3.7 The Articles of Confederation

After declaring independence, nearly every state wrote a new written constitution. Fearing another king, most gave the most power to an elected legislature and kept governors weak. Many included bills of rights listing protections like trial by jury and freedom of the press.

Most states kept property requirements for voting and office-holding, though often lower than before. Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution was the most democratic, with a one-house legislature and no single governor. Massachusetts's 1780 constitution, written largely by John Adams, was approved by a special convention and a popular vote, a process that became a model for the national Constitution.

Congress drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and they took effect in 1781 once all thirteen states approved. They created a confederation, a loose alliance of sovereign states. Congress was the whole national government, and each state had one vote.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 set up a system for surveying the Northwest Territory, the land north of the Ohio River, into townships six miles square, each divided into 36 sections. One section in each township was set aside to support public schools.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set out how territories would become states. When a territory had 60,000 free inhabitants it could apply for statehood on equal terms with the original states. It banned slavery in the territory, protected religious freedom and trial by jury, and promised that Native land would not be taken without consent, a promise that was soon broken. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin later came from this territory.

The Confederation could not pay its war debts or its soldiers. States printed their own money and taxed each other's goods. Britain refused to leave forts in the Northwest, and Spain closed the lower Mississippi River to American trade in 1784. Congress was too weak to respond.

In 1786–1787 indebted farmers in western Massachusetts, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, rose up against high state taxes that had to be paid in hard money and against courts that were seizing their farms. Led by Daniel Shays, they shut down courts and in January 1787 marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield. A militia paid for by Boston merchants put the uprising down.

Shays' Rebellion alarmed elites. Congress could do nothing about it, and many leaders feared that disorder would spread. It added urgency to the call, already made at the Annapolis Convention in 1786, for a convention to revise the Articles.