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This article traces the drafting, ratification, operation, and supersession of the Articles of Confederation, the first constitutional framework of the United States. For the governing document itself and its provisions, see Articles of Confederation. For contested interpretations of its legacy and adequacy, see Articles of Confederation - Debate. For the legislative body that produced it, see Second Continental Congress - History.

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in May 1775, the thirteen colonies were already at war with Great Britain but had no formal legal compact binding them to one another. Congress acted on ad hoc authority, raising armies, issuing paper currency, and conducting diplomacy without any instrument authorizing it to do so. Delegates recognized early that a durable union would require a written foundation.

In June 1776, as Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence moved toward a vote, Congress appointed a Committee of Thirteen - one delegate per colony - to draft articles of confederation. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, a lawyer and veteran colonial pamphleteer, took the lead in preparing a draft. Though Dickinson would refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence that July, hoping reconciliation with Britain remained possible, he completed a draft of the articles by mid-July 1776.¹⁾

Dickinson's draft proposed a relatively strong central government. It would have given Congress authority over western lands and assigned financial requisitions to states in proportion to their total population, including enslaved persons. It also granted Congress broad powers to arbitrate disputes between states.

Congress debated the draft intermittently through 1776 and into 1777 amid the pressures of active warfare. Three issues dominated and nearly broke the deliberations:

Representation. Small states insisted on equal votes per state; large states argued for proportional representation based on population. Congress settled on one vote per state delegation, a concession to small-state interests that shaped the document's character throughout.²⁾

Apportionment of expenses. The Dickinson draft apportioned common expenses by total population. Southern delegates objected that enslaved laborers, generating wealth for their enslavers, should not be counted equally with free inhabitants for tax purposes. The final text apportioned expenses by the value of surveyed land and improvements, avoiding direct population enumeration entirely.³⁾

Western lands. States without charters extending to the west - Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania - insisted that Congress control the trans-Appalachian territory. States with sea-to-sea charter claims, notably Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, resisted. The Dickinson draft's provision asserting congressional authority over unsettled lands was removed. The final text left the question unresolved, which would delay ratification by several years.⁴⁾

Congress approved the revised Articles on November 15, 1777, and sent them to the states for ratification.

Ratification required unanimous consent of all thirteen states. Ten states ratified within a year. Delaware ratified in 1779. The holdouts were New Jersey and Maryland, both landless states unwilling to enter a union in which Virginia and other charter-claim states would dominate enormous western territories.

New Jersey ratified in November 1778 after extracting assurances it deemed adequate. Maryland refused to ratify until the landed states ceded their western claims to Congress. Virginia's cession of its northwestern territory, voted by its legislature in January 1781, broke the deadlock. Maryland ratified on February 27, 1781, and the Articles of Confederation entered into legal force on March 1, 1781, when Congress formally proclaimed ratification - more than three years after congressional approval.⁵⁾

The Articles created a “firm league of friendship” among sovereign states rather than a national government acting directly on individuals. Congress was the sole federal institution; there was no separate executive and no federal judiciary. Each state delegation cast one vote. Major decisions - declaring war, entering treaties, coining money, borrowing - required nine of thirteen votes. Amendments required unanimous consent.

Congress lacked authority to levy taxes, regulate interstate or foreign commerce directly, or compel state compliance with its requisitions or treaties. It could request money from states, but enforcement was left to state governments.

Military finance. Wartime financing relied on paper currency (Continentals), foreign loans, and state requisitions. By the early 1780s Continental currency had collapsed in value. Congress's inability to service foreign debts became a persistent crisis.⁶⁾

The impost proposals. In 1781 and again in 1783, Congress proposed amendments granting it a five-percent duty on imports. Both failed because the amendment rule required unanimity: Rhode Island blocked the first proposal; New York's refusal defeated the second. The failure of the impost measures left Congress chronically insolvent.⁷⁾

Treaty enforcement. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War, bound the United States to allow British creditors to recover pre-war debts and to recommend that states restore confiscated loyalist property. Congress had no power to enforce either provision. Several states passed laws obstructing debt recovery. Britain used American non-compliance as justification for retaining military posts in the Northwest Territory in violation of the same treaty.⁸⁾

Western land ordinances. Despite its domestic weaknesses, Congress under the Articles enacted two landmark ordinances governing the territory north of the Ohio River. The Land Ordinance of 1785 established the township-and-range survey system for the Northwest Territory. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 created a framework for territorial governance and the admission of new states, and prohibited slavery in the territory.⁹⁾

Shays's Rebellion. In late 1786 and early 1787, indebted farmers in western Massachusetts, led by Daniel Shays, forcibly prevented county courts from sitting and briefly threatened the federal arsenal at Springfield. Congress could not raise funds to field troops in response; Massachusetts suppressed the uprising with state militia funded by private subscription. The episode alarmed property-owning elites across the states and intensified calls for constitutional revision.¹⁰⁾

Interstate commercial disputes, particularly over navigation on shared waterways and competing tariff schedules, prompted Virginia to call a conference of states at Annapolis, Maryland, in September 1786. Only five states sent delegates. The Annapolis Convention, finding itself unable to act productively with so few participants, issued a report drafted largely by Alexander Hamilton calling for a broader convention to revise the Articles.

Congress endorsed the call in February 1787, authorizing a convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” Delegates convened in Philadelphia beginning in May 1787. The convention quickly resolved to draft a new frame of government rather than amend the existing one - a departure from its stated mandate that was not lost on critics at the time.¹¹⁾

The Constitution drafted at Philadelphia replaced the Articles as the governing instrument of the United States upon ratification by nine states. New Hampshire became the ninth on June 21, 1788. The new government began operations in April 1789. The Articles of Confederation ceased to function as law.

Some historians argue that the Articles represented a deliberate and coherent republican philosophy - privileging state sovereignty and legislative supremacy - rather than a failed experiment in government; the counterarguments and the nationalist interpretation are examined in Articles of Confederation - Debate.¹²⁾

Whether the fiscal and diplomatic failures of the Confederation period were caused by structural defects in the Articles or by contingent political circumstances, particularly state legislatures' unwillingness to cooperate, remains contested; see articles-of-confederation-structural-vs-contingent-failure-controversy.

Whether the Philadelphia Convention exceeded its legal authority in replacing rather than amending the Articles, and what legal or moral weight attaches to that question, is examined in articles-of-confederation-constitutional-convention-authority-controversy.

1. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774-1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940), 126-128. 2. Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 151-155. 3. Jensen, Articles of Confederation, 140-145. 4. Peter Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775-1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 75-102. 5. Edmund C. Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 498-502. 6. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 109-146. 7. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 152-176. 8. Frederick W. Marks III, Independence on Trial: Foreign Affairs and the Making of the Constitution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1986), 24-62. 9. Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1-43. 10. David P. Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 84-120. 11. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911-1937), vol. 1, 33. 12. Jensen, Articles of Confederation, 239-245; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 354-363.