From the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · A government that could ask

The men who wrote the Articles during a war against a distant taxing power built exactly what you would expect: a Congress that could not tax. Requisitions were apportioned among the states, and a state that simply did not pay faced no consequence, because there was no mechanism to make it. In 1781 and again in 1783 Congress proposed an impost — a modest duty on imports to fund the debt — and both times it failed, the first blocked by Rhode Island alone, since amendment required all thirteen.

That created the worst kind of collective problem. A state that paid its share while others did not was simply subsidising its neighbours, so the sensible thing for each was to wait. By the mid-1780s the national government was months behind on interest to foreign creditors and had effectively stopped paying its own veterans.

The Articles did achieve something substantial, and it is worth saying. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organised the territory north of the Ohio, provided for new states to enter on equal terms with the old rather than as colonies, and barred slavery from the territory. That principle — that expansion creates equals, not dependencies — shaped the whole later map.

Part 2 · Shays’ Rebellion

The crisis arrived in western Massachusetts. The state had taken on a heavy war debt and chose to pay it down fast, through taxes demanded in hard coin at a time when farmers had almost none. Courts foreclosed on farms and jailed debtors; veterans who had been paid in near-worthless certificates were losing land to creditors who had bought those certificates cheaply.

In 1786 farmers began closing the county courts by force to stop foreclosures. Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain who had fought at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, became the best-known leader of a movement several thousand strong. In January 1787 about fifteen hundred of them marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield and were dispersed by cannon fire.

The rebels were not a mob and said so in their own petitions. They asked for paper money, for courts to sit less often, and for taxes to fall on trade rather than on land — the ordinary demands of people being squeezed, pressed through the channels available before they closed the courts. Several had fought the whole war. Shays had been commended for bravery at Saratoga and had sold the ceremonial sword Lafayette gave him to pay a debt. The men suppressing them were in many cases the creditors holding their paper.

What frightened the political class was not the rebellion's strength but the government's weakness. Congress could raise no force; the militia that finally suppressed it was paid for by a subscription from Boston merchants. Washington, in retirement, wrote in alarm asking what a government was worth that could not protect itself. The Convention in Philadelphia met four months later.

Part 3 · A convention that exceeded its brief

Congress called the Philadelphia convention of 1787 “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” The fifty-five delegates who came decided within days to do something else entirely: to abandon the Articles and write a new frame of government.

They also worked in secret. Windows were shut in a Philadelphia summer, guards posted, and delegates bound not to discuss proceedings. Madison's notes, the fullest record, were not published until 1840, after the last delegate had died. The secrecy let men change their minds without defending every shift in public, and it also meant the country first saw the document as a finished thing.

Who was in the room shaped what came out of it. The fifty-five were lawyers, merchants, planters and veterans — the wealthiest and best-connected men in America, more than half of them holding government securities that would gain value under a stronger government, and about twenty-five enslaving people. Rhode Island refused to send anyone at all. No women, no Native delegates, no Black Americans, nobody poor and nobody from the debtor side of the Massachusetts quarrel took part.

Then there is what they claimed. The Articles required all thirteen states to amend; the new Constitution declared itself in force once nine states ratified, and it bypassed the state legislatures in favour of specially elected conventions. The men who wrote it knew it was irregular, and argued that the authority of the people assembled in convention outranked the procedure of an existing compact. It is a revolution conducted by lawyers.

Part 4 · Reading the Constitution as a list of fixes

The most useful way into the document is to read each power as an answer to a failure you have just met. Congress could not tax; the Constitution gives it the power to lay and collect taxes directly from people, without asking states. States taxed each other's goods; the commerce clause gives Congress authority over interstate trade.

There was no executive to act between sessions or command forces; the Constitution creates a president. There was no national court to settle disputes between states or interpret treaties; it creates a Supreme Court. Treaties could not be enforced against state law; the supremacy clause makes federal law and treaties binding on state judges. Unanimity made amendment impossible; the new rule requires three-quarters, which is hard rather than hopeless.

The fixes were not guesses. Delegates had lived the failures: Madison had spent 1786 collecting evidence of the Confederation’s breakdown for a paper he wrote before the Convention; Hamilton had served as Washington’s aide watching an army go unpaid; Washington had commanded it. When the Constitution gives Congress power over interstate commerce, that answers Maryland and Virginia quarrelling over the Potomac in 1785, which is the dispute that produced the Annapolis meeting of 1786 and then the call for Philadelphia.

Shays appears in the document too, in the clauses on suppressing insurrections and on guaranteeing each state a republican form of government. Almost every substantive grant of power in the original Constitution can be traced to something that went wrong between 1781 and 1787, which is why the failures are worth knowing before the solutions.