| Convention in Philadelphia
historian Woodrow Wilson wrote:
in 1787.' Before he became this country's 28`" President, scholar and
Everybody knows that it was a conference between delegates from
Maryland and Virginia about [George] Washington's favorite
scheme of joining the upper waters of the Potomac with the upper
waters of the streams which made their way to the Mississippi - a
conference held at his suggestion and at his house - that led to the
convening of that larger conference at Annapolis, which called for
the appointment of the body that met at Philadelphia and framed
the Constitution under which he was to become the first President
of the United States.2
Because this is the first opportunity of the parties to submit substantive briefs to the
Special Master, this section sets forth background information about the Potomac River and
provides a detailed history of the interstate compacts in question. It also describes the historical
context in which the compacts were enacted.'
' E.g., 2 Robert A. Rutland, The Papers of George Mason 812 (1970) [hereinafter "2
Rutland"]; Douglas Southall Freeman, Washington 532-33 (1968) (Harwell ed.) [hereinafter
"Freeman"]; Helen Hill, George Mason: Constitutionalist 182-83 (1938); 2 Kate Mason
Rowland, The Life of George Mason 93 (1892) [hereinafter "2 Rowland"].
'` Woodrow Wilson, The Making of the Nation, 80 Atlantic Monthly 1, 7 (1897). Popular
history publications have likewise recognized this link. E.g. Annapolis Convention,
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, at http://w-ww.britannica.com (last visited Nov. 29, 2000) (describing
the Annapolis Convention as "an important rallying point in the movement toward a federal
convention to revise the inadequate Articles of Confederation. Growing out of an earlier meeting
of representatives of Maryland and Virginia to discuss ways of improving navigation on the
Potomac River, the convention of delegates from five states found that it could not deal
effectively with national commercial problems without changes in the Articles. Realizing that
they could not recommend the needed revisions, the delegates stretched their authority by issuing
a new call to all the states for a meeting eight months later in Philadelphia, where the present
federal Constitution was drafted.").
A chronology of events related to the Compact of 1785 and its progeny is attached at
Tab 1.
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