The Articles of Confederation

The Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, were built on a fear of concentrated power. The states had just fought off a king, so they created a national government on purpose weak: a single one-chamber Congress with no president to enforce laws and no national courts to interpret them. Each state kept one vote regardless of size. Congress could ask states for money and troops, but it could not tax anyone directly and could not force a state to comply. That meant every law depended on voluntary state cooperation, so laws existed on paper without any guarantee of becoming real.

Shays' Rebellion in 1786 exposed this. When armed farmers in Massachusetts, crushed by debt and facing foreclosure, took up arms against state courts, Congress wanted to send a national army to help. It had no power to tax or draft troops, so it had to beg states for money and men, and the states mostly refused. Massachusetts had to raise its own privately funded militia to put the rebellion down. A government that cannot protect order during an armed uprising is not functioning as a government.

Passing an ordinary law needed 9 of the 13 states to agree, already a high bar in a union of rivals, but amending the Articles themselves needed all 13, which made fixing these flaws nearly impossible. This is why the Articles were not a rough draft of the Constitution but a genuinely different design, one built to prevent national power rather than enable it. Shays' Rebellion became the shock that pushed leaders toward Philadelphia in 1787 to replace, not revise, this system.