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Known as the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison of Virginia drafted the Virginia Plan and took detailed notes of the debates at the Constitutional Convention. 12 George Washington resided at his beloved Mount Vernon plantation on the Potomac River in Virginia, where he practiced scientific farming and landscape design. The Mount Vernon Conference, the precursor to the Annapolis and Philadelphia conventions, met here in March 1785. 17 This statue of “Reluctant Statesman” George Mason of Virginia is part of the George Mason Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Mason sat on the Grand Committee of Eleven that proposed the Great Compromise. He later refused to sign the completed Constitution because he believed that it would allow the North to dominate the South and that it would lead to monarchy or aristocracy. 19 This broadside offers a reward for the capture of Daniel Shays, namesake of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts. Shays had received a sword made of gold from the Marquis de Lafayette in honor of his military service during the Revolutionary War. Shays fled to Vermont, an independent republic, to avoid apprehension and later settled in New York. 29 List of Illustrations