Rescuing the Republic: James Madison, the Annapolis Convention, and the Path to the Constitution

This talk reviews how the Second Continental Congress created a deliberately weak federal government through the Articles of Confederation. It highlights Alexander Hamilton’s earliest and most frustrating encounters with the Confederation Congress while he served as Aide de Camp to George Washington, and it examines the economic and political reading he undertook during that period. Out of this early study emerged Hamilton’s first proposals for revising the federal government.

The talk follows the evolution of those increasingly ambitious proposals and explores Hamilton’s efforts during his short tenure in Congress to persuade his colleagues to adopt new taxes and fund the national debt. It also traces Hamilton’s continuing determination to call a convention to revise or replace the Articles of Confederation, beginning with his 1780 letter to John Sullivan Duane and continuing through his renewed involvement three years later as a delegate to the Annapolis Convention, where he drafted the call for a federal convention to meet “on the first Monday of May next.”

The presentation concludes with an account of Hamilton’s struggle in the New York Assembly to commit the state to attending the Philadelphia Convention, along with an examination of his own controversial and abbreviated service as a delegate there, a role cut short by his abrupt departure after fewer than six weeks.

Andrew H. Browning, the son of an army officer, grew up in a wide range of locations, some exotic and some ordinary, each of them memorable. Every family move involved dozens of boxes of books and a trunk filled with notes for his father’s never-completed dissertation. Books and education were central to family life, and his earliest memories involve being read to.