Annapolis

Annapolis is where the American Revolution ended — formally, legally, and symbolically. On January 14, 1784, the Continental Congress met in the Maryland State House and ratified the Treaty of Paris, officially concluding the war with Great Britain. Fourteen days earlier, on December 23, 1783, George Washington had entered that same chamber and resigned his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, surrendering the military authority he had held for eight and a half years. Both events took place in the same building, within weeks of each other, and their proximity was not accidental.

The resignation is worth dwelling on. Washington could have kept his commission indefinitely. The army revered him. Many officers had floated the idea — never entirely in jest — that he might make a better king than the Continental Congress made a functioning government. The Newburgh Conspiracy of March 1783, when discontented officers circulated anonymous letters urging the army to march on Congress, had shown how fragile civilian control of the military actually was. Washington defused Newburgh with a carefully crafted speech. But defusing one conspiracy did not answer the larger question of what an independent nation did with its commanding general once the war was over.

What Washington did was come to Annapolis and give the commission back. He did it with full ceremony, before Congress, the diplomats, and the public gallery, in a choreographed ritual designed to project a message to the world: in America, soldiers answer to civilians. Thomas Jefferson, watching from the gallery, called it the greatest act of Washington's life. King George III, told about it, reportedly said that if Washington truly meant to return to his farm, he was the greatest man in the world.

The Maryland State House where both events occurred is the oldest state capitol still in continuous legislative use in the United States. Its dome, completed in 1779, was the largest wooden dome in America at the time. The town itself was one of the wealthiest in colonial America — Maryland's tobacco planters built mansions along its streets that still stand and represent the apex of American Georgian architecture. The men who gathered here to ratify the Treaty and receive Washington's resignation were educated, prosperous gentlemen who understood the classical precedents they were invoking and the European audience they were performing for.

Ten months later, twelve delegates from five states met at Mann's Tavern in the same city and called for the Constitutional Convention that produced the document governing the United States today. Annapolis thus bookends the founding: it is where the Revolutionary War formally ended and where the institutional path to the Constitution began.