why did people in both free and slave states feel that it was important to have equal amount of senators?

Answer 1

They wanted to keep the balance of power between the free and southern states.

Answer 2

This issue isn't related to slavery at the time of the Constitution. The answer to this question really depends on "when" in American history you are referring to. At the time of the Constitution's ratification the issue of slavery wasn't a factor. What was important then was whether the states with large populations would be allowed to dominate the legislature of the US under the Constitution. Delegates from the states with small populations wanted to protect their voice in the new legislature so a second deliberative body, a Senate in which each state had equal representation, was added to the proposal for a House of Representatives based on "proportional representation" (the population of each state). It really wasn't a free state v slave state issue until the Missouri Compromise of 1820 when northerners expressed concern about the slave states having a majority in the senate. Keeping the balance would force senators to make compromises about important issues including slavery.

Answer 3

to be short and frank:
north and south were fighting over representation in congress at the time and settling matters of taxation. the south wanted to have equal number of senators instead of senators based on population (like on senator ever 30,000 ppl) since thier pop. was large due to thier slaves. and north wanted otherway around so the south paid most of the taxes and the north still had adequate representation.

Answer 4

They wanted to make sure that small states would have an equal voice as the big ones.

Answer 5

because if the southern states had less senators they feared laws would be passed to banish slavery..this way with equal representation they can have equal say

Answer 6

The idea with having equal numbers of senators per state is to keep have one house of Congress in which states have an equal voice with each other. This forces the government to take into account state concerns, as opposed to simply citizens' concerns. Clear as mud, I know.

For example, with just a parliament, or a Congress with two houses with seats given out by population, small concerns are seldom given much voice and even more seldom given real action. In that kind of government, if NY, PA and VA (the three most populous states of the time) wanted something, they would always get it without anything offered in return to opposition in small population states. Nowadays, that might mean CA and NY banding together to double everyone's taxes to buy Canadian water and build canals and pipelines to bring it to CA and to give everyone in NY a $5,000 bonus for being New Yorkers. Everyone else pays and gets nothing because they can put it through and share between themselves.

With a house or all of Congress being evenly divided between the states, state concerns like "what do we get in order for us helping you build those canals and pipelines" have to be addressed or a bill cannot become law. So Montana sometimes gets a concern addressed and CA does much more often, but it's not always just about a clique of CA-NY-FL-TX running roughshod over the rest of us. An interesting note is that some nations do the same thing except they do not break it down by state, but rather by interest group. So in Indonesia, the army might get 25% of the seats, a business association might get 10%, ranchers might get 5% and the rest might be voted for in districts (in other words, the "interest group" we call average citizens would get the other 40%). Arguably, this makes good sense because they think, like with ours, it helps hold the nation together rather than different groups growing apart.

Lastly, in some nations, they do not define the groups and percentages ahead of time. In Germany and Israel for instance, groups getting over a given amount of votes in each election are guaranteed a minimum number of seats regardless of actual performance and they can get more if they poll better than the minimum. As for how it works out, in Germany the percent of votes needed for guaranteed seats is fairly high though it changes (5-10% of the vote) while in Israel it is low enough that as many as 20 parties get one or two seats making majority governments impossible. So in Germany, two big national parties almost always court the third, more localized, one and form a stable government of mostly moderate people leaning left or right. In Israel it is almost impossible to form a government without giving hideous promises to bizarre groups and in the end having an unstable government as those people keep bargaining even after getting their promised rewards. Kind of a do something more for me or I'll walk and destroy your government. Always something more. Or they dress it up as you somehow stepped on our toes and insulted us, offer something tasty or we walk. Very messy, very impossible to change now.

I prefer our system to these variations, but more importantly, you will often hear, from those who wish to change it and have no valid arguments to offer or simply hate all things American, that we have the only government doing this so we must be wrong because the rest of the world can't be. Not so. Simply seeing single-house parliament in an almanac for Indonesia hardly tells the story. They are more similar to us than to a nation with a simple everyone votes and the seats are shared out strictly according to the percentage of the vote gotten by each defined group in the election. Almost identical to us, really, regardless of what their systems are called.

Sorry. I posted and realized I didn't address your mention of free and slave states. It didn't have anything directly to do with that aspect of our history. In fact, what most people point to in regard to it is in fact getting cart and horse mixed up. Understandably to some extent as it twists back into this and this then back into it. The problem is southerners wanted slaves counted in the population and for their owners to have their votes. After all, northerners even then kept insisting the black folk are people so they should count as "peopulation"... and northerners were dead set that southerners only have one vote each, just like them. So the end result affected the House of Representatives but it did not affect the Senate. I know, some say the Senate was a secondary effort to nip the southern states' voting power but had little to do with it. In fact, the southern states had a greater percentage of seats in the Senate than their population, even if all blacks were counted, would give them in the House. (The House ended up with southern states getting "credit" for 60% of their black population — something that rather aggravated them as northern states got "credit" for the entire Negro in handing out House seats. But then, no one was voting the Negros' vote in the north for them. The southerner getting 1.6 votes to a northerner's one wasn't so bad as it sounds as the northerner and southerner both were voting many people's votes. Not enough property? You were counted, but don't vote. A woman? You were counted but don't vote. Can't pay your poll tax? You were counted but can't vote. I'll vote for you my friend and you can trust me. Even today we do this though to a lesser extent. 13 years old? You were counted but can't vote. Too lazy to register and then show up? You were counted but can't vote. My governing has totally turned you off government in disgust? You were counted but don't vote. Your state doesn't require photo ID and voting records show you don't show up? You were counted but someone I bus from polling station to polling station will claim to be you and vote. Sixteen times or more perhaps. That's not to mention the old folks who move to FL but still vote, for President, in their old home districts by absentee ballot as well as their FL districts in person getting two votes to your one. But none of that is why the states each get two Senators. Just the first part.