Annapolis and the Founding of the Republic

The Maryland State House in Annapolis was completed in seventeen seventy-two and has been in continuous legislative use ever since, making it the oldest statehouse in the United States that has never stopped serving as a working legislature. Eleven other states were formed from territory that did not yet exist as states when this building opened. The dome above the chamber was constructed without a single iron nail, held together by wooden pegs and mortise joints.

In the winter of seventeen eighty-three and seventeen eighty-four, it was the capital of the new republic, and two things happened here that together closed one chapter of American history and opened another. On January fourteenth, seventeen eighty-four, the Congress of the Confederation, meeting in the Senate chamber upstairs, ratified the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the Revolutionary War and establishing the United States as a recognized sovereign nation. The British government, whose military had occupied much of the Eastern Seaboard eight years before, acknowledged in that document that the war was over and the revolution had succeeded.

Three weeks earlier, on December twenty third, seventeen eighty three, George Washington had appeared before the same Congress in the same chamber and resigned his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. He had held that command for eight and a half years. He was giving it back to the civilian government. In an era when victorious military commanders regularly converted victory into personal political power, the resignation was understood by contemporaries as a deliberate act of republican principle. It is still considered one of the defining moments in the formation of American civil-military relations.

Two years after that, in September of seventeen eighty-six, the Annapolis Convention met in this building to address a commercial dispute between states. The convention was too small to accomplish its stated purpose; only five states sent delegates. But the delegates drafted a resolution calling for a larger convention the following year to address the structural problems of the Confederation. That larger convention, meeting in Philadelphia in seventeen eighty-seven, wrote the Constitution.