Sep 15, 2026 · 26 min · 10 segments
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…
On September 11, 1786, in the Senate Chamber of the Maryland State House at Annapolis, a convention assembled to rescue the commerce of the United States.
Twelve men showed up.
Twelve from five states.
The meeting had been called to bring together all 13 to hammer out at last a common policy on trade, to end the tariff wars and the border tolls and the commercial chaos that was strangling the country's economy.
And when the appointed day came, the delegates who bothered to appear could look around the room and count five states present.
Everyone else had either sent no one at all or sent men who still were somewhere on the muddy countryside roads and would arrive, if they arrived, only after the business was done.
Travel in 1786 was slow, expensive, and miserable.
A commissioner from Georgia or New Hampshire faced a journey of a week or more over bad roads to reach Annapolis, and many of those appointed had simply decided the trip was not worth the trouble for a meeting about tariffs.
The indifference showed how little the states expected out of acting together.
Four states had appointed commissioners who simply never came.
Men from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North Carolina who either declined the trip or were still traveling when the convention broke up.
And four more states had not even bothered to name anyone.
Maryland, which was hosting the convention, in whose own state house the delegates were sitting, had not appointed a single commissioner of its own.
In that gathering sat Alexander Hamilton of New York, James Madison and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, John Dickinson of Delaware, who took the chair for the convention.
In that room was a future president, a future treasury secretary, a future governor and attorney general.
The talent in the room was extraordinary, the attendance pathetic.
And the reason for the empty seats was, in its way, the whole problem in miniature.
The states stayed home for exactly the reason the convention was needed.
Indifference, distraction, the assumption that someone else's problems were not their own.
The settled habit of each state minding its own affairs and letting the union fend for itself.
The states, pulling apart, unable to act together, was the disease that kept most of them from showing up to discuss the cure.
It was, by any ordinary measure, a humiliating failure.
On September 11, 1786, in the Senate Chamber of the Maryland State House at Annapolis, a convention assembled to rescue the commerce of the United States.
Twelve men showed up.
Twelve from five states.
The meeting had been called to bring together all 13 to hammer out at last a common policy on trade, to end the tariff wars and the border tolls and the commercial chaos that was strangling the country's economy.
And when the appointed day came, the delegates who bothered to appear could look around the room and count five states present.
Everyone else had either sent no one at all or sent men who still were somewhere on the muddy countryside roads and would arrive, if they arrived, only after the business was done.
Travel in 1786 was slow, expensive, and miserable.
A commissioner from Georgia or New Hampshire faced a journey of a week or more over bad roads to reach Annapolis, and many of those appointed had simply decided the trip was not worth the trouble for a meeting about tariffs.
The indifference showed how little the states expected out of acting together.
Four states had appointed commissioners who simply never came.
Men from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North Carolina who either declined the trip or were still traveling when the convention broke up.
And four more states had not even bothered to name anyone.
Maryland, which was hosting the convention, in whose own state house the delegates were sitting, had not appointed a single commissioner of its own.
In that gathering sat Alexander Hamilton of New York, James Madison and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, John Dickinson of Delaware, who took the chair for the convention.
In that room was a future president, a future treasury secretary, a future governor and attorney general.
The talent in the room was extraordinary, the attendance pathetic.
And the reason for the empty seats was, in its way, the whole problem in miniature.
The states stayed home for exactly the reason the convention was needed.
Indifference, distraction, the assumption that someone else's problems were not their own.
The settled habit of each state minding its own affairs and letting the union fend for itself.
The states, pulling apart, unable to act together, was the disease that kept most of them from showing up to discuss the cure.
It was, by any ordinary measure, a humiliating failure.
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