Annapolis Convention (1786)

Annapolis Convention (1786)

The Annapolis Convention was a meeting at Annapolis, Maryland of delegates from several states that called for a Constitutional Convention. The formal title of the meeting was a Meeting of Commissioners to Remedy Defects of the Federal Government. The defects that they were to remedy were those barriers that limited trade or commerce between the Independent states under the Articles of Confederation.

The convention met from September 11 to September 14, 1778. The commissioners felt that there weren't enough states present to make any substantive agreement worth while. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North Carolina had also appointed commissioners, but they didn't get to the meeting, while Connecticut, Maryland, South Carolina or Georgia had taken no action at all.

They produced a report which was sent to the Continental Congress and to the States. The report asked support for a broader meeting to be held next May in Philadelphia. It expressed the hope that more states would be represented and that their delegates or deputies would be authorized to examine areas broader than simply commercial trade.

The direct result of the report was the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Delegates

The states represented, and their delegates were:

New York: Egbert Benson and Alexander Hamilton
New Jersey: Abraham Clark, William C. Huston, and James Schureman
Pennsylvania: Tench Coxe
Delaware: George Read, John Dickinson, and Richard Bassett
Virginia: Edmund Randolph, James Madison, Jr, and Saint George Tucker

External link

Text of the report at Yale Law School web site