[September 17th is Constitution
Day, so to celebrate this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for
that foundational American document. Leading up to a special weekend post on
threats to the Constitution in 2019!]
On what was
drastically different in the new nation’s first unifying documents, and what
wasn’t.
Until
researching this post, I hadn’t really understood just how much the Articles of
Confederation paralleled the American Revolution. I knew they went into
effect in March 1781, while the Revolution was still very much ongoing, but it
turns out that that timing was due solely to how long it took all 13 states to
ratify the Articles (Maryland
was the last state to do so, on March 1, nearly two years after Delaware
had become the 12th to ratify); they were initially
proposed in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence, in
July 1776, and were after more than a year of heated debate approved by that
Second Continental Congress and sent to the states for ratification in November 1777.
Which is to say, the Articles weren’t a product of the Revolution (as I had
always thought of them) so much as part of its impetus and origins, which now
that I’ve reframed it that way does make sense—once the colonies had declared
independence, it was vital that they immediately and consistently envision a
political and civic arrangement through which they could exist in Perpetual
Union (the usually elided part of their full title)
without England, even (if not especially) while their war to establish and
cement that independence was entirely ongoing.
Better understanding
that Revolutionary context for the Articles can help explain some of the ways in
which they differed from the Constitution that would eventually replace them. The
most famous such difference is that under the Articles the central government (known
first as the Continental Congress and then, after 1781, as the Congress
of the Confederation) was quite weak, both on its own terms and in
comparison to the individual states. I had always attributed that to the
colonists’ hatred of the King and thus fears of a tyrannical government, and of
course those were factors; but given the highly regional nature of the
Revolution (with different battles/campaigns
fought across the regions and states in somewhat disconnected and certainly discrete
stages), it makes perfect sense that the Articles granted each state the power
necessary to respond to those particular, evolving circumstances without
needing to rely on or wait for a central authority. It’s harder to understand
the choice to deny Congress any ability to levy taxes, leaving the central
government entirely dependent on funding from the states; that limitation frequently
left not just Congress
but the Continental Army in the lurch. But on the other hand, that too can
be seen as a wartime decision: fighting a war requires continued support and
buy-in from civilians, and it’s fair to say that in a war which originated with
opposition to onerous taxes, many colonists might have been unwilling to continue
supporting a new government which immediately began imposing its own taxes.
Explicable or
not, that element of the Articles continued to produce financial difficulties after
the Revolution, and (along with the related histories
of Shay’s Rebellion) contributed significantly to the move toward a new
governing document. The ability to levy taxes was just one of many powers given
to the far stronger federal government created by the Constitution (although
not without extended debate, as I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post). But despite those
shifts, the Articles can be seen as a predecessor to the Constitution, and not
just in symbolic ways (ie, how the Constitution’s Preamble echoes part of the
Articles’ opening: “The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league
of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their
liberties, and their mutual and general welfare”). In particular, the Articles created
the new nation as a representative,
democratic republic, with the state legislatures appointing representatives
from each state to the Congress of the Confederation. Since the fundamental
nature of the nation’s political system was just as uncertain as every other Revolutionary
aspect, this was a vital choice, and one that was carried forward into and
enhanced by the Constitution.
Next
ConstitutionStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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