The Articles of Confederation

The Road and the Hill

Winter 1786–1787

In the winter of 1787, two old soldiers met alone on a road in Pelham, a hill town in western Massachusetts. Daniel Shays was leading an armed uprising against the state, and his old commander, Rufus Putnam, warned him:

Rufus Putnam · his recollection to Bowdoin you must either run your country or hang, unless you are fortunate enough to bleed.

Daniel Shays · as Putnam wrote it down By God I’ll never run my country.

On January 25, Shays led about twelve hundred men toward Springfield, Massachusetts, where the national government stored its weapons. General William Shepard, another former Continental Army officer, held the arsenal with state militia and cannon.

Shepard's cannon fired two warning shots over their heads, but the column kept coming.

Then the cannon fired into the column, and four men died.

Shays, Shepard and Putnam had all fought for independence, and the country they won still owed its soldiers their pay. The trouble that set old comrades against each other began ten years earlier, with the nation's first government.

The Fifth Massachusetts

1777–1781

In October 1777, Putnam commanded the Fifth Massachusetts Regiment at Saratoga, and Daniel Shays was one of his captains.

That same autumn, the Continental Congress, which the British army had driven out of Philadelphia, adopted the Articles of Confederation.

Americans had just rebelled against a distant Parliament and king, so they kept the new Congress weak on purpose. Thomas Burke, a delegate from North Carolina, feared a Congress strong enough to

Thomas Burke · letter to Caswell, April 29, 1777 explain away every right belonging to the States and to make their own power as unlimited as they please.

Burke's safeguard passed: any power not expressly given to Congress stayed with the states. The new state constitutions also kept governors weak, gave elected legislatures most of the power, and usually required property to vote.

Congress had one house, where each of the thirteen states cast one vote, whatever its population. Major laws needed nine states, and changing the Articles needed all thirteen. There was no executive to enforce the laws, and no system of national courts.

So Virginia and Delaware each had one vote. Switch the chart from votes to people. Virginia had more than ten times as many people as Delaware, and large states would later fight to change this rule.

Congress could not tax or regulate trade, so when it needed money, it sent each state a bill, called a requisition. The states often paid little or nothing, and Congress had no way to make them.

Congress had printed paper money called Continentals, far more than it could ever redeem, and the bills kept losing value. In March 1780, Congress itself valued forty paper dollars at one Spanish silver dollar, the coin people trusted. Americans had a saying for anything worthless: “not worth a Continental.”

Every state had to approve the Articles, and Maryland held out until Virginia and New York agreed to give Congress their western land claims. Maryland then signed, and the Articles finally took effect in March 1781.

Go, Starve, and Be Forgotten

1781–1783

Robert Morris, Congress’s superintendent of finance, could only wait for the states to pay what Congress asked.

In July 1782, Morris reported that four million dollars had been due from the states by the first of the month. He had received less than forty thousand, under one percent of what Congress had asked for.

In 1781, Congress had asked the states for the power to tax imports, which meant amending the Articles. In 1782, Rhode Island refused, and because amendments needed all thirteen states, that one refusal killed the plan.

In March 1783, an anonymous letter urged unpaid officers at the army's camp in Newburgh, New York, to defy Congress. If they went home quietly, it warned, they would “go, starve, and be forgotten.” Washington talked them out of it, and Congress promised the officers five years' full pay, in cash or certificates.

In June 1783, Putnam sent Washington a petition from 288 officers who wanted their promised land grants north of the Ohio River.

When unpaid soldiers surrounded Congress in Philadelphia that same June, Pennsylvania refused to call out its militia, so Congress fled to Princeton.

Seven States

1783–1786

The Treaty of Paris, which ended the war in 1783, had to be ratified within six months. That took nine states, but only seven had delegates in Congress that winter, so ratification waited until January 1784.

In April 1784, Thomas Jefferson proposed banning slavery after 1800 in all the western territories, south as well as north. Sixteen delegates voted for the ban and seven against it. Switch the chart from delegates to states.

The ban won only six states, one short of seven, because a sick delegate left New Jersey unable to vote. Jefferson later wrote:

Thomas Jefferson · notes written in Paris, 1786 thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, & heaven was silent in that awful moment!

Britain kept its forts on American soil around the Great Lakes, such as Niagara and Detroit. It blamed Americans for not paying their old debts to British merchants, and Congress could not make the states pay. Britain also closed its Caribbean colonies to American ships, and Congress had no power over trade to strike back.

Spain, which held New Orleans, closed the lower Mississippi River to Americans in 1784, cutting western farmers off from their market.

Because Congress could not regulate trade between the states, each state wrote its own trade laws and taxes. New York taxed goods landing at its port, so neighbors in New Jersey and Connecticut who bought them paid New York's taxes.

Section Sixteen

1785–1786

In May 1785, Congress passed the Land Ordinance to survey and sell its western land. Surveyors divided the land north of the Ohio River into townships six miles square, each with thirty-six lots of one square mile. Congress set aside lot sixteen in every township for public schools. The smallest sale was 640 acres, which favored companies and speculators over ordinary farmers.

That land was home to the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Wyandot and other Native nations. Drag the line across it to see what the survey grid recorded, and what it left out.

In January 1786, at Fort Finney on the Ohio River, American commissioners told the Shawnee that by fighting for Britain, they had lost their land.

A Shawnee leader named Kekewepellethe gave the commissioners his people's answer:

Kekewepellethe · translated testimony in Richard Butler's journal God gave us this country, we do not understand measuring out the lands, it is all ours

A few Shawnee leaders signed the next day, but a wider alliance of Native nations called such treaties void.

In March 1786, at a Boston tavern, Putnam and other veterans founded the Ohio Company to buy western land together. Congress accepted its own debt certificates as payment for land, so the veterans pooled the certificates they had been paid in.

Hard Money

1786 · with retrospective testimony

Even Shepard, the general at the arsenal, had sold his own pay certificate, as he later wrote:

William Shepard · later appeal to Henry Knox, circa 1790 I was obliged to dispose of a final Settlement Certificate of Eleven hundred and thirteen Dollars, at less [than] four Shillings on the pound

Many veterans sold their certificates this cheaply to speculators, who bet that a stronger government would someday pay in full.

Massachusetts had a large war debt of its own, and investors had bought up many of its IOUs cheaply. In March 1786, the state passed a heavy tax to pay Congress, run the government and pay interest to those investors. Taxpayers owed part of it in gold or silver coin, which was scarce in the hill towns.

Hill towns petitioned the legislature for relief, and one of them, Greenwich, complained that at forced sales for debt,

Greenwich petition, 1786 · collective written words our Land after itt is prised by the best Judges under oath is sold for about one third of the Value of itt

The towns wanted paper money, or the right to pay taxes and debts in goods instead of coin.

But the legislature in Boston, where eastern merchants and creditors had the most influence, went home in July without granting relief. The state constitution of 1780 required property to vote and gave more senate seats to districts that paid more taxes.

Imagine you were a farmer ordered by a court to pay a debt in coin you did not have. Choose what you would do, and see what happened to people who did.

On August 29, 1786, about fifteen hundred armed men stopped the county court at Northampton from hearing debt cases. They called themselves Regulators, men out to correct a government gone wrong, and crowds soon closed other courts too.

In September, at Springfield, Shepard brought the militia to protect the court, and Shays brought Regulators to shut it down.

In New York, where Congress now met, Secretary at War Henry Knox warned George Washington that

Henry Knox · letter to George Washington, October 23, 1786 they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private

Washington, retired at his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, feared the union was falling apart and wrote to James Madison:

George Washington · letter to James Madison, November 5, 1786 Thirteen Sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head, will soon bring ruin on the whole

The Regulators described their aims differently, and in December one of their leaders, Daniel Gray, called for measures

Daniel Gray · address of the body at arms, December 1786 to discharge both our foreign and domestick debt.

The Unhappy Time

1787 · and 1794

Congress voted to raise troops, but the states sent it too little money, and few men enlisted. So wealthy Bostonians lent the money, and Massachusetts sent its own army under General Benjamin Lincoln to protect the courts.

On January 25, 1787, Shays's column reached the arsenal at Springfield before Lincoln's army could get there. Shepard wrote that after two warning shots, his gunner aimed “thro' the center of his column.”

Ezekiel Root · Ariel Webster · Jabez Spicer · John Hunter

Four Regulators died: Ezekiel Root, Ariel Webster, Jabez Spicer and John Hunter.

The next day, Shepard reported to Governor James Bowdoin of Massachusetts:

William Shepard · report, January 26, 1787 The unhappy time is come in which we have been obliged to shed blood.

On the night of February 3, Lincoln's army marched thirty miles through a snowstorm to surprise the rebels at Petersham. Rufus Putnam, Shays's old colonel, rode with Lincoln as a volunteer. By morning, Shays's men had scattered, and Shays escaped to Vermont, which was not yet part of the United States.

That spring, voters replaced Governor Bowdoin with John Hancock, and the state eased its taxes and pardoned nearly all the rebels.

In 1794, farmers in western Pennsylvania staged a similar revolt, against a federal tax on whiskey. By then, under the Constitution, the national government could act, and President Washington led about thirteen thousand militia west.

The Most Lasting Law

1786–1788 · later lives

In September 1786, delegates from five states had met at Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss trade problems among the states. Too few came to act, so they called for a broader convention in Philadelphia the next May. Shays' Rebellion convinced many doubters that the Articles needed fixing, and in February 1787, Congress backed the convention, for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation

In May 1787, Washington left Mount Vernon to join delegates from twelve states at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

While the Convention met in secret, the old Congress in New York passed its most lasting law, the Northwest Ordinance, in July 1787.

The Ordinance created the Northwest Territory, to be divided into three to five states, which became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. At first, Congress appointed a governor, and once five thousand free adult men lived there, settlers elected an assembly. With sixty thousand free inhabitants, a territory could join the Union “on an equal footing with the original States.” New states would be equals, not colonies, and most later territories followed the same path.

The Ordinance guaranteed settlers freedom of religion, trial by jury and protection of their property, and it promised: Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Article Six banned slavery in the territory, three years after Jefferson's broader ban had failed by a single state. But it also said that a person who escaped slavery into the territory “may be lawfully reclaimed.” The Ohio River became the line between free soil and slave soil.

Article Three of the Ordinance made a promise to the Native nations: The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; Yet the same article allowed “just and lawful wars authorised by Congress.”

In December 1786, an alliance calling itself the United Indian Nations had already told Congress that

United Indian Nations · collective address, 1786 any cession of our lands should be made in the most public manner, and by the united voice of the confederacy

As settlers poured in, the dispute became a war, which the Native alliance won at first and lost in 1794.

In April 1788, Putnam led the Ohio Company's settlers to Marietta, the first American town in the territory.

In 1788, Massachusetts pardoned Shays but barred him from public office, and Shepard later served in the new Congress under the Constitution.

Under the Articles, the nation had won the war, made the peace and created a plan for settling the West. But Congress could not raise taxes, regulate trade or enforce its laws, and the Constitution would give the new government all three powers. Historians still debate whether the Articles were a failure or a necessary first step toward the Constitution.

Ordinary people carried much of the Revolution's cost, starting with soldiers whose pay certificates sold for a fraction of their value.

Farmers owed taxes in coin they did not have.

Native nations lost land that Congress surveyed and sold under treaties their alliance called void.

And enslavers could still reclaim people who escaped slavery into the new territory.