Practice questions: The Articles of Confederation

Answer: (B) Powers not expressly given to Congress stayed with the states.

1. A power to tax individuals would have enlarged the central authority leaders feared after Parliament's taxes; the Articles left collection to the states.
2. Article II reserved to the states any power the Articles did not expressly give Congress, blocking a broad reading that could swallow state authority.
3. The Articles gave each state one vote, and population-based seats were the fight large states brought to the 1787 Convention.
4. Equal state votes were a real feature of the Articles, but they settled a quarrel over representation, separate from the fear of an open-ended grant of power.

Answer: (C) A large-state fight in 1787 to replace equal votes in Congress

1. The Northwest Ordinance's slavery ban came from sectional votes on western territory, not from the rule of one vote per state.
2. Farmers in western Massachusetts closed courts in 1786 over taxes and debt, a state crisis separate from congressional seats.
3. Equal votes let small states match large ones, and at the Constitutional Convention the large states fought to tie representation to population.
4. State constitutions already required property to vote in the 1770s, years before this population gap became a national argument.

Answer: (A) Congress paid for the war with paper and promises, having no tax of its own.

1. With no power to tax, Congress printed Continentals and paid soldiers in promises, and by 1780 it took forty paper dollars to match one silver dollar.
2. The Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791, under the Constitution, and did not issue the wartime Continentals.
3. The Articles left taxation with the state legislatures, which is why Congress had to ask them for money.
4. Wartime trade was disrupted, but the collapse came from printing far more paper than Congress could redeem.

Answer: (A) Congress depended on state legislatures to collect the money it requested.

1. Under the Articles, Congress could only requisition the states, and the legislatures decided what to collect, so a request for millions could bring in almost nothing.
2. Congress borrowed at home and from France and Dutch bankers during the war; the shortfall was unpaid requisitions.
3. Requisitions were apportioned among the states, and equal votes in Congress did not mean equal dollar quotas.
4. Foreign loans were one of the few ways Congress raised money; what it lacked was a tax of its own.

Answer: (C) Congress could promise pay but had no tax of its own to fund it.

1. Congress had raised and directed the Continental Army through the war; the problem was paying it, not a missing power to have an army.
2. These were Continental officers, owed pay by the United States, not employees of a single state.
3. In March 1783 Congress turned the officers' half-pay for life into five years' pay in cash or interest-bearing securities, but with no independent tax it could not be sure of honoring them.
4. Amending the Articles took all thirteen states; ordinary money measures needed nine states in Congress, not a separate yes from each legislature.

Answer: (B) Using western land to give value to holders of public debt claims

1. The petition asked Congress for land north of the Ohio and did not propose military rule over the existing states.
2. Officers asked to buy western land with public securities, and the Land Ordinance of 1785 later accepted United States debt certificates as payment for that land.
3. The proposal was addressed to Congress and concerned American land, not a British pension.
4. Some states confiscated Loyalist property, but this proposal concerned the national domain west of the Ohio, not those estates.

Answer: (D) Requiring nine states slowed ordinary acts such as ratifying a treaty.

1. The Articles created no separate executive with a veto; the presiding officer of Congress could not hold up a treaty.
2. There was no system of national courts that could overturn a treaty.
3. Each state had one vote, so a large state could not outvote a small one on foreign policy.
4. Treaties needed nine states, and in the winter of 1783–84 only seven delegations were present, so the Treaty of Paris waited until January 1784.

Answer: (B) Sectional conflict over letting slavery expand into western land

1. Federalists and Anti-Federalists argued over the Constitution and a bill of rights in 1787–88; these votes were about slavery in the West.
2. A ban on slavery in the western territories failed by one state in 1784, and in 1787 Congress banned it north of the Ohio, so the sectional fight over expansion was already underway.
3. The bank fight came in 1791, under the Constitution, and these votes did not concern a charter.
4. The Treaty of Paris asked Congress to recommend Loyalist restitution, a dispute separate from the western slavery votes.

Answer: (A) Congress could sign treaties but could not make the states or Britain obey them.

1. Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris, but it could not compel states to let British creditors collect, and Britain cited that failure while keeping forts such as Niagara and Detroit.
2. Congress negotiated the peace and, once nine states were present, ratified it in January 1784.
3. Article VII required British troops to leave; holding the forts broke that term and was not a right the treaty granted.
4. Britain recognized American independence in the Treaty of Paris; the quarrel was over carrying out the other articles.

Answer: (D) Surveying, selling, and governing the national lands in the West

1. Britain kept posts such as Niagara and Detroit after 1783, and the Confederation never forced those garrisons out.
2. Continental bills had already collapsed by 1780, and Congress still had no tax that could restore their value.
3. States quarreled over borders under a clumsy process that settled few of them; this clause sets aside a school lot, not a state line.
4. Under the Articles, Congress surveyed the land north of the Ohio, sold it, reserved a lot in each township for schools, and in 1787 gave that territory a government and a path to statehood.

Answer: (C) Congress could survey and sell the Ohio country as United States land.

1. By 1785 the landed states had ceded their western claims to Congress, so the ordinance assumed a national domain.
2. The ordinance accepted specie or federal debt certificates, and this speech rejects the survey itself.
3. The Land Ordinance treated land north of the Ohio as public land to be measured and sold, and Shawnee leaders at Fort Finney answered that the country was already theirs.
4. The school reservation was part of the ordinance, but this speech attacks the right to divide the land.

Answer: (B) Land companies and speculators made the early purchases north of the Ohio.

1. A square mile at a dollar an acre, plus survey charges, was more cash than most farm families could pay up front.
2. The smallest purchase was 640 acres at no less than a dollar an acre, so companies and speculators, including veterans pooling certificates, bought first.
3. The ordinance took specie or United States debt certificates, and Congress later accepted the Ohio Company's certificates as payment.
4. Congress itself banned slavery north of the Ohio in 1787; settlers did not vote on it at the 1785 sales, and popular sovereignty of that kind came in the 1850s.

Answer: (A) Pay certificates lost value because Congress lacked money to redeem them.

1. Congress paid soldiers with certificates it could not redeem, and veterans sold them for a fraction of face value to buyers betting a future government would pay in full.
2. The Bank of the United States dates from 1791; these certificates were wartime and Confederation debt, not bank notes.
3. The federal whiskey excise was a tax of the 1790s; this sale was of a Revolutionary pay certificate.
4. Congress did not cancel the certificates; it still owed them, which is why they kept a market price at all.

Answer: (C) Scarce coin and forced sales were costing them land and livestock.

1. Debt cases stayed in the state courts; the Articles did not move them to Congress.
2. Stopping a court could delay a suit, but it did not erase the debt.
3. With little gold or silver in the hill towns, court-ordered sales brought a fraction of the appraised price, and crowds later blocked the courts to stop those sales.
4. Massachusetts refused the towns' request for paper money; printing it was what the protesters asked for, not what the state had done.

Answer: (D) Knox wrote to warn a national leader; Gray wrote to defend the protesters.

1. Knox was Secretary at War and a leading nationalist, pressing for a stronger government.
2. Gray's address was a public defense for Massachusetts readers, printed in the American press.
3. Crowds stopped the Northampton court on August 29, 1786, and Knox wrote to Washington on October 23, after those closings.
4. Knox, alarmed about property and order, described the protesters as men out to abolish debts, while Gray, speaking for the armed body, asked for a way to pay the public debt.

Answer: (B) The Whiskey Rebellion of farmers in western Pennsylvania

1. The Hartford Convention of 1814 was a meeting of New England Federalists angry about the War of 1812, not a backcountry protest against an eastern tax.
2. Like the Massachusetts Regulators, western Pennsylvania farmers in 1794 resisted a tax from a distant government they believed favored other regions.
3. The Stono Rebellion in 1739 was an uprising of enslaved people in South Carolina, not a taxpayers' protest.
4. The Tea Party in 1773 attacked a tax from Parliament; these petitions attacked a state legislature's taxes and debt courts after independence.

Answer: (C) Congress could authorize troops but not reliably pay for them.

1. Massachusetts raised its own army under its governor and had not handed the militia power to Congress.
2. In October 1786 Congress voted to add to the troops already in service; the Articles did not forbid a peacetime force.
3. Congress voted to raise men, but the states sent too little money and few enlisted, so Boston merchants lent the funds and Massachusetts fielded its own army.
4. Massachusetts did use force: state militia held the Springfield arsenal, and a state army pursued the Regulators to Petersham.

Answer: (A) the Confederation could not keep order, and a stronger government was needed.

1. Congress could not pay for troops to defend its arsenal at Springfield, and leaders such as Washington treated the uprising as proof the Articles had to be strengthened.
2. The Regulators aimed at debt courts and state taxes in Massachusetts; they did not fight to restore the king.
3. The weakness ran the other way: Congress could not compel the states, and Massachusetts, not Congress, raised the army that ended the uprising.
4. The Northwest Ordinance, including its slavery ban, passed in July 1787, months after this January fight, and the crowd at Springfield was not protesting that law.

Answer: (C) became the pattern by which most later territories entered as states.

1. Conflict with Native nations in the Ohio country continued after 1787 and was not settled until the American victory of 1794.
2. Settlers did not vote on slavery there; Congress banned it, and letting territories vote on slavery was a policy of the 1850s.
3. Appointed government, then an elected assembly, then admission became the path Ohio and most later territories followed into the Union.
4. The ordinance tied admission to population, not to paying down the national debt.

Answer: (D) limited slavery's growth in the Northwest but still returned fugitives.

1. The ban applied to the Northwest Territory; slavery continued in the original states, especially in the South.
2. The Articles did not give Congress power over slavery inside the existing states; this article governed the national territory.
3. The same article allowed a person who escaped into the territory to be reclaimed, so crossing the Ohio did not free them.
4. Congress banned slavery north of the Ohio and, in the same article, let enslavers reclaim people who had escaped from the original states.

Answer: (B) the Northwest Ordinance's plan for settling the western territory.

1. Requisitions were a famous failure: Congress asked the states for millions and often received almost nothing.
2. The Northwest Ordinance organized the national domain, banned slavery there, and set a path for new states, the evidence historians use when they call the Confederation more than a failure.
3. Spain's closure of the river in 1784 showed that Congress could not defend western trade, which supports the criticism.
4. Merchants had to lend the money because Congress could not fund troops, which is evidence of weakness.

Answer: (A) War in the Ohio country, closed by the Treaty of Greenville

1. The confederacy's rejection of separate land cessions led to war in the Ohio country; the United States won in 1794, and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 ceded much of what became Ohio.
2. Cherokee removal came in the 1830s, under the Indian Removal Act, long after this 1786 address.
3. Britain did not leave the Great Lakes forts under the 1783 treaty; it kept them into the 1790s, and this address is a Native claim about land.
4. The Northwest Ordinance divided the territory into three to five states, admitted separately.