"A SYSTEM OF NATIONAL GOVERNMENT"
What followed from this dilemma is one of the great stories of the American republic — how a handful of national-minded individuals led by James Madison, and with the blessing of George Washington, arranged a conference of Virginia and Maryland delegates to discuss the navigation of the Potomac, proposed a larger commercial conference at Annapolis in 1786, and then persuaded the conference to petition the Confederation Congress to call for a convention in Philadelphia to review the Articles themselves. What emerged from that convention after the summer of 1787 was not a revision of the Articles — there is no evidence Madison ever intended anything so tame — but an entirely new Constitution that rebalanced government authority within the United States.
Had that plan not been in view, it is unlikely that Washington would have ever consented to attend, much less preside over, the Philadelphia convention. As Washington confidante Henry Knox wrote two months before the delegates assembled, "[o]ur present federal government is indeed a name, a shadow without power, or effect." Knox, who had reported regularly to Washington on the Shays insurrection, hoped that the convention would "possess the magnanimity to propose a wise modification of a national government." "If only propositions be obtained for bracing up the present radically defective thing," he added bitterly, "then better had it been, that the idea of the convention had never been conceived."
The American republic did not cease to be a federation, and under the convention's Constitution, the states continued to possess significant discretionary powers. States would oversee their own voting procedures. They would be represented as states in a new congressional Senate. A new executive president would be elected by the outcomes of elections in the states. And, thanks to a series of amendments that Madison first opposed and then endorsed, federal powers over several areas of civil liberties — freedom of religion and expression, freedom of assembly and of the press, freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, and the like — were sharply curtailed, or even eliminated. Above all, the states took their time ratifying the new Constitution — the process lasted well into 1788.
Yet what should not be lost to sight is how determined the 42 delegates who sat through most of the grueling sessions of the convention were to create a federalism that tilted strongly in a nationalistic direction. Three-quarters of them had served in the Revolutionary War where, in the words of John Marshall, they had "associated with brave men from different States, who were risking life and everything valuable, in a common cause, believed by all to be most precious." It was there that Marshall "was confirmed in the habit of considering America as my country and congress as my government."