Did the Articles of Confederation Fail? Probably Not

It is taken, in many cases, to be fact that the reason the Constitutional Convention was called and that the Constitution was ratified was because of the failure of the Articles of Confederation system. The folks at Heritage have made their position clear:

The first plan the Framers tried after declaring independence was called the Articles of Confederation. The government that the Articles created failed because it was too weak to coordinate national policy among states with different priorities.

Now, this is not particularly a criticism of the Constitution, though I believe there is room for that. But, I simply want to raise questions: What if the Articles were not failing? What if they were doing exactly what they were intended to do? What if the Articles were successful, but success was not in the agenda of powerful people?

First, consider the words above: “…it was too weak to coordinate national policy among states with different priorities.” Exactly! But that’s not why it failed. That was precisely why it was created. The regions and the states did have different priorities. Yes, Rhode Island could, on its own, veto legislation. When other states agreed to a tariff, Rhode Island could—as a lone New England state—say no. Of course, the other 12 states were welcome to pass their own tariffs and donate the revenues to the central government. Why did Rhode Island have to do what they did? That was no failure, it was success. In fact, the Constitution made demands on all of the regions and states that violated their priorities.

Second, the Articles of Confederation demonstrated that a weak central government was not incapable of accomplishing what needed to be done. But, it did demonstrate that the causes and purposes to which the national government took action needed to be in the interest of all, or it needed to be handled on a local basis. But, keep in mind that it was under the Articles government that the War for Independence had been won. It was under the Articles that the treaty which drew favorable boundaries for the new nation was drawn. It was under the Articles that the Northwest Ordinance was organized. Let me mention, the Ordinance, which would provide the basis for bringing in the Midwestern states, was a demonstration that the US was not pursuing European imperialism, but wanted expansion on equal footing with the earlier states. The rejection of imperialism, while short lived, was evident in the Articles.

Third, consider that the greatest example of Articles failure should tell us precisely the opposite. Shays’s Rebellion is often used as evidence that there needed to be a stronger central power to address the needs of the young nation. But, that comes from a perspective that says that placing more power in the hands of people further away from the people is better. What folks often miss is that the issue with Shays’s Rebellion was corruption in the local government, in this case, of Massachusetts. Rather than being evidence of the need for more power, it was a demonstration of the danger of corruption even on the state level that needed to be addressed.

A very helpful work on this is Leonard Richards Shays’s Rebellion. We should note its subtitle: The American Revolution’s Last Battle. This was not a call for more centralized power but a challenge to the power that was already being abused.

Fourth, ponder the people behind the writing of a new Constitution. Men like Madison, Hamilton, and even Washington, were men who wanted stronger central power in order to make other states go along with their plans. Sure, Madison would eventually become a “Jeffersonian,” but, during and after the War of 1812, he demonstrated himself to be interested in larger central power and more government spending. He was responsible for the organization of the Constitutional Convention, which was underhanded in its own way because it was supposed to be a revision of the Articles. That plan went out of the (proverbial) window. All of the actual windows were shut so that no one knew what was going on behind those closed doors.

Could there have been amendments to the Articles? Sure. Perhaps the prospect of a Confederation should have been embraced and, like all human efforts, corrections need to be made along the way. But, the Constitutional Convention disregarded that. In addition, the ratification efforts also used some underhanded methods, both in the way that the new document was presented and in the conventions that they created to ratify it. Notably, they avoided using the state congresses because they did not want to deal with state governments who would see that they were, indeed, losing power. They framed people who opposed a new Constitution as “Anti-Federalists.” But, it was those men who really believed in federalism. They really wanted a true division of power.

In reality, one of the men who most strongly defended the Constitution as a document that would limit government, Alexander Hamilton, was the one who most doggedly pursued a looser reading of it. He contended that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the Constitution limited what the government was allowed to do—then, he championed a financial plan that broke through the boundaries of a strict reading. And yet, perhaps he was right, along with others, that if specific rights were not listed in a Bill of Rights that the central government would assume that a person did not have them. That has indeed been the case.

Fifth, considerations of the Constitution often over-estimate the document. I say this with gratitude for the degree to which the government has been limited. It could have been worse. Many of the ideas were rooted in much older concepts. But, we can see that when power is held in one place, regardless of what a document said or says, there is little limitation that will hold. Only decentralization can serve as a real check or balance. Remember the compromises in the Constitutional Convention: about representation in Congress, the count of enslaved people, the way to raise funds for the central government? No one was satisfied with what had been created.

And this only brings us to the reality that the Constitution, under which we live today, is not the one they wrote, due to Supreme Court decisions, overreaching executives, expanding bureaucracy, and Amendments, especially the Fourteenth, and other factors.