Articles of Confederation
Based on Wikipedia: Articles of Confederation
America's First Constitution Was Designed to Fail
Before the Constitution, there was another document. It lasted eight years. And it was deliberately engineered to be weak.
The Articles of Confederation—officially titled the "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union"—represented America's first attempt at self-governance after declaring independence from Britain. But here's the fascinating part: the men who wrote it didn't want a strong central government. They had just fought a war against one. So they created something closer to a treaty between sovereign nations than a unified country.
This wasn't incompetence. It was intentional. And understanding why tells us something profound about the American experiment itself.
Born in a Crisis, Forged in Debate
The Second Continental Congress began drafting the Articles in June 1776—literally days after appointing the committee to write the Declaration of Independence. These weren't separate projects in the founders' minds. They were two parts of the same revolutionary act.
Think about what the colonists needed at that moment. They needed foreign allies. France and Spain, the great powers who might help them against Britain, wouldn't negotiate with rebels. They would only deal with a legitimate nation. So the Americans needed three things simultaneously: a declaration explaining why they were breaking away, a model treaty for dealing with foreign powers, and some kind of constitutional framework proving they were a real government.
The committee tasked with drafting this framework included thirteen members, one from each colony. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania served as chairman. The debates that followed were fierce and prolonged, touching on questions that would haunt American politics for centuries: How much power should states surrender? Should large states have more votes than small ones? Who controls the western territories?
Congress had to flee Philadelphia twice during the drafting process—first to Baltimore, then to Lancaster and York, Pennsylvania—as British troops advanced. They kept working anyway.
What the Articles Actually Said
The final document, completed in November 1777, established what we would now call a confederation. The difference between a confederation and a federation matters enormously here.
In a federation—like the United States under the current Constitution—the central government has direct authority over citizens. It can tax you. It can conscript you. It can pass laws that supersede state laws.
In a confederation, the central government can only deal with the member states. It's more like the United Nations than a country. The states remain sovereign; the central body coordinates.
Article Two of the Articles of Confederation made this explicit: "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated." The states weren't giving up their independence. They were entering a "firm league of friendship" for mutual defense and common interests.
The Congress could declare war and peace. It could send ambassadors and make treaties. It could settle disputes between states. It could regulate weights, measures, and coinage. It could establish post offices and appoint military officers.
But here's what it couldn't do: it couldn't tax.
This was the fatal flaw. Congress could request money from the states. It could not demand it. And the states, as you might imagine, often found reasons not to pay.
The Deliberately Weak Design
The Articles gave Congress no power to regulate commerce between states. No power to enforce its own laws. No executive branch to carry out decisions. No national judiciary to interpret them.
Each state, regardless of population, got exactly one vote. Tiny Delaware had the same voting power as massive Virginia. Major decisions required nine of thirteen states to agree. Amending the Articles required unanimous consent—all thirteen states had to approve any change.
This wasn't oversight. The founders were applying a lesson they thought they'd learned from British rule: concentrated power corrupts. Better to have a government too weak than one too strong.
There's a certain logic to this. The colonists had experienced what happened when a distant central authority could tax without representation, quarter troops in private homes, and dissolve local legislatures. They built a system designed to make such abuses impossible.
The problem was that they also made effective governance impossible.
Ratification and the Maryland Standoff
Even getting the states to agree to this deliberately weak framework took years. Virginia ratified first, in December 1777. Within fourteen months, twelve of thirteen states had signed on.
Maryland refused.
The issue was western land claims. Several states—Virginia especially—claimed vast territories stretching to the Mississippi River and beyond, based on their original colonial charters. Maryland, which had no such claims, worried that these states would become too powerful. They might sell their western lands to pay off war debts while Maryland's citizens shouldered their full burden.
Maryland held firm for two years. Only when Virginia and other landed states indicated they would cede their western claims to the Confederation did Maryland finally ratify, on February 2, 1781. The Articles officially took effect on March 1, 1781.
The Revolutionary War had been going on for six years at that point. The government had been operating under the Articles as a de facto framework the whole time. The formal ratification changed little procedurally—it mostly codified what was already happening.
How the Articles Defined America
Article One gave the new nation its name: "The stile of this confederacy shall be 'The United States of America.'" This name, which first appeared in the Declaration of Independence, became official.
Article Three laid out the purpose of the union in language worth quoting directly: the states "hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them."
Article Four established something like citizenship—or at least freedom of movement. Free inhabitants of any state could pass unhindered through other states, enjoying the same rights as local citizens. Criminals who fled across state lines could be extradited. The word "free" was doing significant work here; enslaved people were not considered free inhabitants.
Article Five set the rules for Congress. Each state could send between two and seven delegates, but got only one vote regardless of delegation size. Representatives were appointed by state legislatures and could serve no more than three years out of any six.
Article Six prohibited states from conducting independent foreign policy, accepting foreign gifts or titles, or maintaining standing armies in peacetime (unless dealing with pirates or imminent frontier attack). Every state had to maintain a ready militia.
Article Nine granted Congress its most significant powers: the exclusive right to determine war and peace, exchange ambassadors, make treaties, regulate captures and prizes, appoint courts for maritime crimes, and serve as a final court for disputes between states. Congress could also appoint a president—not an executive like we have now, but a presiding officer who could serve only one year in any three-year term of Congress.
That same article contained the crucial limitation: Congress could not declare war, make treaties, appropriate money, or appoint a commander-in-chief without nine states agreeing. In a body of thirteen, this was a high bar.
The Years of Dysfunction
The weaknesses embedded in the Articles became apparent almost immediately after the war ended in 1783.
Congress couldn't pay the Continental Army's back wages. Soldiers had fought for years on promises of payment that the government now couldn't fulfill because states weren't sending their requisitioned funds. In 1783, a group of army officers at Newburgh, New York, considered marching on Congress to demand payment—a potential military coup averted only by George Washington's personal intervention.
States began erecting trade barriers against each other. New York taxed goods coming from New Jersey and Connecticut. Maryland and Virginia quarreled over navigation rights on the Potomac River. Each state printed its own currency, leading to chaos in interstate commerce.
Foreign powers treated the United States with contempt. Britain refused to evacuate military posts in the Northwest Territory as required by the peace treaty, correctly calculating that Congress couldn't do anything about it. Spain closed the Mississippi River to American navigation. The Barbary pirates seized American merchant ships, and Congress couldn't afford to ransom the sailors or build a navy to stop them.
And then came Shays's Rebellion.
The Rebellion That Changed Everything
In 1786, western Massachusetts farmers, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, faced crushing debt and the threat of losing their farms. The state government, dominated by coastal merchant interests, refused to issue paper money or provide debt relief. When farmers couldn't pay, courts ordered their property seized.
Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led an armed uprising. Rebels prevented courts from sitting and threatened to seize the federal arsenal at Springfield. Massachusetts eventually suppressed the rebellion, but it had taken months and required raising a private army—Congress had neither the troops nor the funds to help.
The rebellion terrified American elites. If a relatively stable state like Massachusetts could nearly collapse into anarchy, what chance did the whole confederation have? The weakness that had seemed like a virtue now looked like an existential threat.
From Annapolis to Philadelphia
Even before Shays's Rebellion, some leaders had recognized the need for reform. In September 1786, delegates from five states met at Annapolis, Maryland, ostensibly to discuss interstate commerce problems. Alexander Hamilton, one of the delegates, steered the convention toward a bolder goal: calling for a general convention to revise the Articles of Confederation.
The following May, delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia. Rhode Island, suspicious of any centralizing tendency, refused to participate.
The delegates quickly concluded that the Articles couldn't be fixed. The requirement of unanimous consent for amendments meant that any significant reform would be blocked. So they did something audacious: they exceeded their mandate and wrote an entirely new constitution.
The new document kept some elements from the Articles. The name "United States of America" survived. So did the general structure of a Congress making laws for the nation. But almost everything else changed.
The new Constitution created a strong executive—a president with real power, not just a presiding officer. It established federal courts. Most crucially, it gave Congress the power to tax citizens directly and to regulate interstate commerce. The federal government could now act directly on individuals, not just request cooperation from states.
Ratification required only nine states, not all thirteen. This deliberate lowering of the threshold—itself a kind of constitutional revolution—ensured that a handful of holdouts couldn't block the new system.
The Perpetual Union Question
The Articles called themselves a "perpetual union." This phrase would become enormously significant decades later, when Southern states claimed the right to secede.
Did the Constitution continue this perpetual union, or create a new one? Could states that had voluntarily joined the union voluntarily leave it? The Articles suggested permanence, but they had also been replaced—so how perpetual could they really have been?
These questions would be settled not by legal argument but by civil war. Yet they originated in this first, flawed attempt at American nationhood. The tension between state sovereignty and federal authority, embedded in the Articles, never fully resolved itself. It merely changed forms.
Why the Articles Matter
It's tempting to view the Articles of Confederation as a false start—an embarrassing first draft that the founders wisely replaced. But that undersells their importance.
The Articles established the United States as an independent nation in the eyes of the world. They provided a framework, however imperfect, that held the country together through the Revolution and its aftermath. They created precedents for representative government and interstate cooperation that the Constitution would build upon.
More profoundly, the Articles represented an experiment in a particular theory of government: that liberty was best protected by keeping power dispersed and central authority weak. The experiment failed, but its failure was instructive. The founders who wrote the Constitution had learned from the Articles' shortcomings. They designed a system with more federal power, but also with checks and balances meant to prevent that power from becoming tyrannical.
The Articles also remind us that the Constitution was not inevitable. American government could have evolved differently. The founders made choices, and those choices had consequences. The strong federal system we now take for granted emerged from a specific historical moment when the weakness of confederation government had become intolerable—but just barely intolerable enough to allow a stronger alternative.
Eight years. That's how long America's first constitution lasted. In historical terms, barely a moment. But in that moment, a nation discovered what kind of government it didn't want to be—and began the longer work of figuring out what it did.