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 States. And here as the
representatives of the one people they had stopped. They did not