The Articles of Confederation

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe the structure of the government created by the Articles of Confederation, including the unicameral Confederation Congress, the absence of a separate executive or judiciary, the one-state-one-vote rule, and the supermajority requirements for major legislation and amendment.
• Identify the principal accomplishments of the Confederation Congress, including the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the Land Ordinance of 1785, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
• Account for the structural weaknesses of the Articles, particularly the lack of a federal taxing power, the lack of authority over interstate and foreign commerce, and the absence of executive enforcement.
• Explain how Shays' Rebellion in 1786 to 1787 was used as evidence by political leaders who argued that the Articles required either substantial revision or replacement.
• Use Skill 3.B to identify the specific evidence cited in primary sources to support claims about the strengths or weaknesses of the Articles, and weigh that evidence on its own terms.

When the Continental Congress finished drafting the Articles of Confederation in November 1777, the delegates were eight months into a war against the most centralized empire on the planet, and they wrote the document with that experience in front of them. The Articles created a government that was deliberately the opposite of the British state they were fighting. There was no king, no separate executive, and no national judiciary. The thirteen states retained "sovereignty, freedom, and independence" over every power not expressly delegated to the central government. Ratification took until March 1781, held up by a four-year quarrel over whether states with western land claims (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia) could keep them or had to cede them to the new union. Maryland, which had no western claim, refused to ratify until the cessions began (KC-3.2.II.B).

Inside that confederal frame, governing power lived in a single body: the Confederation Congress. Each state delegation cast one vote. Routine measures required a simple majority, but any consequential decision (declaring war, signing treaties, coining money, borrowing on the national credit, raising an army) required the assent of nine states out of thirteen. Amendment of the Articles themselves required unanimity, which in practice meant that the document could not be amended at all. The structure expressed a settled colonial intuition: that liberty was the natural product of local self-rule, and that any central authority strong enough to act decisively was strong enough to become tyrannical (KC-3.2.II.A).

Inside this limited frame, the Confederation Congress did real work. It negotiated and ratified the Treaty of Paris of 1783, by which Britain recognized American independence and accepted a western boundary at the Mississippi River, a generous territorial settlement that nearly doubled the land area claimed by the new republic. Two years later it passed the Land Ordinance of 1785, which laid a rectangular grid across the public lands north and west of the Ohio River. Surveyors divided the territory into townships of thirty-six square miles, each township into thirty-six sections of one square mile, and reserved the income from one section in every township to support public schools. The same gridded survey would eventually organize the cadastral geography of the western United States from the Ohio River to the Pacific (KC-3.3.I.C).

Two years later still, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which solved a problem the existing thirteen states could not. It defined a process by which a federal territory passed through three stages of governance and, on reaching a population of sixty thousand free inhabitants, applied for admission to the union as a state on equal footing with the original thirteen. The ordinance protected freedom of religion, the right of habeas corpus, and trial by jury inside the territory. And it banned slavery north and west of the Ohio River, the first time any American government had drawn a geographic line against the institution (KC-3.3.I.C). The Northwest Ordinance is the strongest single argument for the Confederation Congress's competence, and the strongest evidence that the new republic had begun to imagine itself as a continental nation.

The same Articles that produced the Northwest Ordinance, however, could not solve the country's most basic financial problem. The Confederation Congress had no authority to levy taxes. It could only requisition funds from the states, and the states routinely paid a fraction of what was asked. Between 1781 and 1786 the states delivered roughly one-sixth of the requisitioned amounts. Foreign creditors went unpaid. The Continental currency, never strong, collapsed entirely. Veterans of the Continental Army waited years for promised back pay. By 1786, Congress could not even cover the interest on its foreign debt (KC-3.2.II.B).

The commerce problem was nearly as severe. Congress had no authority to regulate interstate commerce, and so the states regulated it themselves. Connecticut taxed imports from Massachusetts. New York taxed firewood crossing in from New Jersey. Virginia and Maryland fought over navigation rights on the Potomac River. Several states issued their own paper currencies, which then traded at variable discounts against one another. Foreign powers exploited the disunity: Britain closed the British West Indies to American shipping; Spain closed the Mississippi River below Natchez to American flatboats. With no executive branch, Congress had no way to enforce the treaties it did sign. The Confederation Congress could speak with one voice abroad only when all thirteen states wanted it to (KC-3.2.II.B).

The crisis that translated these structural complaints into a political opening came out of western Massachusetts. In 1786, after a postwar depression had pushed farm commodity prices down and a hard-money tax policy had pushed property foreclosures up, debt-burdened farmers led by Continental Army veteran Daniel Shays began closing the county courts that handled foreclosure cases. By January 1787 they had marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield. The Confederation Congress requisitioned troops from the states; only Virginia paid. Massachusetts suppressed the rising with a privately funded militia that wealthy Boston merchants paid for out of their own pockets. Shays' Rebellion killed only four men, but it confirmed for political leaders including George Washington, James Madison, and John Jay that the central government could not protect property, enforce contracts, or maintain order (KC-3.2.II.B).

Two earlier meetings had already begun to reframe the constitutional question. At the Mount Vernon Conference of 1785, commissioners from Virginia and Maryland agreed on the navigation of the Potomac. The success of that small meeting suggested that interstate problems might yield to face-to-face negotiation. At the Annapolis Convention of September 1786, delegates from five states gathered to discuss interstate commerce, found their numbers too thin for substantive work, and issued a call for a broader convention to meet at Philadelphia in May 1787 to consider revisions to the Articles. Shays' Rebellion broke out three months later. By the time the Philadelphia delegates arrived in May, the question on the table had grown from "how do we revise the Articles" to "do we replace them." Lesson 8 follows the delegates into the State House.

The four sources below sample the Confederation decade from its central charter, through its two great statutes, into the crisis that brought it down.

1. (Causation) The drafters of the Articles of Confederation deliberately created a weak central government. Account for the wartime experience and the political theory that informed that choice. Was the choice rational on the evidence available in 1777, even if it failed by 1787?
2. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the lack of a federal taxing power to the calling of the Constitutional Convention. At which step in the chain do you think a different decision could have stabilized the Articles, and why?
3. (Comparison) The Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 are two of the most consequential statutes in American history, and both were passed under the Articles. Compare their long-term legacies. Which has had the larger effect, and on what grounds?
4. (Causation) The Northwest Ordinance banned slavery north of the Ohio River while the Confederation Congress took no parallel action against slavery south of the Ohio. Account for that asymmetry. What does it suggest about the political limits of the Confederation Congress?
5. (Causation) Critics of Shays' Rebellion treated it as a constitutional crisis; defenders of the rebels treated it as legitimate protest against a hard-money policy that protected creditors. Account for both readings of the same evidence. Which one carried the political day in 1787, and why?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.