Excerpt from Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787

Reported by James Madison
Published by Ohio University Press, edited by Adrienne Koch, 1984

On July 5, 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, agreed to terms on the Great Compromise. Under the compromise, the number of representatives in the lower house of Congress would be determined by each state's population—one elected representative for every forty thousand inhabitants (this number was changed to thirty thousand just before the Constitution was signed). Each state would have an equal number of representatives in the upper house. The next order of business was deciding how to count the number of persons in each state. This number was needed to determine the number of representatives each state would be allowed in the lower house.

The debate centered on the highly charged issue of how to count slaves. In the South...