Benjamin Franklin, much like General Washington, never neglected an opportunity to influence the public.  It may well have been Ben Franklin who gave the Pennsylvania Packet a cheerful but deceptive little item which appeared on July 19th:  “So great is the unanimity, we hear, that prevails in the Convention upon all great federal subjects, that it has been proposed to call the rooms in which they assemble – Unanimity Hall.”

Actually, the delegates were anything but unanimous on most subjects.  Only three days earlier, the Convention had finally passed that essential measure which came to be known as the Great Compromise, by which every state was to have two members in the United States Senate.  This would offset proportional representation in the House, where the large states had the advantage, with one representative to every 40,000 inhabitants.  Critics later declared that the Convention had erred, that the Senate, like the House of Representatives, should have been proportional.  Yet without this Great Compromise it is hard to see how the Convention could have proceeded further – it was the one issue that had caused problems from the very beginning, and the efforts to resolve it had “nearly terminated in a dissolution of the Convention.”

Perhaps the delegates would never have reached an agreement had not the heat broken.  By mid-July, Philadelphia had finally cooled after a solid month of torment.  Over the weekend, members were able to rest and enjoy themselves, sleep comfortably in their narrow chambers at the lodging houses along Market Street or Second Street.  Even the mosquitoes had somewhat relented, though around noontime on the streets the horseflies still droned and darted.

The small states were jubilant over the Compromise, and if the large states had been initially alarmed, they soon let the question die.  They also recognized that perhaps it might not have been so bad a deal at all; thereafter matters moved far more easily.  The little states were more willing to meet the big, willing to yield on many questions.  They felt safer now, no longer threatened by those towering bullies – Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, or any possible combination of those three.  Soon delegates wrote home optimistically that the Convention had “nearly agreed on the principles and outlines of a system.”  Some even expressed the hope that they would shortly be able to come home, their duties and obligations fulfilled.