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Madison was too shy to pitch
Madison's preparation
Madison arrived in Philadelphia with well-developed ideas on the separation of powers and a two-house national legislature where population and wealth, not one vote per state, would set representation. The convention's slow start turned out to help him. A sickly, balding 36-year-old known as Little Jemmy could not sell his ideas on the convention floor, but he could refine them over dinner at Benjamin Franklin's house and then daily in a tavern with the Virginians and Pennsylvanians.
Randolph presents the plan
On May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House Assembly Room, Virginia's governor, Edmund Randolph, rose and spoke for hours. He laid out a 15-point plan: a national legislature in two branches, a national executive, a national judiciary, and a power for the legislature to negative state laws.
It went far beyond correcting the Articles of Confederation. It replaced them with a national government. At New Jersey's table along the back wall, William Paterson scratched out a note: sovereignty is an integral thing.
The note-taker
Madison sat at the table just to the right of Washington taking copious notes, and his record is where the juicy details come from. The shy man who could not pitch his own plan went on to speak more than the vast majority of delegates before the convention was through.
How did Madison prepare before Philadelphia?
Madison spent months before the convention studying the histories of ancient and modern confederacies. He had asked Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris, to send books on the subject. In April 1787 he wrote a memo titled Vices of the Political System of the United States, listing the failings of the Articles of Confederation. Much of the Virginia Plan grew out of that list.
Why did the convention work in secret?
The delegates adopted a rule of secrecy early on, and they kept the windows of the State House shut even in the Philadelphia summer heat. The rule let members float ideas and change their positions without public pressure or newspaper attacks. Madison's own notes of the debates were not published until 1840, after his death. They remain the fullest record of what was said.
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