Took a while.
The Articles were a mess, and they knew it.
Anyway, George Mason a great revolutionary.
“The Articles were a mess, and they knew it.”
They were. There was no excutive branch, only a figurehead “President of Congress”. No judicial branch. The Continental Congress ran everything. There was no taxing power, and the Continental dollar was virtually worthless. States squabbled over boundaries, trade between them was very difficult. The post Independence experiment in self government was headed for collapse.
But Anti-Federalists still favored reforming the Articles rather than replacing them with a strong central gov’t as proposed in the Constitution. One concession to the Anti-Federalists was the inclusion of a Bill of Rights to limit the power of the central gov’t. That might not have worked out as well as hoped.
The events that led to writing the Constitution began with Virginia farmer and former general George Washington wanting to build a canal along the Virginia side of the Potomac river back in 1785.
To do that some navigation disputes with Maryland had to be ironed out, so George invited Maryland officials to meet with Virginians at Mount Vernon. We call that “the Mount Vernon Conference”, the attendees probably didn’t call it anything.
Anyway that led a bigger meeting the next year at Annapolis with more delegates from more states, followed by the even bigger meeting in Philadelphia the year after that, which resulted in the Constitution. The Constitution owes its existence to a canal, one that never did get built.