Once Americans had thrown off a king, they had to decide who would hold power instead, and their answer came out of what they had just fought against. They had watched royal governors veto laws and a distant Parliament tax them, so they built governments that trusted elected legislatures close to home and starved executives and any central authority. Between 1776 and 1787 that design produced thirteen state constitutions, a national government under the Articles of Confederation, and a land policy for the West that outlasted the Articles themselves.
State constitutions: power to the legislatures
In May 1776 the Continental Congress told the colonies to form new governments, and by 1777 most had written constitutions. Writing them down was itself new: Britain's constitution was an unwritten collection of laws and customs, and colonists believed Parliament had twisted it. A written charter fixed the rules beyond the reach of ordinary lawmaking. Virginia added a separate declaration of rights (June 1776, drafted mainly by George Mason) protecting jury trial, a free press and freedom of religion, and most states followed.
The constitutions shared one structural choice: the legislature dominated. Most governors were chosen by the legislature for one-year terms, could not veto laws, and had to act with an advisory council. Virginia's governor could serve only three one-year terms in a row. Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution, the most radical, abolished the governor entirely in favor of a plural executive council and created a single-house assembly elected every year, with voting open to every adult male taxpayer. Annual elections everywhere kept lawmakers on a short leash. The reasoning was simple: executives had been the king's agents, while assemblies had defended colonial rights, so the branch closest to voters should hold the most power.
That trust in voters had a boundary. Nearly every state kept a property qualification for voting, and most set higher ones for office. Virginia kept its colonial rule that a voter own a freehold, such as 50 acres of unimproved land. Maryland required £5,000 in property for governor, and South Carolina required a debt-free estate worth £10,000 for its governor. Massachusetts's 1780 constitution required £60 in property or £3 in yearly income from land to vote. The logic was republican: a man who owned property was independent, while a tenant or wage worker could be pressured by his landlord or employer, so only owners could be trusted with the vote. Topic 3.6 covers the pressure from below that this logic faced.
Massachusetts (1780) marked a turn. Written mostly by John Adams, its constitution was drafted by a convention elected for that purpose and ratified by the towns, so it rested on the people rather than the legislature. It also gave the governor a veto that two-thirds of the legislature could override, and set up a two-house legislature with appointed judges. That balance, and the method of ratifying through a special convention, became models in Philadelphia in 1787.
The Articles: a league of sovereign states
John Dickinson drafted the Articles in 1776, and Congress sent them to the states in November 1777. Ratification took until March 1781, because Maryland refused to sign until states with colonial charters reaching to the Mississippi, above all Virginia, gave their western claims to the nation. Maryland's holdout produced something important: the West became common national property.
The Articles' own words show what kind of union they created. A sovereign government holds final authority over its territory and answers to no higher government, and Article II kept that status for each state:
Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.
Articles of Confederation, Article II, 1781
The states joined in what Article III called "a firm league of friendship," closer to an alliance of nations than to one nation. The structure followed.
| Feature | Under the Articles |
|---|---|
| Legislature | One house, Congress. Each state had one vote, whatever its population, and its delegates were chosen by its legislature. |
| Executive and courts | No president and no national courts. Congress ran everything through committees and appointed officers. |
| Major decisions | Nine of thirteen states to declare war, make treaties, borrow money or coin it. |
| Amendments | Unanimous approval of all thirteen state legislatures. |
| Taxes | None. Congress sent states requisitions (requests for money) and had no way to enforce them. |
| Trade | No power to regulate commerce between the states or with foreign nations. |
Congress was not powerless. It could make war and peace, send ambassadors, borrow money, run a postal service, and manage relations with American Indian nations outside state borders. Under the Articles, Congress finished the war, negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783), and set up a lasting system for the West. What it lacked were the three powers a government needs to act on its own: money, control of trade, and a way to make anyone obey. The design was deliberate. Americans had fought a government that taxed and regulated their trade from far away, and they refused to create another.
Why the Articles faltered
Each weakness turned into a crisis in the 1780s.
Finances. The war left the national government owing more than $40 million to foreign lenders, soldiers, and citizens who had sold it supplies. Paper Continental dollars had collapsed so far by 1781 that "not worth a Continental" became a saying. In 1781 Congress asked the states to let it collect a 5 percent duty on imports, the impost, so it would have its own income, and Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris made the impost the center of his plan to pay the debt. Because the Articles needed unanimity to change, Rhode Island alone killed it in 1782, and New York blocked a second version in 1786. Unpaid officers at Newburgh, New York, talked of marching on Congress in March 1783 until George Washington faced them down in person.
Foreign relations. Britain refused to leave its forts on American soil around the Great Lakes, at Detroit, Niagara and Oswego, pointing to American failure to pay prewar debts to British merchants, which the Treaty of Paris required. Congress could not make the states pay, so it had no answer. In 1784 Spain closed the lower Mississippi and New Orleans to American trade, cutting off western farmers' only practical route to market. In 1785 and 1786 Secretary for Foreign Affairs John Jay negotiated with Spain's Diego de Gardoqui and asked Congress to give up the Mississippi claim for 25 years in exchange for a trade treaty. Seven northern states voted to let him, five southern states voted no, and since a treaty needed nine, the talks died. The vote left westerners and southerners convinced that northeastern merchants would trade away the West. And when Algiers seized American merchant ships in 1785, Congress had no navy and no money for ransom.
Trade between and beyond the states. Britain closed its West Indies colonies to American ships while flooding American markets with its goods, and Congress could not retaliate because each state set its own tariffs. States also taxed one another. New York charged fees on boats from New Jersey and Connecticut, and New Jersey answered by taxing the lighthouse New York owned at Sandy Hook. Virginia and Maryland had to negotiate their own agreement on the Potomac at Mount Vernon in 1785.
Internal unrest. The breaking point came in western Massachusetts. To pay its own war debt, much of it owned by eastern speculators, the state taxed heavily and demanded payment in hard money, which farmers did not have. Courts seized farms for unpaid debts and taxes. Beginning in August 1786, armed farmers, many of them veterans, closed the courts to stop foreclosures. Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, became the movement's best-known leader. Congress could not fund troops to help. In January 1787 a militia raised by Governor James Bowdoin, about 4,400 men paid for by Boston merchants, drove the rebels from the federal arsenal at Springfield, and the rebellion collapsed in February.
Shays' Rebellion frightened nationalists more than any other event of the decade. To them, it showed that a government without money or an army could not keep order and that debtor majorities threatened property everywhere. Thomas Jefferson, watching from Paris, drew a different lesson: "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing." That split matters. The rebels wanted relief from their own state's policies, not a stronger national government, yet their revolt became the strongest argument for one. A meeting at Annapolis in 1786 had already called for a convention, and after Shays' Rebellion the states took the call seriously (Topic 3.8).
Historians have argued over how bad the 1780s were. John Fiske's The Critical Period of American History (1888) described a nation near collapse that the Constitution rescued. Merrill Jensen (The New Nation, 1950) answered that the economy was recovering by the mid-1780s, that many states were paying down their debts, and that the "crisis" was partly a story told by nationalists who wanted a stronger government for their own reasons.
The Northwest Ordinance
The West was where the Confederation succeeded. Once the states ceded (formally gave up) their claims, Congress owned the land north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, and it needed both income from land sales and a plan for governing settlers who were pouring across the Appalachians.
The Land Ordinance of 1785 set up the survey. Surveyors divided the land into townships six miles square, each split into 36 sections of 640 acres, and sold land at auction for at least $1 an acre. One section in every township, section 16, was reserved to support public schools. Because the smallest purchase was a full section, $640 was beyond most farmers, and speculators such as the Ohio Company of Associates, which founded Marietta in 1788, bought much of the first land.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by Congress in New York in July while the convention met in Philadelphia, answered the harder question: what would the territory become? Its answers set the pattern for nearly all later territories.
- A path to equal statehood. At first, Congress appointed a governor and judges. Once a district had 5,000 free adult men, they could elect an assembly. At 60,000 inhabitants, it could write a constitution and join the Union on an equal footing with the original states. Three to five states were to be formed; they became Ohio (1803), Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. The United States would add states, not rule colonies.
- Rights and property. Settlers were guaranteed habeas corpus (the right of a jailed person to make the government justify the imprisonment before a judge), jury trial and freedom of religion, and contracts and private property were protected against interference.
- Schools. Article 3 declared that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged," because education was needed for good government.
- Slavery. Article 6 barred slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory, except as punishment for a crime, while requiring that people escaping from slavery in the original states be returned.
Each provision had limits. The slavery ban was not applied to people already held in bondage by French settlers, and Indiana's territorial government later allowed long-term "indentures" that worked like slavery. Article 3 also promised that Indian lands "shall never be taken from them without their consent," yet the government was already pressing treaties on Native nations who had never agreed to cede the Ohio country, which led directly to war in the 1790s (Topic 3.10). Even so, the ordinance drew the Ohio River as a line between free and slave territory, and later antislavery politicians from the 1820s through Abraham Lincoln pointed to it as proof that Congress could keep slavery out of federal territories. Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784 had proposed banning slavery in all western territory after 1800 and lost by a single state's vote, so the line could have been drawn further south.
Worked examples
Identify the claim in this excerpt and the evidence the author uses to support it.
We may indeed with propriety be said to have reached almost the last stage of national humiliation. . . . Do we owe debts to foreigners and to our own citizens contracted in a time of imminent peril for the preservation of our political existence? These remain without any proper or satisfactory provision for their discharge. Have we valuable territories and important posts in the possession of a foreign power which, by express stipulations, ought long since to have been surrendered? These are still retained . . . Are we entitled by nature and compact to a free participation in the navigation of the Mississippi? Spain excludes us from it.
Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 15, December 1787
Show solution
Claim: The United States under the Articles has fallen almost as low as a nation can, humiliated at home and abroad.
Evidence, in order:
- The government has not paid the debts it ran up during the war, to foreign lenders or to its own citizens.
- A foreign power still holds "important posts" it promised to give up. These are the British forts around the Great Lakes, which the Treaty of Paris required Britain to surrender.
- Spain denies Americans the use of the Mississippi, which closed New Orleans to western farmers' goods in 1784.
How to find it. The first sentence states the claim; everything after it is a list of proof, set up as questions Hamilton answers himself. To identify evidence, pull out each specific situation he points to and say what it refers to, rather than quoting the rhetorical questions back.
Using it. Notice what all three pieces have in common: each is a failure the Articles could not fix, because Congress could not tax to pay debts or raise an army to make Britain leave. Hamilton was writing to persuade New York voters to ratify the Constitution, so he picked the most damaging facts. His evidence is accurate, but the claim of near-total collapse is the nationalist interpretation that historians such as Merrill Jensen later challenged.
There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always, That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.
Northwest Ordinance, Article 6, 1787
a. Briefly describe ONE way the excerpt reflects ideas about liberty that developed during the American Revolution.
b. Briefly describe ONE way the excerpt shows the limits of those ideas.
c. Briefly explain ONE way the Northwest Ordinance affected the development of the United States in the period 1787 to 1820.
Show solution
a. By banning slavery in a whole region, the ordinance applied the Revolution's natural rights ideas to national territory, the same reasoning that led Pennsylvania (1780) and other northern states to begin abolishing slavery.
b. The proviso required that people escaping slavery in the original states be returned to their enslavers, so Congress protected slaveholders' property claims even while banning slavery in the territory.
c. The ordinance created a process by which territories became equal states, and Ohio followed it into the Union in 1803, with Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) entering as free states. That process let the United States expand without ruling permanent colonies and made the Ohio River a boundary between free and slave states.
Why these earn the points. Each part makes one specific point and connects it to the excerpt. Part (b) uses the second half of the source, which many students skip. Part (c) names concrete results with dates inside the period the question sets.
a. Briefly describe ONE piece of evidence that supports the view that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was ineffective.
b. Briefly describe ONE piece of evidence that supports the view that the national government under the Articles had important successes.
c. Briefly explain ONE reason Shays' Rebellion increased support for a stronger central government.
Show solution
a. Congress could not tax, so when it proposed a 5 percent impost to pay war debts, Rhode Island alone blocked it in 1782, because amendments needed all thirteen states. The national government stayed unable to pay its creditors or soldiers.
b. Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the sale of western land and set out how territories would become equal states, a system the United States used for later territories.
c. When Massachusetts farmers closed courts in 1786 and marched on the Springfield arsenal in 1787, Congress had no money to raise troops, and the state relied on a militia paid for by private merchants. Nationalists such as Washington and Madison concluded that only a stronger central government could protect order and property, and more states agreed to send delegates to the Philadelphia convention.
Why these earn the points. Each answer names a specific law, event or action and ties it to the claim in the prompt. "The Articles were weak" earns nothing for (a); the impost vote shows the weakness.
Where students lose points
On the exam
The skill for this topic is identifying the evidence a source uses to support its argument. Expect excerpts from state constitutions, Federalist or Anti-Federalist writings about the Articles, letters reacting to Shays' Rebellion, or the Northwest Ordinance. Questions ask what weakness a source points to, what caused it, or how the Constitution later responded. In essays on the shift from the Articles to the Constitution, use specific failures (the impost, the British forts, the Mississippi, Shays' Rebellion) as causes, and the Northwest Ordinance as evidence that the Confederation also achieved lasting results.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which of the following best explains why most state constitutions written between 1776 and 1780 gave governors short terms and little or no veto power?
- A
Colonists associated strong executives with royal governors who had vetoed colonial laws.
- B
The Articles of Confederation required states to place executive power in a council.
- C
Most states had too few qualified candidates to fill a powerful executive office.
- D
State legislatures wanted to copy the powerful executive of the British constitution.
Show answer
A
Royal governors had been the Crown's agents who vetoed laws and dissolved assemblies, so revolutionaries put power in elected legislatures instead. Choice D gets the motive backwards, and the Articles said nothing about how states organized their governments.
- A
Question 2
The impost of 1781, a 5 percent national duty on imports, was approved by nearly every state and still failed. Explain why, and what that shows about the Articles.
Show answer
Rhode Island refused to approve it, and changing the Articles required the consent of all thirteen state legislatures. One state could therefore block a reform the rest wanted, which left Congress without its own revenue.
The unanimity rule protected each state's sovereignty, but it meant the Articles could not be repaired from within. That is a main reason nationalists turned to a convention, and why Article VII of the Constitution required only nine states.
Question 3
A Kentucky farmer in 1786 would most likely have opposed which of the following?
- A
The Land Ordinance's reservation of one section per township for schools
- B
John Jay's proposal to give up the American claim to navigate the Mississippi in exchange for a trade treaty with Spain
- C
Congress's request that states cede their western land claims
- D
The Treaty of Paris recognizing the Mississippi as the western boundary
Show answer
B
Western farmers shipped crops down the Mississippi through New Orleans, which Spain had closed in 1784, so giving up the navigation claim threatened their livelihood. Southern states blocked Jay's proposal. The Land Ordinance applied north of the Ohio, not to Kentucky, and the boundary in the Treaty of Paris helped westerners.
- A
Question 4
The Northwest Ordinance promised that territories would enter the Union 'on an equal footing with the original States.' Explain why that provision mattered for the way the United States expanded.
Show answer
It meant new western states had the same rights and powers as the original thirteen instead of being governed as colonies of the East, so settlers could expect full self-government once a territory reached 60,000 people. The same model was used for nearly all later territories.
Having just rebelled against rule from a distant capital, Congress chose a system in which expansion added equal members rather than dependent colonies. That made westward settlement politically attractive and avoided repeating Britain's imperial relationship.