Delegate Votes on 28 Motions at the United States Constitutional Convention, 1787

This data set contains delegate votes on 28 motions at the United States Constitutional Convention held in 1787. Nine of the motions are related to slavery, sixteen come from a disparate list created by McDonald (1958), and four are related to public debt and currency issues (one of which is also in the second category). Since individual delegate votes were not recorded at the Constitutional Convention -- only the votes of entire state delegations were recorded -- delegate votes were inferred from delegate statements found in debates, speeches, manuscripts, and other sources, as well as the formal rule that each state's vote is determined by the majority of its delegation. Each observation includes the delegate's name, state, ICPSR-supplied state code, state vote on the motion, and the vote inferred for the delegate on the motion. The codebook describes the motion, the method by which each delegate's vote was inferred, the date of the vote, relevant pages in the Records of the Federal Convention (Farrand 1966), and the frequency of the yeas, nays, and related codes.