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The Achievement of the Philadelphia Convention
each other under certain circumstances or for certain limited purposes—
usually military action. A federal government scarcely was a government
at all. It amounted to no more than a simple apparatus for enabling the
members of the confederation to confer and cooperate.
Such federations were distinguished from a central government, which
had always been understood to mean a political structure in which there
is one central sovereign power that all lesser political units must obey. A
centralized regime, sometimes called a consolidated or unitary system of
government, is one in which most political power is vested in authorities
located at a common center—usually a city. The growth of centralization
means the transfer of power from the local level and its greater and
greater concentration in the hands of central authorities. This power
may be legislative, executive, or judicial, and is usually all three. In the
modern world, France, Spain, and Italy are examples of centralized political systems, whereas Switzerland, Germany, and Austria have federal systems.
So the government of the United States under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 to 1789 was a ‘‘federal’’ government in the old sense of
that term. The United States was a league of sovereign States, banded together for common advantages, but each retaining its independence. The
coordinating body, chiefly the Congress, was called the government of
the United States.
In the summer of 1787, the advocates of political reform, especially
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, were trying to bring into being
a quite new form of general government—sometimes referred to as
‘‘national’’—which would greatly reduce the powers of the States. Such
plans were opposed by those delegates to the Great Convention who for
a variety of reasons viewed with hostility any designs for centralizing
power. The proponents of a strong national government first proposed
what was called the Virginia or Randolph Plan. A second group of delegates, shocked by the nationalism of the Virginia Plan, put forward their
New Jersey or Paterson Plan. Less detailed plans were proposed by Alexander Hamilton of New York and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina.
There emerged from this encounter a draft of a new constitution which
was the result of a series of compromises among groups of delegates. It
called for a constitution that would be neither a confederacy nor a central-