The Unsung Accomplishments of the Articles of Confederation

On this day in 1777, a committee of the U.S. Congress proposed the first draft of the Articles of Confederation. The final draft was proposed a year later and it did not not go into effect until 1781. Officially, the Articles was our first constitution from 1781 to 1788 but unofficially, most of the principles it embodied had been governing policy since 1775.

As I mentioned in Was the Constitution a Good Thing? historians have often failed to appreciate the Articles. For example, unlike the Constitution which followed it, it was not tainted by such subsidies for slavery as the Fugitive Slave clause.

The system established by the Articles had several accomplishments to its credit. Here are a few:

First, during this period, the United States not only declared Independence but won a war against the greatest military power on the planet.

Second, it negotiated a favorable peace treaty.

Third, it instituted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which provided a system of disposing of land in the west. The Ordinance also banned slavery in the Northwest and created a system for admitting new states on an equal footing with the old ones.

Fourth, it began to pay down the wartime debt.

Fifth, the United States began a strong economic recovery in the mid 1780s after a normal post-war recession.

Historians have often dismissed the government of the United States in this" critical period" of the Articles as a failure. To be sure, the document had its flaws but it also created a government that had some remarkable accomplishments and certainly compares well with other post-revolutionary governments (France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, etc.).

At the very least, the Articles deserves more credit in in U.S. survey textbooks and lectures as the governing companion document of the Declaration of Independence. Like the Declaration, it reflected the radical whig distrust of centralized political, military, and economic power.