Articles of Confederation

The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were the first constitution of the United States of America, drafted by the Second Continental Congress in 1777 and ratified by all thirteen states in 1781, which established a loose confederation of sovereign states under a unicameral national Congress with sharply limited central authority, and which served as the framework of American government until it was superseded by the present Constitution of the United States in 1789.

Background and Origins

By the summer of 1776, the thirteen British colonies in North America had declared their independence and were engaged in war with the world's leading military power. The Continental Congress, an ad hoc body of delegates from the colonies, was coordinating the war effort, but it operated without any formal constitutional basis. Most political leaders of the era, shaped by their experience with royal authority and by republican ideology, were deeply suspicious of centralized power and considered their states to be independent, sovereign polities united only for common purposes such as defense.

On June 12, 1776, barely a week before adopting the Declaration of Independence, Congress appointed a committee of thirteen members—one from each colony—to prepare a plan of confederation. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania prepared the initial draft, which proposed a considerably stronger central government than the version ultimately adopted.

Drafting and Ratification

Congress began debating the draft on July 12, 1776, but final agreement proved difficult. Prolonged disputes centered on three issues: whether representation and voting in Congress should be by state or by population; how expenses of the war should be apportioned among the states; and, most contentious of all, whether states with extensive western land claims (notably Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut) should be required to cede their claims beyond the Appalachians to the national government, a demand pressed most persistently by the landlocked "landless" states.

After extended debate and substantial revision, Congress formally adopted the final text on November 15, 1777, and submitted it to the states for ratification. An engrossed copy was signed by congressional delegates on July 9, 1778. Ratification required the unanimous consent of all thirteen states. Most states acted quickly, but Maryland, which had no western claims of its own, refused to ratify until the landholding states surrendered their trans-Appalachian territories to the Union. When Virginia finally agreed to cede its northwestern claims in January 1781, Maryland ratified on February 2, 1781. Congress proclaimed the Articles in force on March 1, 1781, little more than seven months before the decisive Allied victory at Yorktown.

Structure of Government

The Articles created a government of a deliberately decentralized character. The formal name of the new polity, declared in Article I, was "The United States of America," and the union was described as a firm "league of friendship" among sovereign states for common defense, security of liberties, and mutual welfare.

The national government consisted of a single body, the Congress of the Confederation (formally "The United States in Congress Assembled"), a unicameral legislature that absorbed both legislative and executive functions. Its principal structural features were:

• Each state, regardless of size or population, cast a single vote in Congress.
• Each state legislature annually appointed a delegation of between two and seven members; the states, not the national government, paid their delegates' salaries.
• No person could serve as a delegate more than three years in any period of six years, a restriction intended to prevent the development of a professional political class.
• A presiding officer, the President of the United States in Congress Assembled, was chosen from among the delegates by Congress itself; the first to serve under the formally ratified Articles was John Hanson of Maryland in 1781.
• There was no separate executive branch and no national judiciary. Executive business was conducted through congressional committees, a President of Congress, and, after 1781, small administrative departments for war, foreign affairs, marine, and finance, the last headed by the energetic Superintendent of Finance, Robert Morris.

Article XIII declared the union "perpetual" and stipulated that no alteration of the Articles could be made without the agreement of Congress and confirmation by the legislature of every state.

Powers of Congress

The Articles granted Congress authority over matters of general concern while reserving all powers not expressly delegated to the states. Congress could declare war and make peace; conduct diplomacy and conclude treaties and alliances; send and receive ambassadors; establish rules for captures on land and water; raise armies and navies (though troops and funds had to be obtained by requisitions upon the states); build and equip a navy; fix the standards of coinage and regulate its value; coin and borrow money; emit bills of credit; establish and regulate a postal service; regulate Indian affairs outside state boundaries; determine the value of state coinage; and appoint courts for trials of piracy and settle disputes between states, including through arbitration procedures.

The Articles also imposed constraints on the states. No state could engage in foreign relations, wage war without congressional consent (except in repelling sudden attacks), keep a peacetime army or navy above limits set by Congress, coin money or emit bills of credit, or grant titles of nobility. Article IV guaranteed citizens of each state the privileges and immunities of citizens in the others, required that public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of each state be given full faith and credit by the others, and provided for the extradition of fugitives. Article XI offered Canada the opportunity to join the union on its own application, while the admission of any other new state required the consent of nine states.

Principal Weaknesses

The weaknesses of the confederation framework were substantial and widely acknowledged even by contemporaries:

• No power of direct taxation. Congress could only requisition funds from the states, which frequently failed to pay. By the mid-1780s the states were deeply in arrears, the national treasury was empty, and the Continental currency had collapsed in value so thoroughly that the phrase "not worth a Continental" entered the language.
• No control over commerce. Congress could neither regulate interstate trade nor counteract discriminatory British mercantile policies. The states erected their own tariff and navigation barriers against one another, fragmenting the American market.
• No enforcement mechanism. Lacking an executive and courts, Congress depended entirely on state compliance; it could not compel states to honor treaties, pay requisitions, or observe national obligations.
• Structural rigidity. Amendments required the unanimous consent of all thirteen legislatures, and major measures required the votes of nine states, making effective action extremely difficult.
• Equality of states. The one-state, one-vote rule gave tiny Delaware influence equal to populous Virginia.

Proposed remedies repeatedly failed. An amendment of 1781 sought to give Congress a five percent duty on imports to fund the national debt, but was defeated when Rhode Island rejected it and Virginia rescinded its approval; a second impost proposal in 1783 likewise fell short of unanimity.

Achievements under the Articles

Despite these defects, the government of the confederation recorded significant accomplishments. It directed the final phase of the Revolutionary War to victory, managed the French alliance, and negotiated the Treaty of Paris of 1783, by which Britain recognized American independence and ceded territory stretching to the Mississippi River. Its most enduring achievement was in western policy: the Land Ordinance of 1785 established the rectangular survey system and reserved land for public schools, while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 created a framework for territorial government, provided an orderly path to eventual statehood, guaranteed basic civil liberties, and prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory—foundations of American expansion that survived the Articles themselves. Congress also chartered the Bank of North America in 1781 and, after the war, reestablished regular diplomatic representation abroad.

Decline and Calls for Reform

After the peace of 1783 the confederation's difficulties multiplied. Congress struggled to pay demobilized soldiers, defusing a near-mutiny of the army at Newburgh, New York, in March 1783 only through George Washington's personal intervention. That June, mutinous Pennsylvania soldiers besieged Congress in Philadelphia, forcing the body to flee to Princeton; the national capital thereafter drifted, settling in New York City in 1785. Britain retained military posts in the Northwest Territory in violation of the peace treaty; Spain closed the lower Mississippi River to American navigation in 1784 and negotiated from strength; Barbary pirates preyed upon Mediterranean shipping that Congress could not protect; and squabbles among the states over navigation rights and tariffs multiplied.

The critical turning point came with Shays' Rebellion (1786–1787), an armed uprising of indebted farmers in western Massachusetts that the national government was powerless to suppress and which had to be put down by state militia financed by private subscription. Alarmed conservatives concluded that the union itself was in danger. In September 1786 a convention at Annapolis, Maryland, called by Virginia and attended by delegates from only five states but led by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, issued a appeal for a broader convention to consider the defects of the federal system. Congress reluctantly endorsed the proposal, and in May 1787 delegates from every state except Rhode Island assembled at Philadelphia.

Replacement by the Constitution

The Philadelphia Convention, presided over by Washington, was formally charged with revising the Articles, but it quickly resolved to draft an entirely new constitution establishing a national government with independent powers of taxation, regulation of commerce, and enforcement—a federal system combining a strong general government with retained state sovereignty. The finished document was signed on September 17, 1787, and transmitted to Congress, which submitted it to the states for ratification by special conventions rather than by the legislatures, thereby bypassing the unanimity requirement of the Articles.

Delaware ratified first on December 7, 1787; New Hampshire became the ninth state on June 21, 1788, providing the majority required by the new document and putting it into effect among the ratifying states; Virginia and New York followed in June and July 1788; and the new government commenced operations on March 4, 1789. The Congress of the Confederation held its final session on March 2, 1789. Rhode Island, which had never ratified the Constitution, was the last state to accede, in May 1790.

Significance and Legacy

The Articles of Confederation occupy a foundational place in American constitutional history. They created the Union itself, first bestowed the name "United States of America" upon it, established the principle of a perpetual union, and administered the successful conclusion of the War of Independence and the beginning of western settlement. Their failures served as the principal instructional text for the framers of 1787: the Constitution deliberately corrected the confederation's defects by granting the national government direct taxation, commercial regulation, an independent executive, a federal judiciary, and flexible amendment procedures, while preserving the federal division of powers.

Historical judgment of the Articles has varied considerably. Traditional accounts, influenced by the Federalist generation, treated the period as a "Critical Era" of near-national failure, while later historians, noting the genuine achievements in diplomacy, western policy, and the peaceful preservation of thirteen quarrelsome republics, have viewed the confederation as a reasonable experiment in decentralized republicanism for its time. The document remains a classic subject of comparative study of confederal versus federal forms of government, and its emphasis on state sovereignty and fear of centralized power has continued to echo in American debates over federalism to the present day.