A Failed Nation - A Convention of the States

The convention that produced the Constitution was born, improbably, out of a fishing dispute and a failure. This is the story of the strange chain of events that led to Philadelphia. It begins in 1785 at Mount Vernon, where commissioners from Virginia and Maryland settle a quarrel over the Potomac — and prove that states can cooperate outside a paralyzed Congress. It runs through Annapolis in September of 1786, where a grand convention on interstate trade collapses when only five states bother to show up — and where a dozen men with no authority whatsoever, led by Alexander Hamilton’s pen, make a desperate gamble: they call for a far larger convention, at Philadelphia, to remake the entire frame of government. And it turns on Shays’ Rebellion, the armed uprising that did the persuading no argument could, frightening state after state into sending delegates. James Madison doubted the whole thing would work. Even he could not have guessed that a half-empty room in Annapolis had just lit the fuse — and that the matter was now bound for a reluctant Congress that would have to decide whether to bless a convention it had never called.