Rough Drafts Are...Rough
American Documents: The Virginia Plan
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Treaty of Paris.
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The Virginia Plan from 1787 was the earliest draft of our three-branch system of government, put forth by James Madison, who would go on to be president after Thomas Jefferson. During 1787, Madison was one of three men writing under the pen name Publius, with the others being John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, and they published the Federalist Papers which advocated for a unified central government over the States.
The Virginia Plan, then, was a model of what that federal government would look like, with necessary checks and balances to keep it from being too powerful and too similar to a monarchy. From the get-go it featured a bicameral Legislature, including Representatives based on population, and two Senators per State, which were not decided by popular vote, but rather by each State’s own Legislature.
Reps would serve for three years and Senators for seven. The plan for an Executive branch leader (not yet called President) would also call for a seven-year term.
As for the Judiciary, there would be a Supreme Tribunal, and they could establish lesser tribunals below them as needed.
The entire Plan consisted of 19 points or resolutions that formed a framework of details, many of which we would recognize in the Constitution from two years later. If the 1770s (broadly speaking) were the war decade, the 1780s were the policy decade: the Revolutionary War officially ended with the Treaty of Paris, and Congress had almost a decade of experience with the Articles of Confederation (and had thus discovered the specifics of their inadequacy).
The final years of the 1780s were defined by rigorous and well-articulated debates over whether we should have a federal government and what it would look like, as well as the finer points of its relation to the State governments. The Constitution, ratified in 1789, would have an Article 1 Legislature, an Article 2 Executive, and an Article 3 Judiciary branch, though their final forms would look different from Madison’s original proposal.
And so the Virginia Plan was the rough draft of what would ultimately become our most important founding document. Click the link above to read it, it’s actually not all that long.