LISTEN ON SOUNDCLOUD: After the decisive Battle of Yorktown in October of 1781 where General George Washington’s army defeated and captured the British army commanded by General Charles Cornwallis, the British sued for peace. America had finally won the independence that Jefferson had written about in his famous Declaration formalized by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. It took more than five years of war to win that freedom. Now came the difficult task of establishing a nation dedicated to the principles of freedom and self-government. But the Continental Congress did not leave the task of creating a government until after the war was won. Shortly after declaring their independence in July 1776, the Continental Congress began to debate what sort of government they should create. More than a year later, on November 15, 1777, they sent the Articles of Confederation to the states for ratification. The Articles of Confederation established a war-time confederation of the 13 original states. Even though the Articles were unratified by the thirteen states until March 1, 1781 — about eight months before the victory at Yorktown — it was used by the Continental Congress to govern during the Revolutionary War and to prosecute the war. The experience of early American political leaders with big, powerful government had been decidedly negative. The British government, as it became frustrated with American’s desire for freedom, had barred free speech, censored and outlawed a free press, forbidden the freedom of association, mandated religious beliefs and practices, outlawed gun ownership, and denied the people’s right to govern itself by abolishing their colonial legislatures. The grievance of “taxation without representation” was only a small part of the frustrations of colonial Americans with British rule. In an attempt to preclude such abuses in America’s future, the Articles of Confederation created a weak central or national government. It created an unicameral national legislature known as a congress, but no presidency, and no judiciary, and no power to tax. The central government could make war, negotiate peace, negotiate commercial agreements with foreign nations, and adjudicate disputes between the states. But they had no power to enforce those decisions or agreements. So even those limited powers proved in practice to be mostly theoretical. The Continental Congress could only request states to fund the war effort, but often those requests were ignored — which made funding the Continental Army extraordinarily challenging and risked the success of the War for Independence from the very beginning. Reading General Washington’s letters to Congress pleading for food, clothing, shoes, guns and ammunition for his soldiers reveals one of the frustrating weaknesses of the Articles. During the Revolutionary War and thereafter, it became apparent that the government they had created was too weak and ineffective. After independence was won, the various states pursued their own interests and there were increasing economic disputes about trade and travel between the states. There was a growing sense that the Articles of Confederation were failing and that reform was needed. At the same time, the fear of big, powerful centralized government that could abuse the rights of its citizens remained a serious concern. In 1786 and early 1787, Shay’s Rebellion, the armed uprising of 4,000 rebels near Springfield Massachusetts, highlighted and focused what was already in the general consciousness of the nation — that the Articles of Confederation needed to be reformed. Additionally, the Rebellion may have increased support for restructuring the Articles so that the federal government was stronger — and yet, still strictly limited with powers checked and divided. Thus, many believe that Shays Rebellion created a climate in which the U.S. Constitution could be more easily proposed and ratified in the following years. Even though not ultimately successful and eventually replaced by the United States Constitution, the Articles of Confederation played a vital and important part in the development of America and its experience with liberty, individual rights, and self-government. First, our nation’s name “The United States of America” was established in the Articles of Confederation. This name is more than just a name — it recognizes that the thirteen original states preexisted the national government and that they voluntarily united themselves by their mutual agreement and to promote their common interest in freedom. Second, the Articles of Confederation established the important precedent of having a written constitution — not merely an amorphous collection of precedents and traditions as was common at the time. This was a revolutionary idea. To this day, Great Britain does not have a written constitution. Thanks to the Articles of Confederation, America’s tradition is to have an actual text that we can debate and refer to with specificity. Third, the Articles established the important concept known as “federalism.” The Articles created a federal government that had limited powers, but left everything that was not specifically given to the central government to the individual states. Many nations simply have a central government with no state governments. Providences are often simply geographical subdivisions of the larger landmass. But in the United States, states have their own written constitutions and have their own powers and authorities — independent of the federal government. The Articles of Confederation formalized the importance of this division of power in the minds of Americans. Fourth, under the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 was passed which helped shape the expansion of the United States and began the process of outlawing slavery. It provided that several large and powerful states with territorial claims on western lands relinquish their claim to those lands and prohibited slavery there. This paved the way for five new states to later join the United States under the U.S. Constitution as free states — Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota. Because the framers of the Articles of Confederation were so focused on not creating a central government that could ever repeat the abuses they witnessed as colonists of the British crown, they created a national government that was too weak. These weaknesses revealed themselves throughout the Revolutionary War and afterward. But the Articles of Confederation created a solid foundation upon which the current U.S. Constitution was built. In September 1786, the Annapolis Convention called for a Constitutional Convention to address needed reforms to the Articles of Confederation. Beginning in May 1787, that Constitutional Convention was convened in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence had been debated and adopted about 10 years earlier. George Washington was unanimously elected the president of the convention. Because of his national reputation and trust, the proceedings enjoyed a certain level of credibility in the minds of the American people which ultimately helped the new Constitution obtain ratification. After a long and fierce debate, the Constitutional Convention discarded the Articles of Confederation and adopted the United States Constitution. This new Constitution gave the federal government enough power to cure the defects observed in the Articles of Confederation, but still focused on ways to limit, divide, separate and check the power of the central government and ensure individual rights. Despite the abandonment of the Articles of Confederation, many of its foundational elements are clearly present in our government today, and it was an important political document that helped pave the way for America’s amazing experience with more than 240 years of independence limited government, and individual liberty. George Landrith is the President of Frontiers of Freedom. Frontiers of Freedom, founded in 1995 by U.S. Senator Malcolm Wallop, is an educational foundation whose mission is to promote the principles of individual freedom, peace through strength, limited government, free enterprise, free markets, and traditional American values as found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Click Here to have the NEWEST essay in this study emailed to your inbox every day at 12:30 pm Eastern! Click Here for the previous essay. Click Here for the next essay. Click Here to view the schedule of topics in our 90 Day Study on Congress.
U.S. Constitution Constitution of the United States of America, the fundamental law of the U.S. federal system of government and a landmark document of the Western world. The oldest written national constitution in use, the Constitution defines the principal organs of government and their jurisdictions and the basic rights of citizens. (For a list of amendments to the U.S. Constitution, see below.) U.S. Constitution The Constitution was written during the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 55 delegates to a Constitutional Convention that was called ostensibly to amend the Articles of Confederation (1781–89), the country’s first written constitution. The Constitution was the product of political compromise after long and often rancorous debates over issues such as states’ rights, representation, and slavery. Delegates from small and large states disagreed over whether the number of representatives in the new federal legislature should be the same for each state—as was the case under the Articles of Confederation—or different depending on a state’s population. In addition, some delegates from Northern states sought to abolish slavery or, failing that, to make representation dependent on the size of a state’s free population. At the same time, some Southern delegates threatened to abandon the convention if their demands to keep slavery and the slave trade legal and to count slaves for representation purposes were not met. Eventually the framers resolved their disputes by adopting a proposal put forward by the Connecticut delegation. The Great Compromise, as it came to be known, created a bicameral legislature with a Senate, in which all states would be equally represented, and a House of Representatives, in which representation would be apportioned on the basis of a state’s free population plus three-fifths of its enslaved population. (The inclusion of the enslaved population was known separately as the three-fifths compromise.) A further compromise on slavery prohibited Congress from banning the importation of enslaved people until 1808 (Article I, Section 9). After all the disagreements were bridged, the new Constitution was signed by 39 delegates on September 17, 1787, and it was submitted for ratification to the 13 states on September 28. The Federalist In 1787–88, in an effort to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison published a series of essays on the Constitution and republican government in New York newspapers. Their work, written under the pseudonym “Publius” and collected and published in book form as The Federalist (1788), became a classic exposition and defense of the Constitution. In June 1788, after the Constitution had been ratified by nine states (as required by Article VII), Congress set March 4, 1789, as the date for the new government to commence proceedings (the first elections under the Constitution were held late in 1788). Because ratification in many states was contingent on the promised addition of a Bill of Rights, Congress proposed 12 amendments in September 1789; 10 were ratified by the states, and their adoption was certified on December 15, 1791. (One of the original 12 proposed amendments, which prohibited midterm changes in compensation for members of Congress, was ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. The last one, concerning the ratio of citizens per member of the House of Representatives, has never been adopted.)
U.S. History Highlights: Part Two How long is one term for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives? What is the role of the cabinet? Test your knowledge. Take the quiz. The authors of the Constitution were heavily influenced by the country’s experience under the Articles of Confederation, which had attempted to retain as much independence and sovereignty for the states as possible and to assign to the central government only those nationally important functions that the states could not handle individually. But the events of the years 1781 to 1787, including the national government’s inability to act during Shays’s Rebellion (1786–87) in Massachusetts, showed that the Articles were unworkable because they deprived the national government of many essential powers, including direct taxation and the ability to regulate interstate commerce. It was hoped that the new Constitution would remedy this problem. The framers of the Constitution were especially concerned with limiting the power of government and securing the liberty of citizens. The doctrine of legislative, executive, and judicial separation of powers, the checks and balances of each branch against the others, and the explicit guarantees of individual liberty were all designed to strike a balance between authority and liberty—the central purpose of American constitutional law. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now |
The first written constitution of the united states was the articles of confederation.
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