George Washington took a personal interest in the meeting. As a wealthy plantation owner and a land speculator who owned
more than 30,000 acres of land upstream on the Potomac, Washington was keenly interested in commercial problems under the
Articles of Confederation. He lent his great prestige to the Alexandria meeting by inviting the participants to his house
at Mount Vernon. Out of this conference came the idea for a general economic conference for all of the states, to be held
in Annapolis, Maryland, in September of 1786.
The Annapolis Convention turned out to be a key stepping-stone to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Instead of concentrating
on commerce and navigation between the states, the delegates at Annapolis, including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison,
called for a general constitutional convention to suggest remedies to what they saw as defects in the Articles of Confederation.
On February 21, 1787, the Congress called for a convention to meet in Philadelphia for the "sole and express purpose"
of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to the Congress and the state legislatures "such alterations and provisions
therein as shall, when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the states, to render the federal Constitution adequate to the
exigencies of government and the preservation of the union."
