The First Try: The Articles of Confederation

Why they wanted a weak central government

In 1776, thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic coast declared that they were free and independent states. For more than ten years before that, they had argued with a government far away in London. That government was the king and Parliament, Britain's law-making body. Parliament had taxed the colonists and made laws for them, but the colonists had no representatives in Parliament. No one they had elected sat there to speak for them.

The Declaration of Independence gave the colonists' answer. It said that a government gets its right to rule from "the consent of the governed." Consent means agreement. A government is supposed to rule only because the people it rules have agreed to it. (Chapter 1 of this course is about that idea.)

Now the states faced a new problem. They were fighting a war against Britain, and they needed to work together to fight it. They needed some kind of shared government. But they had just risen up against a powerful government that taxed them from far away. Most Americans did not want to build another one.

Each state already had its own government, with its own legislature. A legislature is the elected group of people that makes a state's laws. Today New York's legislature meets in Albany. To most people in 1776, their state government felt close and familiar. A national government felt distant, the way London had felt. So they decided to keep most of the power in the states and to give the shared government only a little.

What the Articles set up

The Second Continental Congress, the meeting of delegates from all thirteen states that was running the war, wrote the Articles of Confederation. Congress approved them in 1777. They could not take effect until every state ratified them. To ratify means to formally approve. That took until March 1, 1781. Maryland held out the longest. It refused to sign until the states that claimed land in the West, such as Virginia, agreed to hand those lands over to the nation as a whole.

One branch only

The Articles created a single body, called Congress. Each state sent between two and seven delegates, but each state had one vote, no matter how many people lived in it. Delaware, one of the smallest states, had the same vote as Virginia, the largest.

There was no president or other executive. An executive is the person or office that carries out the laws. There was also no system of national courts to decide cases under national law. Congress could set up a few special courts, for example for ships captured at sea, and it could help settle quarrels between states. But there was no Supreme Court and no national court system. So the national government had a law-making body, and nothing else.

What Congress could do, and what it could not

Two rules that made action hard

First, the biggest decisions, such as going to war, making a treaty, borrowing money, or coining money, needed the votes of nine of the thirteen states. A simple majority, seven states, was not enough.

Second, any change to the Articles themselves needed the agreement of all thirteen states. The word for that is unanimous, meaning everyone agrees. If one state said no, the change was dead. Keep this rule in mind. It comes back in Part 4.

Drills for this part: II.07 What Congress could and could not do under the Articles. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

Reading the Articles in their own words

The GED test often shows you a short piece of an old document and asks what it means. The language of 1777 is harder than today's English. Sentences are long, and some words are spelled differently, such as "defence" for "defense." The way to read these passages is slowly, a phrase at a time, asking: who is doing what? Here are five short passages, each followed by what it says in plain words.

In plain words: Each state keeps its independence and all its powers, except the ones this agreement clearly hands to Congress. Sovereignty means supreme power: the final say over your own affairs. Expressly delegated means clearly and specifically handed over, in writing.

In plain words: The states join together in a "league of friendship" to defend one another, protect their freedoms, and help one another. Notice the word league. A league is an alliance of separate members. The states did not describe themselves as one nation. They described themselves as friends who had signed an agreement.

In plain words: When Congress votes, each state gets one vote, whatever its size. A state with many people counts the same as a state with few.

In plain words: Each state's share of the national government's costs will be raised through taxes that the state legislature decides on and collects. Laid and levied means set and collected. Congress sends each state a bill. Congress itself taxes no one.

In plain words: No part of the Articles can ever be changed unless Congress agrees and then every state legislature approves. One "no" blocks the change.

Trouble: money, an unpaid army, and trade

A government that could only ask for money

The war against Britain cost enormous sums. To pay for it, Congress printed paper money called Continental dollars. It printed so many that they lost almost all their value. For years afterward, people said a worthless thing was "not worth a Continental."

Congress also borrowed money, from Americans and from France and the Netherlands. The debts had to be paid back, with interest. But Congress could not tax. It could only send each state a request for money. These requests were called requisitions. The states had their own war debts, and many of their people had little cash. Year after year, the states sent Congress only a small part of what it asked for, and some states sent nothing.

In 1781 Congress tried to fix this. It asked the states to agree to a change in the Articles: a tax of 5 percent on goods brought into the country from abroad. A tax on imported goods is called a tariff, a duty, or an impost. Because this was a change to the Articles, all thirteen states had to agree. Most of the states agreed. But in 1782 Rhode Island, the smallest state, voted no, and the plan died. Congress tried again in 1783. That time New York's conditions blocked it, and by 1786 the second plan was dead too. The unanimous rule meant that a single state could stop the whole country from paying its bills.

The army at Newburgh, 1783

The soldiers who had won the war felt the problem first. By the winter of 1782 to 1783, the Continental Army was camped at Newburgh, New York, on the Hudson River about sixty miles north of New York City. The fighting was over, and a peace treaty was being worked out. But the soldiers and officers had gone months without pay. Congress had promised officers a pension, a payment for life after their service, and it had no money to pay it.

In March 1783 an unsigned letter passed through the camp. It urged the officers to stop being patient. It hinted that the army could refuse to disband, or go home and leave the country undefended, until Congress paid. That would have meant an army threatening its own government.

General George Washington called the officers to a meeting on March 15, 1783. He asked them to trust that Congress would do them justice and not to turn their swords against their own country. Then he took out a letter to read and could not make out the words. According to an officer who was there, Washington put on a pair of glasses and said: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country." Many of the officers were moved to tears, and the threat faded.

Washington calmed the army, but the money problem stayed. Many ordinary soldiers went home with paper promises of back pay instead of cash. Needing money to live on, many sold those paper promises for a small part of their value to people who had cash to spare. People who buy something cheaply in the hope that its value will rise later are called speculators. Remember those paper promises. They come back in Part 6.

Thirteen trade policies

Congress could not control trade. So each state made its own rules, and some states taxed goods coming in from other states. New York, for example, charged fees on boats bringing goods from New Jersey and Connecticut. States printed their own paper money, and a dollar from one state might not be worth the same as a dollar from another. That made trade between states slow and uncertain.

The weakness showed abroad too. Britain kept soldiers in forts on American land around the Great Lakes, even though the peace treaty said it would leave. In 1784 Spain closed the port of New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, to American trade. Western farmers used the river to ship their crops, and Congress could do little about either problem. It had almost no army and no money to raise one.

What the Articles got right

It would be wrong to say the Articles did nothing. Under them, the United States finished the war and signed the peace. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Britain recognized American independence, and the new country's western border was set at the Mississippi River.

The Articles' greatest success was a plan for the western lands. The states had given their claims to land northwest of the Ohio River to the nation. That region later became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided that land into square townships for sale, and it set aside one section of each township to support public schools. (An ordinance is a law or official order.)

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 went further. It explained how a territory could become a state, and it promised that new states would be equal to the original thirteen, not colonies of them. It guaranteed settlers certain rights, such as trial by jury and freedom of religion. And it said:

In plain words: Slavery and forced labor are banned in this territory, except as punishment for someone properly convicted of a crime. Almost eighty years later, the Thirteenth Amendment used nearly the same words to end slavery in the whole country, with the same exception for punishment. Chapter 8 of this course returns to those words and to what that exception has meant.

The same ordinance made a promise to the Native nations who lived on that land:

In plain words: The United States will deal honestly with the Native nations and will never take their land without their agreement. In the years that followed, the land was taken anyway, through treaties signed under pressure and through war. A right written on paper is one thing. Whether it is honored is another. That gap between the promise and the practice runs through this whole course.

Shays' Rebellion

The crisis that finally pushed the country's leaders to act began among farmers in western Massachusetts in 1786.

Most of these farmers had little cash. In the countryside, people often traded goods and work, and kept accounts with their neighbors and the local storekeeper. Gold and silver coins, called hard money, were scarce. Many of the farmers were veterans of the war.

Massachusetts owed a large war debt, much of it in the form of those paper promises from Part 4. A lot of that paper was now owned by merchants and speculators in Boston and other eastern towns, many of whom had bought it cheaply. The state government, where eastern merchants had strong influence, decided to pay the debt off at full value. To do that it raised taxes sharply, and it demanded payment in hard money.

Farmers who could not pay their taxes or their debts were taken to court. Many lost their farms through foreclosure, which means a creditor takes property when a debt is not paid. Some were put in jail for debt. The farmers sent petitions to the state legislature asking for relief: lower taxes, paper money, and a pause on foreclosures. The legislature refused.

Starting in August 1786, crowds of armed farmers marched to the county courthouses and closed them, so that no foreclosure cases could be heard. One of their leaders was Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army. The uprising came to be called Shays' Rebellion.

In January 1787 more than a thousand of the rebels marched on the national arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, a building where weapons and ammunition were stored. The national government could do almost nothing. Congress had no money to raise an army. So the governor of Massachusetts raised a state militia, a force of citizen soldiers, and wealthy Boston merchants paid for it. On January 25, 1787, at Springfield, the militia fired cannon at the rebels. Four rebels were killed. Within weeks the rebellion had broken up.

Afterward, most of the rebels were pardoned. In the next election, Massachusetts voters replaced the governor, and the new legislature eased some of the pressure on debtors. But the rebellion had frightened many of the country's leaders. If farmers could close courts and march on an arsenal in one state, what would stop it in another? And the national government had been unable to help.

Two ways of seeing the crisis

People at the time did not agree about what the rebellion meant. Here are two famous founders, writing to the same man, James Madison, a few months apart.

In plain words: These riots prove that our governments are too weak. ("Want of energy" means lack of strength.) Thirteen states pulling in different directions and against the national government will soon ruin the whole country. ("Fœderal" is an old spelling of "federal.")

In plain words: I believe that a small rebellion from time to time is good for a country. It works like medicine: it keeps a government healthy by reminding it that it answers to the people. ("Medecine" is Jefferson's spelling.)

Washington, who was at home in Virginia and hearing alarming reports, saw danger and disorder. Jefferson, who was in France serving as the American minister there, saw a warning that the people were watching their government. Both men were looking at the same events.

Historians still disagree about how to see the crisis of the 1780s, and the two main views are worth knowing.

The first view says the national government was simply too weak to do what a country must do: pay its debts, defend its borders, keep trade flowing, and keep order. The Constitution fixed those problems.

The second view adds a question: weak for whom? In many states, the legislatures of the 1780s were responding to ordinary voters, farmers and debtors, by printing paper money and passing laws that gave debtors more time to pay. Creditors, the people who were owed money, were furious, because they were being repaid in paper worth less than what they had lent. Many of the men who met to write the Constitution were creditors or merchants. The Constitution they wrote made it illegal for states to print paper money or to pass laws that cancel or weaken contracts. On this view, the crisis was also a fight over who would pay for the war and who would be paid.

The two views can both be true at once. The GED test will not ask you which one is right. It will ask you to recognize a point of view, to tell a fact from an opinion, and to judge whether a claim is supported by evidence. This part of the story gives you practice at exactly that.

The road to Philadelphia

Even before the rebellion, some leaders were trying to fix the trade problem. In September 1786 they called a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss trade among the states. Only twelve delegates from five states came. They could not do much, so they called for a larger meeting in Philadelphia the next May, to consider everything that needed repair in the national government.

After Shays' Rebellion, that call was hard to ignore. On February 21, 1787, Congress agreed to the meeting. It said the convention would meet "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation." In other words, the delegates were supposed to repair the Articles.

In May 1787, delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia. Rhode Island refused to send anyone. Within days, the delegates decided not to repair the Articles at all. They set out to write a completely new plan of government, the Constitution of the United States. How they argued over it, and the bargains they struck over representation and over slavery, is the subject of Chapter 3.

What the Constitution changed

This table is one of the most useful things on this page for the test. Each row takes a weakness of the Articles and shows how the Constitution answered it. You will meet each of these answers again in later chapters.

Drills for this part: II.08 The Articles or the Constitution?. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

Words to know

Confederation

A group of independent states that agree to cooperate on a few things while each keeps most of its own power.

Sovereignty

Supreme power; the final say over your own affairs.

Delegate

As a noun, a person sent to represent others at a meeting. As a verb, to hand a power or a job over to someone else.

Ratify

To formally approve a document such as a constitution, an amendment, or a treaty.

Unanimous

Agreed to by everyone, with no one opposed.

Legislature

The elected body that makes laws. Congress is the national legislature. Each state also has its own.

Executive

The branch or person that carries out the laws. In the national government today, the president.

Judiciary

The system of courts, which decides cases and says what the law means.

Requisition

A formal request. Under the Articles, Congress sent requisitions to the states asking for money and soldiers.

Tariff (also called a duty or impost)

A tax on goods brought in from another country, or from another state.

Creditor and debtor

A creditor is owed money. A debtor owes it.

Foreclosure

When a creditor takes property, such as a farm or a house, because a debt was not paid.

Speculator

Someone who buys something cheaply in the hope that its value will rise later.

Militia

A force of citizen soldiers, called up when needed, rather than a full-time army.

Ordinance

A law or official order.

Territory

Land belonging to the nation that is not yet a state.

Amendment

A formal change or addition to a constitution.