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[[File:washington.jpg|left|thumbnail|200px|Washington at the Constitutional Convention ]] The meeting that led to the drafting of the United States Constitution took place eleven years after the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Treaty of Paris (1783). The impetus for the Constitutional Convention was to develop a compact that strengthened the United States of America, one that provided more of national glue than the weak Articles of Confederation. The United States Constitution is widely heralded as the document that makes America whole. Historians argue that it essentially prevented a fledging nation from disintegrating just as soon as it had been created. Along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution continues to be a privileged site of explorations of American exceptionalism. Much like the Declaration, however, the document contains a complicated relationship to what some have called the United States’s original sin: slavery.