Saratoga --Brandywine --Germantown --Trenton --Valley Forge -- and Yorktown. The War was over, but the Articles of Confederation, which loosely held the thirteen colonies together, were clearly inadequate. Congress gave cautious approval to a constitutional convention. The fundamental goal was to create a workable central government. The men who appeared in Philadelphia were persons of means: merchants, lawyers, planters. Tempers frayed in the humid heat of the Philadelphia summer. After much debate, the convention decided that the Nation must have a single chief executive, with limited and independent powers not a monarch.
