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The Collapse of the Confederation

© Meg Greene Malvasi

By the late 1780s, most Americans had grown dissatisfied with government under the Articles of Confederation. The Continental Congress had long been unable to deal with the fractiousness and instability of politics, with economic and commercial problems, and perhaps most frightening of all with such popular uprisings as Shays's Rebellion, a revolt of debt-ridden farmers in Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays (1747-1825). A decade earlier, Americans had deliberately avoided creating a genuinely national government, fearing that it would encroach on the liberty and independence of the states. Now they began to reconsider that decision. So unpopular and ineffectual had the Confederation Congress become that its members were like orphans, wandering from place to place in search of a home. In 1783 they timidly withdrew from Philadelphia to escape the clamor of army veterans demanding back pay. They took refuge first in Princeton, New Jersey. Then, in 1785, the Congress moved to Annapolis, Maryland, and finally settled in New York in 1785.

For the most part, the delegates were conspicuous by their absence. Only rarely and with great difficulty did Congress secure a quorum so that it could conduct business, including the ratification of the treaty with Great Britain that ended the Revolutionary War. Eighteen members representing only eight states voted on the most important piece of legislation that the Confederation government enacted: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Clearly, something had to be done to preserve the new American republic.

Although weak and incompetent, the Confederation government had for a time satisfied a great many Americans. They believed that they had fought the Revolution to depose remote and tyrannical authority. When they adopted the Articles of Confederation, they had desired to keep political power centered in the states where they could carefully monitor and control those who wielded it. Now, in the 1780s, some of the wealthiest and most influential groups in the country sought a more genuinely national government capable of solving the problems of the United States. Whatever their differences with one another, every group, it seemed, had a complaint about government under the Articles of Confederation.

Veterans of the Revolutionary War, many of them former officers in the Continental Army, were disgruntled at the refusal of Congress to pay back wages or to fund their pensions. Some even envisioned the formation of a military dictatorship, and flirted briefly with the idea of establishing one in the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy of 1783.

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