The Plan That Refused Consolidation

William Paterson and the fear of centralized power

June 15, 1787

The Constitution was not written by men who trusted power or government.

That is the first thing modern Americans need to understand.

The founders did not gather in Philadelphia to create an efficient managerial system run by enlightened experts. They gathered because the Articles of Confederation were failing — but due to their lived experiences with the British Empire, many of them feared concentrated national power almost as much as they feared collapse itself.

That tension exploded into the open on June 15, 1787.

Just weeks earlier, the Virginia Plan—introduced by Edmund Randolph and heavily shaped by James Madison—proposed a far stronger national government. This plan featured representation based largely on population, three branches of government, a national judiciary, and the power for the new federal government to tax and regulate commerce.

The large states loved the idea of proportional representation based on population. They resented the Articles and every state having an equal vote regardless of size. Virginia was ten times the size of Delaware, yet Delaware had equal footing with Virginia under the Articles.

But the smaller states saw immediate danger. Not only could they become subjugated to the larger states, but lurking underneath the procedural arguments about representation was the deeper question:

Would America remain a union of sovereign states or in fact become a consolidated national system dominated by population centers?

That fear gave birth to the New Jersey Plan.

Introduced by William Paterson from New Jersey on June 15, 1787, the plan pushed back directly against the Virginia proposal.

Paterson argued that the Convention had not been assembled to destroy the existing federal structure entirely. The states, he believed, were not administrative subdivisions of one consolidated nation. They were political communities with their own sovereignty and legitimacy.

That distinction mattered enormously.

The New Jersey Plan demanded equal representation for states regardless of population. It proposed strengthening the Articles of Confederation rather than replacing them outright with a heavily centralized national framework.

Modern commentators often dismiss the New Jersey Plan as the “losing side” of constitutional history.

That’s a mistake because the New Jersey Plan forced the Convention to confront one of the central questions of the American experiment:

How do you create national unity without destroying local self-government?

The founders understood something many modern bureaucratic systems refuse to acknowledge: Centralization creates distance between rulers and the ruled and distance eventually erodes liberty.

Small states feared becoming politically invisible inside a purely population-driven system. They worried that large states would eventually dominate national policy permanently. More importantly, they feared the emergence of a consolidated governing class far removed from local communities.

Frankly, that fear was not irrational.

Much of modern American political frustration stems from precisely that dynamic: Power drifting further away from local accountability and concentrating inside permanent national institutions.

The New Jersey Plan represented resistance to that consolidation.

Not necessarily resistance to union itself but resistance to absorption.

That is an important distinction.

Paterson and the small-state delegates were not anti-American. They were attempting to preserve a federal balance where states retained meaningful independent authority rather than becoming administrative territories managed from the center.

And in many ways, they succeeded.

The New Jersey Plan itself was not adopted outright. But its arguments led to the eventual Connecticut Compromise, which created equal representation in the Senate.

Without the New Jersey Plan: no Senate as we know it. No federal balance. Possibly no Constitution at all.

The Convention may simply have fractured.

The significance of this debate reaches far beyond eighteenth-century procedural history.

The Constitution with its separation of powers was intentionally designed to slow consolidation.

That idea was present not only at the federal level—with Congress split between the House (with proportional representation for large state interests) and the Senate (with equal representation for small states)—but also in the Judiciary and the Executive. There was also Federalism, with power not specifically given to the federal government left to the states; ergo, the idea of state sovereignty. These were not inefficiencies accidentally left in the system.

They were safeguards.

The founders understood that concentrated power in the hands of a relative few — even when well-intentioned — eventually becomes self-protective, bureaucratic, and detached from the people it governs.

That is why the Constitution disperses authority so aggressively.

The administrative state despises this structure because friction slows centralized action. The founders viewed that friction as protection.

William Paterson may not receive the historical attention given to Madison or Washington. But his role was indispensable. He reminded the Convention that America was not supposed to become an empire managed from a distant capital.

It was supposed to remain a republic of self-governing states and citizens. That argument still matters, maybe now more than ever.