"We, the people..."

Your next reading takes you into the Constitutional Convention, convened for the express purpose of revising the weak Articles of Confederation. What happened, of course, was something much more than that. Here are some questions for your consideration from pages 170-174:

1. What was the Virginia Plan?
2. What was the New Jersey Plan?
3. What was the Great Compromise?
4. How did the common law legal tradition influence the length of the Constitution? How is this different from other constitutions?
5. How did the institution of slavery impact the making of the Constitution?
6. In what ways is the Constitution essentially a conservative document (as in, not radical), and in what ways was it innovative? How did it attempt to resolve the tensions left over from the Revolution? To reconcile with the Spirit of '76?
7. What was the main point of disagreement between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists?