At his residence at Mount Vernon, in March, 1785, the first idea
was started of a revisal of the Articles of Confederation, by the
organization, of means differing from that of a compact between the
State Legislatures and their own delegates in Congress. A convention
of delegates from the State Legislatures, independent of the Congress
itself, was the expedient which presented itself for effecting
the purpose, and an augmentation of the powers of Congress for the
regulation of commerce, as the object for which this assembly was to
be convened. In January, 1785, the proposal was made and adopted in
the Legislature of Virginia, and communicated to the other State
Legislatures.

The Convention was held at Annapolis, in September of that year. It
was attended by delegates from only five of the central States, who,
on comparing their restricted powers with the glaring and universally
acknowledged defects of the Confederation, reported only a
recommendation for the assemblage of another convention of delegates
to meet at Philadelphia, in May, 1787, from all the States, and with
enlarged powers.

The Constitution of the United States was the work of this Convention.
But in its construction the Convention immediately perceived that they
must retrace their steps, and fall back from a league of friendship
between sovereign States to the constituent sovereignty of the
people; from power to right--from the irresponsible despotism of
State sovereignty to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of
Independence. In that instrument, the right to institute and to alter
governments among men was ascribed exclusively to the people--the ends
of government were declared to be to secure the natural rights of man;
and that when the government degenerates from the promotion to the
destruction of that end, the right and the duty accrues to the people
to dissolve this degenerate government and to institute another. The
signers of the Declaration further averred, that the one people of the
United Colonies were then precisely in that situation--with a government
degenerated into tyranny, and called upon by the laws of nature and of
nature's God to dissolve that government and to institute another. Then,
in the name and by the authority of the good people of the colonies,
they pronounced the dissolution of their allegiance to the king, and
their eternal separation from the nation of Great Britain--and declared
the United Colonies independent S