eric Lane

did at the House-Trist lodgings at Fifth and Market just down the block from the Pennsylvania state house, where the convention would be held. He wanted time to take the political temperature of the delegates as they arrived and to informally meet and talk with as many as possible.
    He seemed particularly interested in the Pennsylvania Federalists: Robert Morris, James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin, and Gouverneur Morris.
    Madison also wanted time to sell his friend Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia on his plan. He could not succeed without the support of his own state, Virginia, whose delegation also included his ally George Washington and George Mason (who would later oppose the Constitution). But Randolph was the key. “It was axiomatic with Madison that Virginia would go no farther into federalism than Randolph would but how far he would go sometimes depended more on Madison than on himself.” Travel was slow in those days, and the delegations took time to arrive. Madison used that time to full effect. The Virginia delegation met daily to discuss Madison’s proposals.
    The fruits of Madison’s politicking became clear on the convention’s first day of real business, Tuesday, May 29, 1787. Madison himself, from his seat near George Washington, took notes as his plan was presented by the governor of Virginia, ensuring that evermore the young Madison’s ideas would be known to history as the Virginia Plan.
    Mr. Randolph opened the main business . . . [t]he character of such a governme[nt] ought to secure 1. against foreign invasion: 2. against dissentions between members of the Union, or seditions in particular states: 3. to procure to the several States various blessings, of which an isolated situation was incapable: 4. to be able to defend itself against encroachment: & 5. to be paramount to the state constitutions . . . [h]e then proceeded to the remedy; the basis of which he said, must be the republican principle.
    I N C ONVENTION —S ETTING THE A GENDA
    In politics, as in so much of life, timing is crucial. So it was with the presentation of Madison’s Virginia Plan for a new government. Madison, the Virginia delegation and other allies were aware that the plan’s radical features would cause upset, and that the other delegates would need time to see its wisdom. They would go first, set the agenda, to accomplish this end. Randolph, expressing “his regret” that he should be the one to “open the great subject of their mission” rather than others of “longer standing in life and political experience,” claimed the right to open on the basis of Virginia’s origination of the convention.
    It took fully two weeks for the more conservative opposition forces to organize themselves. During that time, the only agenda item was the Virginia Plan. It was not until June 15 that William Paterson of New Jersey offered a far less radical formula. Supported by the small states of Connecticut and Delaware and the strongly Anti-Federalist delegates from New York, it proposed only to remedy the narrow failures of the Articles of Confederation: giving Congress power to raise revenues through certain taxes, to regulate trade and commerce with other nations and between the states, and to enforce these laws.
    But the comforting modesty of the New Jersey proposal was too late. According to Max Farrand, the great historian of the convention, “It is altogether possible, if the New Jersey plan had been presented to the convention at the same time as the Virginia plan, that is on May 29th, and if without discussion a choice had then been made between the two, that the former would have been selected.” History may seem inevitable when viewed backward. But it rarely looks that way at the time.
    During the prior two weeks the delegates had discussed much of the Virginia Plan and had, broadly, become comfortable with its boldness, although they had already started tinkering with