Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

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[76] idea of such reorganization arose from the necessity of regulating the commercial intercourse of the states with one another and with foreign countries, and also of making some provision for payment of the debt contracted during the war for independence. These exigencies led to a proposition for a meeting of commissioners from the various states to consider the subject. Such a meeting was held at Annapolis in September, 1786; as only five states (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) were represented, the commissioners declined to take any action further than to recommend another convention, with a wider scope for consideration. As they expressed it, it was their “unanimous conviction that it may essentially tend to advance the interests of the Union, if the states, by whom they have been respectively delegated, would themselves concur, and use their endeavors to procure the concurrence of the other states, in the appointment of commissioners, to meet at Philadelphia on the second Monday in May next, to take into consideration the situation of the United States, to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union, and to report such an act for that purpose to the United States in Congress assembled, as, when agreed to by them, and afterward confirmed by the Legislatures of every State, will effectually provide for the same.”

It is scarcely necessary to remind the well-informed reader that the terms, “Constitution of the Federal Government,” employed above, and “Federal Constitution,” as used in other proceedings of that period, do not mean the instrument to which we now apply them, and which was not then in existence. They were applied to the system of government formulated in the Articles of Confederation. This is in strict accord with the definition of the word constitution, given by an eminent lexicographer:¹ “The body of fundamental laws, as contained in written documents or prescriptive usage, which constitute the form of government for a nation, state, community, association, or society.”² Thus we speak of the British Constitution, which is an unwritten system of “prescriptive usage”; of the constitution of Massachusetts or of Mississippi, which is the fundamental or organic law of a particular state embodied in a written instrument; and of the federal Constitution of the United States, which is the fundamental law of an association of states, at first