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Annapolis Convention

A meeting of delegates from five states in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1786 to discuss the bleak commercial situation in the United States, growing social unrest, and the inabilitiy of Congress to resolve disputes among the states. The conference dissolved when Alexander Hamilton proposed holding the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia the next year to revise the Articles of Confederation.

Constitutional Convention

A 1787 meeting in Philadelphia in which delegates from twelve states convened to revise the Articles of Confederation. The Convention quickly decided that the Articles should be scrapped and replaced with an entirely new document to create a stronger central government binding the states. The result was the Constitution.

Second Continental Congress

A meeting of colonial delegates that convened in different places from 1775 to 1781 to establish a new U.S. government after declaring independence from Britain. In 1777, the Congress drafted the Articles of Confederation as the first U.S. constitution.

Shays’s Rebellion

A 1786–1787 revolt by western Massachusetts farmer Daniel Shays, who led 1,200 other men in an attack on the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts. Shays and others like him throughout the United States were dissatisfied with the ineptitude of state legislatures during the economic depression after the American Revolution. Shays’s Rebellion and other revolts spurred leading Americans to meet and discuss revising the Articles of Confederation.

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