Significant People of Creating a Government Era

Federalist who supported a strong federal/central government

oldest delegate at the Convention. At the end of the Constitutional Convention he said, referring to Washington’s chair, “I have often looked at that [chair] behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now I… know that it is a rising…sun.”

an American soldier, revolutionary and farmer famous for being one of the leaders and namesake of Shays' Rebellion, a populist uprising against controversial debt collection and tax policies in Massachusetts in 1786–1787

president of the Constitutional Convention

Father of the Constitution. Wrote the Federalist Papers with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay

Governor of Virginia who declined to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where the Articles of Confederation would be revised