Articles of Confederation

In 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appointed a committee to draft a constitution for the original thirteen colonies, which Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania dubbed “the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” The colonies themselves had written constitutional-type documents on which their own governance was based. For example, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, dating from around 1638–39, has [Page 48] been called the world’s first written constitution. New Hampshire, after declaring its independence from Great Britain, drafted the first written constitution of an independent state in 1776. These documents followed in the tradition of the ancient democracy of Athens and the republic of Rome, whose written laws were copied down for reference by political leaders and literate citizens. At the time Britain had an unwritten constitution that combined customs and tradition with some written documents, including Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689).

Map of the thirteen colonies and related territories, 1775. At the time of the Articles of Confederation, many in America viewed the individual states as separate entities rather than as components of a single nation. Some of the states, such as Virginia, were considerably larger than their present-day sizes. Altogether, the states stretched about a thousand miles from north to south, which was an enormously large area for a central entity to govern. The Granger Collection, New York

Ratification of the Articles of Confederation by the thirteen newly independent states was officially declared by Congress on March 1, 1781, while the Revolutionary War (1775–83) was still in progress. The document was a product of radical leaders who had advocated independence from a European power, itself a strong centralized government, and were now fighting to ensure the sovereignty and supremacy of their state governments, not a national government. The Articles served basically as an agreement to form a league of states for limited purposes, playing a key role in organizing the newly independent colonies for the successful prosecution of the Revolutionary War. But once the war was over, the states began going their own ways, which was often counterproductive to one another’s interests and to those of the United States as a whole.

That the central government the document provided for after the war was weak and ineffectual might have been expected. Yet in a way the agreement reflected the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, which concludes with the decree that the states, “as Free and Independent States,…have full Power…to do all…Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” This issue of states’ rights— the power of the national government vis-á-vis that of the states—is still debated today.

Sovereign States versus Central Government