The Articles of Confederation: The History and Legacy of America’s First Governing Document

Around the very same time that Congress was drafting the Declaration of Independence, it also had a committee drafting a constitution for the United States. The committee was led by John Dickinson, who presented the committee's conclusion on July 12, 1776. Drafting the document was no easy task: as with the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the individual states were often reluctant to hand sovereignty over to a greater confederate power.

After the Revolution, the new United States attempted to operate under the Articles of Confederation, which had been drafted in a time of war by men who were wary of Parliamentary abuses of power. Given that context, it should not be surprising that the national government the Continental Congress crafted during the Revolutionary War was particularly weak. During the war itself, the reason Congress could not pay the soldiers in the Continental Army was because it did not have the power to tax. General George Washington pestered the Continental Congress for provisions constantly, but they could only ask for money from the states.

The drafters of the Articles of Confederation had deliberately avoided giving the national legislature the power to tax because Parliament had so abused that authority against the colonies, but it didn’t take long for this to be a severe limitation on the national government. Besides hampering the Continental Army, the inability of the national government to raise revenue made foreign policy difficult. After the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States had no navy and was no longer protected by the British navy. As a result, American commerce was pillaged by the Barbary pirates, yet the Congress could do nothing to stop the pirate attacks because it could raise no money to fund a navy to defend American shipping.

Ultimately, the Constitution was a decisive move away from the Articles of Confederation, which the proponents of the Constitution claimed gave the states too much autonomy.