What did the Articles of Confederation do?

The Articles of Confederation established the first national government of the United States, providing a written framework for cooperation among the thirteen original states from 1781 until the Constitution took effect in 1789. The Continental Congress drafted the Articles in 1776 and 1777, finalizing them on November 15, 1777 and sending them to the states for ratification. Maryland was the last state to ratify, on March 1, 1781, after smaller states demanded that landed states cede their western land claims to the national government.

The Articles created a single-chamber Congress in which each state had one vote regardless of population. There was no separate executive and no national judiciary, only Congress and a small administrative staff. The national government could declare war, make treaties, run a postal service, borrow money, and settle disputes between states. It could not levy taxes or regulate commerce; it could only request funds from the states, which were free to refuse. Amendments required unanimous approval by all thirteen states, an almost impossible bar that prevented needed reforms.

The Articles produced both successes and failures. The Confederation Congress conducted the Revolutionary War, signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that secured American independence, and passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which set out terms for new states formed from western territories and barred slavery north of the Ohio River. The ordinance remains one of the most influential laws ever passed in America.

But the Articles also revealed serious weaknesses. The national government could not pay its debts, including pay owed to Continental Army veterans. States raised tariffs against each other, disrupting interstate trade. Foreign nations doubted the union would survive. Shays' Rebellion in 1786 and 1787, an armed uprising of indebted farmers in western Massachusetts, exposed the central government's inability to put down domestic violence.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and other reformers convened the Annapolis Convention in 1786 and then the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in May 1787. Delegates from twelve states, with Rhode Island absent, abandoned plans to amend the Articles and instead drafted an entirely new Constitution that was ratified by 1788 and replaced the Articles in 1789.