of the debt
contracted during the war for independence. These exigencies led to a
proposition for a meeting of commissioners from the various States to
consider the subject. Such a meeting was held at Annapolis in September,
1786; but, as only five States (New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia) were represented, the Commissioners declined
to take any action further than to recommend another Convention, with a
wider scope for consideration. As they expressed it, it was their
"unanimous conviction that it may essentially tend to advance the
interests of the Union, if the States, by whom they have been
respectively delegated, would themselves concur, and use their endeavors
to procure the concurrence of the other States, in the appointment of
commissioners, to meet at Philadelphia on the second Monday in May next,
to take into consideration the situation of the United States, to devise
such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the
Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the
Union, and to report such an act for that purpose to the United States
in Congress assembled, as, when agreed to by them, and afterward
confirmed by the Legislatures of every State, will effectually provide
for the same."

It is scarcely necessary to remind the well-informed reader that the
terms, "Constitution of the Federal Government," employed above, and
"Federal Constitution," as used in other proceedings of that period, do
not mean the instrument to which we now apply them; and which was not
then in existence. They were applied to the system of government
formulated in the Articles of Confederation. This is in strict accord
with the definition of the word constitution, given by an eminent
lexicographer:[29] "The body of fundamental laws, as contained in
written documents or prescriptive usage, which constitute the form of
government for a nation, state, community, association, or society."[30]
Thus we speak of the British Constitution, which is an unwritten system
of "prescriptive usage"; of the Constitution of Massachusetts or of
Mississippi, which is the fundamental or organic law of a particular
State embodied in a written instrument; and of the Federal Constitution
of the United States, which is the fundamental law of an association of
States, at first as embraced in the Articles of Confederation, and
afterward as revised, amended, enlarged, and embodied in the instru