Articles of Confederation Ratified
The Articles of Confederation were ratified in 1781 and replaced within eight years because they gave Congress no money. They had been drafted in 1777 and took four years to ratify because Maryland refused until Virginia surrendered its western land claims. What they created was a league rather than a government: one vote per state regardless of size, nine votes of thirteen required for anything important, unanimity to amend, no executive, no federal courts, and no power to tax or to regulate commerce. Congress could requisition money from the states and the states could decline, which they generally did — by 1786 it had received about a sixth of what it had asked for. The consequences were immediate. The army went unpaid and nearly mutinied at Newburgh, the war debt could not be serviced, the states raised tariffs against each other, and there was no means of enforcing the peace treaty's provisions about loyalist property, which gave Britain a pretext to keep garrisons in the north-west. Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786, a rising of indebted farmers put down by a privately funded militia, convinced men who had been content with the arrangement that it could not defend property or order. The one substantial achievement was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which set out how territories would become states as equals rather than as colonies. The convention that met in Philadelphia that summer was authorised to amend the Articles and wrote a new constitution instead. The Articles are usually treated as a failure and are better read as an experiment whose result was informative. They established that a union of states without an independent revenue is a treaty rather than a government, which is the lesson the framers built the taxing power on.
- Year: 1781 CE
- Category: Political
