1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention

Date: From 1787-05-25 to 1787-09-17

Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Following a period of economic and political instability, delegates to the Annapolis Convention drafted a report in September 1786 which called for a convention of representatives from all U.S. states for the purpose of amending the U.S. Articles of Confederation to create a stronger central government. State legislatures selected seventy-four delegates to the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention, but only fifty-five participated—including prominent leaders such as George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin. The delegates quickly determined that amending the Articles of Confederation was insufficient; an entirely new system of government was needed. They spent the summer working through issues of fair political representation, including in relation to the institution of slavery. Delegates resolved the issue over representation with the Connecticut Compromise, which proposed a bicameral legislature with proportional representation in the lower house and equal representation in the upper house. The delegates ultimately granted the U.S. Congress authority to ban the international slave trade, but not prior to 1808, required all states to assist in the return of fugitive enslaved and indentured persons, and the Three-Fifths Compromise permitted three-fifths of enslaved persons to be counted toward an individual state's population when determining proportional representation and for the assessment of property for taxation. The convention's delegates also settled upon systems for checks and balances between states and the new federal government as well as between the new legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The result was the U.S. Constitution, which thirty-nine of the delegates signed and which a majority of U.S. states ratified the next year, making it the law of the land and the backbone of the modern U. S. government.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, “Constitutional Convention," Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Constitutional-Convention, 24 September 2025; Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009), x-xi, 222-24, 327, 329-30.