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When the Articles of Confederation were drafted, Americans had had little experience of what a national government could do for them and bitter experience of what an arbitrary government could do to them. In creating a central government they were therefore more concerned with keeping it under control than with giving it the means to do its job.
Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89, 1956/1992 1
The "job" of Congress under the Articles of Confederation was to win the Revolutionary War, but the Commander in Chief himself knew that the nation's victory was achieved despite Congress. Not that it lacked conviction and ability among its members—what it lacked was power. Thrown together as a wartime government, the Articles created only a "firm league of friendship" among the states that jealously guarded their power and gave Congress short tether. After all, in 1776 the states had no intention of creating their own despotic Parliament. The Articles assigned Congress duties without risking tyranny, but it soon became apparent that this translated as the age-old bind: responsibility without authority. Win the war—but you can't tax the states to pay for it. Deal with European nations and the Indians—but you can't ratify treaties. Maximize commerce and trade—but you can't interfere with states' trade with each other and with nations. With Washington's leadership and the unifying goal of victory, the "united states" had won their war, but without this motivational glue the "league of friendship" proved insufficient to sustain and develop the new nation.
A collapsing postwar economy brought the lesson home—rampant inflation, plummeting farm and business income, bankruptcies and farm foreclosures, reduced export trade, no national system of coining or printing money, and a staggering war debt that Congress could not make the states pay. If the new nation did not honor its war debts to European lenders, its standing among nations would be nil. No way to start a country. More threatening was the internal danger of revolt as debt-strapped legislatures levied taxes on debt-strapped merchants and farmers facing impoverishment, a situation set to explode. Farmers' revolts in New England, especially Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts, raised the long-feared spectre of anarchy and mob rule, but Congress could do nothing, unable to compel the states to send militia units to quell the uprisings. The crises escalated—frontier Indian raids, state rivalries over river commerce, a bitter tug-of-war over control of the western territories—and a Congress powerless to act. The thirteen "united states" were not yet the "United States."
Alexander Hamilton, 1780
Benjamin Franklin, 1783
George Washington, 1786
