<P> The issue was one of the last major issues to be resolved, and was done so in the electoral college . At the time, before the formation of modern political parties, there was widespread concern that candidates would routinely fail to secure a majority of electors in the electoral college . The method of resolving this problem therefore was a contested issue . Most thought that the house should then choose the president, since it most closely reflected the will of the people . This caused dissension among delegates from smaller states, who realized that this would put their states at a disadvantage . To resolve this dispute, the Convention agreed that the house would elect the president if no candidate had an electoral college majority, but that each state delegation would vote as a bloc, rather than individually . </P> <P> As the Convention was entering its second full month of deliberations, it was decided that further consideration of the prickly question of how to apportion representatives in the national legislature should be referred to a committee composed of one delegate from each of the eleven states that were present at that time at the Convention . The members of this "Grand Committee," as it has come to be known, included Elbridge Gerry, Oliver Ellsworth, Robert Yates, William Paterson, Gunning Bedford, Jr., George Mason, William Davie, John Rutledge, Abraham Baldwin, and Benjamin Franklin . In its report to the Convention on July 5, the committee offered a compromise . The large states had opposed the Connecticut Compromise, because they felt it gave too much power to the smaller states . The Grand Committee's proposal added the requirement that revenue bills originate in the lower house and not be subject to modification by the upper house (although this Origination Clause would later be modified so that revenue bills could be amended in the upper house, or Senate). With this modification, the Convention in a close vote adopted the compromise on July 16 . Nationalist delegates remained bitterly opposed, however, until on July 23 they succeeded in further modifying the compromise to give members of the Senate individual voting power, rather than having votes taken by each state's representatives en bloc, as had occurred in Congress under the Articles of Confederation . This accomplished the nationalist goal of preventing state governments from having a direct say in Congress's choice to make national laws . The final document was thus a mixture of Madison's original "national" constitution and the desired "federal" Constitution that many of the delegates sought . </P> <P> The Convention adjourned from July 26 to August 6 to await the report of the Committee of Detail, which was to produce a first draft of the Constitution . It was chaired by John Rutledge, with the other members including Edmund Randolph, Oliver Ellsworth, James Wilson, and Nathaniel Gorham . </P> <P> Though the committee did not record minutes of its proceedings, three key surviving documents offer clues to the committee's handiwork: an outline by Randolph with edits by Rutledge, extensive notes and a second draft by Wilson, also with Rutledge's edits, and the committee's final report to the Convention . From this evidence it is thought that the committee used the original Virginia Plan, the decisions of the Convention on modifications to that plan, and other sources, such as the Articles of Confederation, provisions of the state constitutions, and even Charles Pinckney's plan, to produce the first full draft, which author David O. Stewart has called a "remarkable copy - and - paste job ." </P>

Who was and wasn't at the constitutional convention