In the 250 years of American history, some decades were more consequential than others. And few have been more important to the shape of the nation than the 1780s.

The next-to-last decade of the 18th Century saw the end of the American Revolution, the first wobbly steps of the Articles of Confederation, the drafting and adoption of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the election of George Washington as the first President of the United States of America, among many other watershed events.

The 1780s were the decade when America started out as a rebellious colony, partway through a bloody struggle for independence. It ended as an independent nation, recognized by major European powers and working to create a new form of government and a new kind of nation.

The American War for Independence started in April 1775, when colonial militias in Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts clashed with British soldiers. The “shot heard round the world” launched the long, difficult fight for American freedom from British rule, leading to years of bloody battles.

By 1780, much of the fighting had moved to the southern states, with the British taking control of much of Georgia and South Carolina and beginning to march north through North Carolina into Virginia.

While the British forces were successful in capturing territory, resistance was widespread, making holding and controlling what they captured more difficult for the British.

Benedict Arnold was born in 1741 in the colony of Connecticut. He was named after his great-grandfather, who had been a Colonial Governor for the colony of Rhode Island.

He served briefly in the French and Indian War before becoming a merchant and getting involved in politics as British policies — including the Sugar and Stamp acts — hit his bottom line.

He joined the Connecticut militia and was a captain when the war began in 1775. Arnold was involved in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775. He resigned his commission the next year after a dispute with a fellow officer, but was eventually chosen to lead an expedition into Quebec.

While Arnold impressed some and won friends and admirers with his military success, he was also good at making enemies.

One fellow officer who knew him at the time wrote a pamphlet excoriating Arnold’s character.

“Money is this man's God, and to get enough of it he would sacrifice his country,” John Brown wrote of Arnold.

His knack for making enemies would follow him throughout the war, even when he was made the military governor of Philadelphia, after the British withdrew from the city in 1778.

While in Philadelphia, Arnold met and married Peggy Shippen, the daughter of a family that was still loyal to the British Crown.

By that point in the war, Arnold had been seriously wounded twice, had lost his mercantile business and was increasingly bitter because other men were being promoted ahead of him.

Historian W.D. Wetherell said Arnold was “among the hardest human beings to understand in American history. Did he become a traitor because of all the injustice he suffered, real and imagined, at the hands of the Continental Congress and his jealous fellow generals? Because of the constant agony of two battlefield wounds in an already gout-ridden leg? From psychological wounds received in his Connecticut childhood when his alcoholic father squandered the family's fortunes? Or was it a kind of extreme midlife crisis, swerving from radical political beliefs to reactionary ones, a change accelerated by his marriage to the very young, very pretty, very Tory Peggy Shippen?”

Regardless of the reason, what happened next would make Arnold’s name a byword for treachery.

Upon learning he was being considered for command of the fort at West Point, N.Y., Arnold offered to turn the fort over to the British for a massive payment.

Before the handoff could happen, though, Arnold’s handler, British Maj. John Andre, was captured and incriminating papers were discovered.

Arnold would flee to New York City, still under control of the British, while Andre was hanged as a spy.

Arnold wouldn’t find happiness with the British. He was given an officer’s commission, but not the trust of the military establishment.

He briefly lived in Canada before moving to London in 1791. While in England, he met French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who wrote about the encounter.

“The innkeeper at whose place I had my meals informed me that one of his lodgers was an American general,” he wrote. “Thereupon I expressed the desire of seeing that gentleman, and, shortly after, I was introduced to him. After the usual exchange of greetings … I ventured to request from him some letters of introduction to his friends in America. ‘No,’ he replied, and after a few moments of silence, noticing my surprise, he added, ‘I am perhaps the only American who cannot give you letters for his own country … all the relations I had there are now broken … I must never return to the States.’ He dared not tell me his name. It was General Arnold. I must confess that I felt much pity for him, for which political puritans will perhaps blame me, but with which I do not reproach myself, for I witnessed his agony.”

Starting in late 1780, the British began a campaign to capture more land in Virginia. By mid 1781, British Gen. Charles Cornwallis was preparing to build a deep water harbor in Yorktown, in Virginia.

A force led by George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau marched down the Eastern Seaboard, arriving near Yorktown in late September and linking up with a force led by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been shadowing Cornwallis’ army for months.

A French naval victory at Chesapeake Bay blocked Cornwallis’ reinforcements from landing, leaving the British forces surrounded.

Over the course of several weeks, the combined American and French forces surrounded the British at Yorktown and began bombarding the British with artillery.

Two daring assaults, one led by the French and the other by the Americans, commanded by Alexander Hamilton, captured the last remaining redoubts surrounding Yorktown on Oct. 14. After three days of intense artillery fire, the British asked for terms of surrender.

On Oct. 19, Cornwallis’ forces surrendered to Washington’s Continental Army, bringing and end to the fighting of the American Revolution.

After the surrender of Cornwallis in October 1781, the major fighting of the war was over, but the two sides were still far away from an agreement. The complications of France and Spain having joined in support of the Americans made negotiations especially fraught.

A delegation that included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and Henry Laurens arrived in Paris in April 1782 to launch the treaty negotiations.

One of the complicating factors was the competing desires of the Americans, French and Spanish. The Americans wanted independence, but the other European powers wanted more colonial possessions and to establish a permanent advantage over the British.

After a suggestion from the French that would have limited the new American nation east of the Appalachian Mountains, the American delegation started separate negotiations with the British.

The British realized the separate negotiations were the chance to salvage at least some of the economic benefits of trade with their soon-to-be former colonies by weakening American ties with France and Spain.

Before long, the sides had settled on recognition of American independence, along with proposed boundaries. The Northern border was set at modern-day Canada, the Southern boundary at what’s now the state line between Georgia and Florida and the Western border at the Mississippi River.

Other provisions included a clause recognizing debts contracted before the war as still valid, protection for Loyalists still living in America, shared access to the Mississippi and a prisoner-of-war swap.

The treaty was signed Sept. 3, 1783, just shy of two years after Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. The Congress of the Confederation, which was the new nation’s governing body, approved the Treaty of Paris in January 1784.

Just one day after setting up a committee to draft what would become the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress empowered another committee to draft a constitution for the new government that was about to come into being.

The result was the Article of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which established a unicameral legislature with limited power over the individual states and set forth a basic framework of cooperation.

While the document called for each state to respect the Articles as inviolable, it didn’t give the Confederation Congress that it established the power to raise taxes or to direct individual states to do something, making cooperation difficult.

The articles were finished in late 1777 and submitted to state legislatures for ratification.

They finally came into effect on March 1, 1781, not long after the Maryland Legislature became the 13th and final colony to ratify the document.

There were problems from the start with the government as set out in the Articles of Confederation. Among the largest were that while Congress could pass laws, it had no way to enforce them, and some decisions required Congressional approval, followed by unanimous agreement from all 13 state legislatures, before coming into force.

But perhaps the most glaring failure had to do with taxation. Only states could levy taxes, and the Confederation Congress could only ask the states for money.

Because it lacked any way to enforce its requests, many were simply ignored or went only partly fulfilled.

That left the Continental Army chronically underfunded and led to the federal government taking on a tremendous amount of debt to fund the Revolutionary War.

The original idea was for the articles to form the basis of a permanent new government for the former colonies, now styling themselves the United States of America, but the weakness of the central power, the lack of any executive or judicial officers and the inability to tax all meant change needed to happen.

Throughout the Revolutionary War, the limitations of the Articles of Confederation, especially when it came to raising money and levying taxes, made themselves glaringly obvious. They continued to show in the years after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris. In 1786, a small group of people, including Alexander Hamilton, met in Annapolis, Md., to discuss changes to the Articles of Confederation around trade between the states.

It became clear something larger needed to be done, and a convention was called in Philadelphia in May 1787 to discuss major revisions to the Articles of Confederation.

Before long, though, many delegates realized reform wasn’t the answer — they needed to start over with an entirely new document.

That wasn’t something the delegates were technically authorized to do, but between late May and late July, the delegates hashed out the basics of the U.S. Constitution.

Much of the basic structure came from proposals created by James Madison, with alterations when one of the ideas was unacceptable to some of the states.

They laid out the idea of three co-equal branches of government, each with its own distinct roles and responsibilities, and each acting as a check on the power of the others. The idea was to make it impossible for someone in power to act in the arbitrary and harmful ways Americans believed the British monarchy had so often done.

In the late 1780s, unrest broke out in Massachusetts in part due to the economic hardships that followed the end of the Revolutionary War. The new nation was hard up for cash, and European trading partners were refusing to offer credit to merchants in a brand-new country.

That led to demands for payments for goods, as well as taxes, be made in currency, as opposed to in-kind contributions that many poorer farmers relied on.

The economic pressure led to petitions to the Massachusetts Legislature for relief, but those were largely ignored.

Things came to a head in 1786, when in an attempt to stop civil actions to collect back taxes, protesters began to keep courts in Western Massachusetts from sitting.

In response, the Massachusetts Supreme Court issued indictments for some of the leaders, but a group of men, including Daniel Shays, were only stopped from blocking the next sitting of the court by a large militia force.

The tension continued to grow until early 1787, when a force tried to seize the federal armory in Springfield, Mass., but were stopped and driven off by a force of as many as 3,000 militia members.

The crisis had laid bare the desperate situation many found themselves in after the Revolution, as well as the weakness of the federal government under the Articles of Confederation.

The rebellion, as well as the fact it had required a state militia instead of federal troops to quell the uprising, influenced delegates to the constitutional Convention in Philadelphia later that year.

After weeks of committee work, a first draft was created, then debate began again on revisions. The delegates shortened the presidential term from seven years to four, among many other changes.

Somewhat famously, the word slavery doesn’t appear in the Constitution, but that doesn’t mean the issue wasn’t addressed.

The tension between states where slavery was essential to the economy, especially the Southern states, were unwilling to allow any changes to the system, and to convince Southern states to approve the document, a clause was inserted that forbade Congress from considering legislation about the international slave trade for 20 years after the Constitution was ratified.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the delegates for Pennsylvania, summed up what many were thinking once the new Constitution was ready for the states to consider.

“I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said during a speech. “I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. … It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies …”

Once the convention had OK’d the new Constitution, it was time for the state legislatures to take it up. To help convince the public of the need for a new Constitution and to help persuade them to approve the document that had come out of the convention, a series of essays began appearing in newspapers signed with the pseudonym Publius.

A total of 85 would be published, with most appearing between October 1787 and April 1788. They were actually written jointly by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.

Though Hamilton and Madison would come to find themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum in just a few years, they worked together to produce an argument for the U.S. Constitution that is still studied by students at all levels to this day.

The arguments worked. By the end of 1787, three states, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, had approved the Constitution, and on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to approve it, the Constitution took effect.

By the end of 1788, elections were underway to form the new government.

A Bill of Rights, which enumerated basic rights of the citizens, had been proposed as part of the Constitution itself, was taken up immediately afterward, though it wouldn’t be finally ratified and go into effect until the 1790s.

George Washington was one of the most beloved figures in the country after the end of the Revolutionary War. After resigning his commission in 1783, he’d returned to Mount Vernon, his Virginia estate.

He’d been prevailed upon to lead the constitutional Convention, and had been the first signatory of the new document.

But he didn’t seem to be interested in a role in this new government. Instead, tired with years of war and public service, he wanted to retire to Mount Vernon.

Historian Stephen Knott wrote about the first campaign.

“In the wake of winning his country's independence and then overseeing the formation of its government, George Washington thought he had done enough,” Knott wrote. “He desperately wanted to go home and live a quiet life, but Americans wanted no one else to lead them. No other person was seriously considered.”

Gouverneur Morris, who’d helped to draft the Constitution, wrote to Washington to try and convince him.

“[Among the] thirteen horses now about to be coupled together, there are some of every race and character,” Morris wrote. “They will listen to your voice and submit to your control. You therefore must, I say must mount this seat.”

Voting began in December 1788 and concluded in January 1789. Washington became the only man to unanimously win the presidency, with 69 votes cast in his favor. John Adams would be his vice president.

The first seat of Washington’s government would be New York, though the capital would move to Philadelphia within a few years.

The moment of the drafting of the Constitution was a fraught one. Major compromises had to be reached, bringing together both proponents and opponents of a strong central government.

It wasn’t clear at the start of the convention what the result would be or even if the delegates would be able to reach one.

But their weeks of work resulted in a document that is still in force — with 27 amendments added — today.

Many recognized how important the Constitution was from the start.

James Madison, who was the driving force behind what would become the new Constitution, recounted what Franklin said on the convention’s last day.

“Whilst the last members were signing it Doctr. Franklin looking toward the Presidents Chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun,” Madison wrote. “I have said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.”