The Articles of Confederation

Under the Articles, Congress was a one-house body where each state got one vote, and most important decisions needed nine of thirteen states to agree. There was no president to execute laws and no national court system. Congress could declare war, make treaties, and ask states for money and soldiers, but it could not tax directly, could not regulate interstate or foreign commerce, and could not force any state to comply with anything. This was not sloppy design. Men who had just fought a king over taxation without representation and standing armies built a government engineered to never threaten liberty that way again. Power stayed with the states on purpose.

That weakness had a cost. By the mid-1780s, war debt was crushing ordinary farmers, especially in Massachusetts, where courts seized land from men who could not pay. Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led farmers to shut down courts and then march on the federal arsenal at Springfield in 1786 and 1787 to stop foreclosures and free jailed debtors. Congress had no army of its own and no money to raise one, so Massachusetts had to rely on a privately funded militia to put the rebellion down. The episode terrified political leaders like George Washington and became the clearest argument that a national government needing unanimous or near-unanimous consent just to function could not protect property or order.

Yet the Confederation government was not empty-handed. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organized the territory north of the Ohio River into a surveyed grid of townships, banned slavery there, and laid out a clear path from territory to statehood on equal footing with the original thirteen, a model that shaped westward expansion for a century. That success sits right next to Shays' Rebellion as the two facts a reader needs to judge the Confederation fairly, and together they set up the Constitutional Convention of 1787.