<P> Immediately after Randolph finished laying out the Virginia Plan, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina presented his own plan to the Convention . As Pinckney did not write it down, the only evidence of the plan are Madison's notes, so the details are somewhat vague . It was a confederation, or treaty, among the thirteen states . There was to be a bicameral legislature made up of a Senate and a House of Delegates . The House would have one member for every one thousand inhabitants . The House would elect Senators who would serve by rotation for four years and represent one of four regions . Congress would meet in a joint session to elect a President, and would also appoint members of the cabinet . Congress, in joint session, would serve as the court of appeal of last resort in disputes between states . Pinckney did also provide for a supreme Federal Judicial Court . The Pinckney plan was not debated, but it may have been referred to by the Committee of Detail . </P> <P> The Connecticut Compromise, forged by Roger Sherman from Connecticut, was proposed on June 11 . In a sense it blended the Virginia (large - state) and New Jersey (small - state) proposals . Ultimately, however, its main contribution was in determining the apportionment of the Senate, and thus retaining a federal character in the constitution . Sherman sided with the two - house national legislature of the Virginia Plan, but proposed "That the proportion of suffrage in the 1st . branch (house) should be according to the respective numbers of free inhabitants; and that in the second branch or Senate, each State should have one vote and no more ." This plan failed at first, but on July 23 the question was finally settled . </P> <P> What was ultimately included in the constitution was a modified form of this plan . In the Grand Committee, Benjamin Franklin successfully proposed the requirement that revenue bills originate in the house . But the final July 16 vote on the compromise still left the Senate looking like the Confederation Congress . In the preceding weeks of debate, Madison, King, and Gouverneur Morris each vigorously opposed the compromise for this reason . Then on July 23, just before most of the convention's work was referred to the Committee of Detail, Morris and King moved that state representatives in the Senate be given individual votes, rather than voting en bloc, as they had in the Confederation Congress . Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, a leading proponent of the compromise, supported their motion, and the Convention adopted it . As the personally powerful senators were to receive terms much longer than the state legislators who appointed them, they became substantially independent . The compromise nonetheless continued to serve the self - interest of small - state political leaders, who were assured of access to more seats in the Senate than they might otherwise have obtained . </P> <P> Among the most controversial issues confronting the delegates was that of slavery . Slavery was widespread in the states at the time of the Convention . At least a third of the Convention's 55 delegates owned slaves, including all of the delegates from Virginia and South Carolina . Slaves comprised approximately one - fifth of the population of the states; and apart from northernmost New England, where slavery had largely been eliminated, slaves lived throughout all regions of the country . The majority of the slaves (more than 90%), however, lived in the South, where approximately 1 in 3 families owned slaves (in the largest and wealthiest state, Virginia, that figure was nearly 1 in 2 families). The entire agrarian economy of the South was based on slave labor, and the Southern delegates to the Convention were unwilling to accept any proposals that they believed would threaten the institution . </P>

Three proposals which were debated at the constitutional convention in philadelphia