Saturday, March 9, 2013

Articles of Confederation

Founding documents · Constitutional history

Articles of Confederation

The First Constitution of the United States

By Stan Klos · Revised scholarly edition, October 1, 2026

Adopted: November 15, 1777
Ratification completed; in force: March 1, 1781
Succeeded by the government under the present Constitution: 1789

The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were the first written national constitution of the United States. They established a continuing framework of union, representation, delegated powers, interstate obligations, adjudication, and constitutional amendment. Their character as a compact among states retaining substantial sovereignty helps explain their structure and limitations; it does not erase their role as a constitution.[1]

The United States had declared independence in 1776 and conducted national affairs before the Articles took effect. Completed ratification in 1781 supplied an agreed written constitutional foundation for that union. It was a transformation in the legal framework of an existing revolutionary government, not the first appearance of American independence.[2]

Articles of Confederation document reproduction
Reproduction of the Articles of Confederation retained from the original exhibit. The formal title joins confederation with perpetual union.

1. What made the Articles a constitution?

A constitution supplies a fundamental arrangement for governing: it identifies the political community, constitutes public institutions, distributes authority, establishes obligations, and determines how the arrangement may be changed. The Articles did these things for the United States. They did so through a confederation whose principal national institution was the United States in Congress assembled, rather than through the three-branch structure later established in 1787.[3]

A union with reserved and delegated powers

Article I named the confederacy the United States of America. Article II reserved sovereignty, freedom, independence, and undelegated powers to the states. Article III declared common purposes of defense, liberty, and welfare. Read together, these provisions describe a deliberately limited union: authority was distributed between the member states and their common institutions. Treating the reservation of state sovereignty as if it eliminated all delegated national authority misreads the same document that makes the reservation.[4]

An institution with rules of representation

Article V regulated the appointment, recall, number, and tenure of delegates. Each state had one vote, although its delegation could contain two to seven members. Delegates were appointed annually in the manner directed by their state legislatures and could serve no more than three years in six. Such provisions organized a continuing public body; they were not merely promises to consult when a diplomatic emergency arose.[5]

Public powers and restrictions on the states

Article IX assigned Congress powers over peace and war, diplomacy, borrowing, bills of credit, coinage regulation, postal administration, standards of weights and measures, military affairs, and specified forms of adjudication. Several powers carried qualifications or special voting requirements. These limitations matter, but so does the breadth of the governmental business being assigned.[6]

Article VI correspondingly restricted the states’ diplomacy, alliances, maintenance of peacetime forces, and initiation of war, subject to congressional consent and stated exceptions. It also required state militias. The Articles therefore both granted authority to common institutions and limited certain actions by member states.[7]

Obligations, interstate protections, and an amendment rule

Article VIII required a common treasury supplied through the states, with the necessary taxes laid and levied by state legislatures. Article XIII required states to abide by congressional determinations in matters entrusted to Congress. The absence of an effective general mechanism for compelling payment was a serious defect; it did not turn the underlying obligation into an optional gift.[8]

Article IV regulated relations among the states and their inhabitants through privileges and immunities, movement and commerce, extradition, and recognition of judicial records and proceedings. Its language and exclusions fall short of modern equality, and it should not be described as guaranteeing every right to every person. Nevertheless, it supplied common rules for an interstate political community.[9]

Finally, Article XIII declared the union perpetual and required congressional agreement and confirmation by every state legislature for alterations. A demanding amendment rule can make constitutional reform difficult without depriving the instrument of its constitutional character.[10]

2. What contemporaries called their government

The description “first constitution” is supported by contemporary usage as well as modern classification. The most direct evidence is Congress’s own resolution of February 21, 1787, endorsing a convention to revise the Articles. Its declared object was to:

“render the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union.”

The Constitution signed in September 1787 did not yet exist. The phrase referred to the existing constitutional arrangement that Congress proposed to improve. The complete adopted resolution appears in the source extracts below.[11]

Earlier records used the same vocabulary. On March 26, 1784, while considering instructions for commercial negotiations, Congress retained a provision that the United States should be treated as one nation on the principles of the federal constitution. This was an instruction concerning treaties, not language quoted from a treaty already concluded.[12]

A committee report on federal finances entered in the journals on February 3, 1786, likewise stated that the federal constitution authorized obtaining money through requisitions, loans, and bills of credit. Its analysis examined the inadequacy of actual receipts. Constitutional authority and practical weakness thus appeared together in the contemporary discussion.[13]

These examples do not make every eighteenth-century use of “constitution” equivalent to the later Constitution of 1787. They establish that officials used constitutional language for the Confederation’s governing framework, including when discussing its reform, foreign relations, and finances. That usage belongs alongside the instrument’s compact language in any balanced account.

3. From drafting to completed ratification, 1776–1781

Congress selected a committee to prepare a confederation in June 1776. John Dickinson was its principal drafter, and the committee reported a draft on July 12. The final instrument emerged from extended debate and revision; it was not simply a compilation of earlier congressional resolutions. Congress adopted it at York, Pennsylvania, on November 15, 1777.[14][15]

The delay before completed ratification reflected difficult questions about the union, especially competing western land claims. Maryland objected to an arrangement under which some states could retain enormous western claims while others lacked them. In its eventual authorizing act, Maryland preserved its asserted interest in the western country even while allowing accession to the Confederation. Accession did not mean that every land controversy had already been settled.[16]

Congress’s resolution of October 10, 1780, helped establish a path forward. Lands ceded to the United States were to serve the common benefit and be formed into republican states with the rights of existing members. This connection between ratification, the public domain, and future statehood makes the western ordinances part of the constitutional story rather than an unrelated appendix to it.[17]

Exhibit map of western claims asserted by states
Map of competing western state claims retained from the original exhibit. Such claims formed part of the ratification and cession controversy; a map of state claims does not establish the extinguishment of Indigenous land rights.
Dates that should not be collapsed into a single “enactment”
DateConstitutional significance
November 15, 1777Congress adopted the Articles and submitted the proposed confederation for state approval.[15]
January 30–February 2, 1781Maryland’s House and Senate assented to legislation empowering its delegates to subscribe and ratify; the act bears Governor Thomas Sim Lee’s signature. This legislative authorization must be distinguished from the subsequent signatures in Congress.[16]
February 22, 1781Congress assigned the following Thursday, March 1, for completing the Confederation and appointed a committee to arrange its public announcement.[18]
March 1, 1781Maryland’s delegates John Hanson and Daniel Carroll signed, completing ratification and bringing the Articles into force.[18]
March 2, 1781The journals recorded the completed ratification and the meeting of the United States in Congress assembled, with Samuel Huntington presiding and Charles Thomson serving as secretary.[18]

Congress had already conducted diplomacy before this completion. France and the United States signed their treaties of alliance and amity and commerce on February 6, 1778. The chronology rules out treating completed ratification of the Articles as a prerequisite to those treaties. Diplomatic encouragement for closer union and a legal requirement that the fully ratified Articles exist beforehand are different propositions.[19]

There was also institutional continuity across March 1: Huntington continued to preside, and Thomson continued as secretary. Huntington was the first person to preside over Congress under the Articles because he already occupied the chair when they took effect. That does not make his office identical to the separate executive presidency created by Article II of the later Constitution. The congressional presidency deserves study on its own terms.[20]

4. The Decree of Trenton: constitutional adjudication

Article IX supplied an elaborate procedure for controversies between states concerning boundaries, jurisdiction, or other causes. It provided for commissioners or judges, a hearing, a final and conclusive judgment, and transmission of the proceedings to Congress. Under specified conditions, refusal by a party to participate did not prevent the procedure from continuing. This was delegated adjudicative authority established in advance by the constitutional instrument.[21]

That authority operated in Pennsylvania v. Connecticut. On December 30, 1782, five commissioners sitting at Trenton unanimously rejected Connecticut’s state claim to the disputed lands and awarded Pennsylvania jurisdiction and pre-emption within its charter boundary. The brief decree did not publish the judges’ reasons.[22]

The interstate result must be kept separate from private ownership. The commissioners had refused to bring individual claimants into this proceeding, and their advisory letter of December 31 emphasized that private claims lay outside their appointment. A settler’s title to a particular farm was not automatically adjudicated by the determination of which state had jurisdiction.[23]

Judgment, transmission, and implementation
DateWhat the evidence establishes
December 30, 1782The court pronounced the interstate judgment.[22]
December 31, 1782The commissioners addressed an advisory letter to Pennsylvania President John Dickinson; Harvey records transmission of a decree copy. They urged protection of the peace while private rights were resolved.[23][24]
January 2, 1783Harvey reports receipt and filing of the advisory letter on this date. Separately, Pennsylvania’s agents dated their report enclosing the decree January 2; Council’s minutes record reading it January 6.[24][25]
January 3, 1783Congress recorded the returned proceedings and decree and ordered them lodged among its acts under Article IX.[22]
January 6, 1783Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council adopted and ordered publication of a proclamation recognizing the decree, requiring obedience to Pennsylvania law, and prohibiting forcible dispossession of settlers pending proper proceedings.[25]

The judgment did not await Pennsylvania ratification to become binding. The states’ prior acceptance of Article IX supplied the tribunal’s authority, and Article IX specified the judgment’s finality. The proclamation was recognition and implementation. Likewise, Congress’s receipt and lodging of the record fulfilled the prescribed process; the entry should not be recast as a new trial or discretionary legislative approval of the merits.[21][25]

Pennsylvania v. Connecticut appears to be the only interstate controversy under Article IX that proceeded through a duly constituted Court of Commissioners to a final judicial judgment. That is a deliberately narrow claim. The Confederation also exercised prize jurisdiction, including through the Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture, established in 1780. Neither “no national courts” nor “Trenton was the first federal judgment of any kind” accurately describes this history.[26][27]

Trenton did not end the Wyoming Valley’s private-title conflict. Pennsylvania’s Confirming Act of March 28, 1787, attempted a statutory accommodation; it was later suspended and repealed. In Vanhorne’s Lessee v. Dorrance (1795), Justice William Paterson, sitting in the federal circuit court, addressed the act’s constitutional defects and its statutory conditions in a private-property case. Continued conflict and later compromise legislation demonstrate the difference between a final interstate judgment and the resolution of all its social and property consequences.[28]

The transmission record does not identify the original recipient of every surviving manuscript. In particular, no delivery to Elias Boudinot or distribution to congressional delegates should be inferred for the Klos Yavneh clerk copy without documentary proof. Its collection attribution to John Neilson, the provisional verso reading “Decree of the Court of Coms. 30 Dec[r] 1782,” and the unresolved docketing hand remain matters for a separate manuscript-provenance inquiry.[24][29]

Related collection page: The Decree of Trenton and its surviving manuscript copies.

5. The ordinance trilogy: governing a continental future

The western measures of 1784, 1785, and 1787 reveal another dimension of the Confederation: Congress was designing settlements, administering a public domain, creating governmental institutions, and providing for future states. Together they form a sequence of constitutional development in practice. They were not three amendments to the Articles, and their authority must be assessed with that distinction in mind.

1784: a framework for future states

The resolution adopted April 23, 1784, conventionally called the Ordinance of 1784, concerned western territory ceded or to be ceded, purchased or to be purchased from Indigenous inhabitants, and offered for sale. It provided for temporary governments, subsequent permanent constitutions, and eventual admission on an equal footing with the original states. Its conditions included continued membership in the Confederation, republican government, federal obligations, and protection of the United States’ disposal of the soil.[30]

This was a program for incorporating new political communities into the union, rather than maintaining them permanently as subordinate colonies. But the adopted resolution must be distinguished from Jefferson’s earlier proposals. His clause excluding slavery after 1800 did not become part of the final 1784 measure. Nor should proposed state names be presented as a list of states actually established by Congress.[31]

1785: surveying, selling, and reserving the public lands

The Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785, supplied an administrative scheme. It directed surveys into townships six miles square, subdivided into thirty-six numbered lots of one square mile, or 640 acres. It regulated the surveyors’ work and the disposition of the resulting lands. Land administration was both a means of organizing settlement and a potential source of national revenue.[32]

The reservation of lot 16 in each township for public schools connected land policy to the support of education. It was a concrete allocation of a public resource, though the reservation alone did not establish a functioning school in every township. Other lots were also reserved for future federal disposition.[33]

1787: territorial government and a route to statehood

The Northwest Ordinance, adopted July 13, 1787, established a more developed system for the territory northwest of the Ohio River. Congress was to appoint a governor, secretary, and judges. The governor and judges initially had a role in adopting laws; a representative stage followed when the specified population threshold was reached. The ordinance superseded the 1784 resolutions.[34]

Five thousand free male inhabitants of full age opened the way to an elected territorial house of representatives, subject to the ordinance’s electoral qualifications. Admission as a state was a separate stage: Article V contemplated three to five states and a threshold of sixty thousand free inhabitants, while allowing earlier admission under stated conditions. Confusing those thresholds obscures the staged nature of the government Congress designed.[35]

The ordinance’s articles of compact protected religious liberty, habeas corpus, jury trial, property, and contracts, and encouraged education. It combined a governing structure with substantive restraints on government. That combination is part of its enduring constitutional importance.[36]

Rights, exclusions, and Indigenous lands

The achievement should be explained without idealizing it. Political participation was restricted by sex, status, property, and residency requirements. The slavery prohibition contained a criminal-punishment exception and a provision for reclaiming persons escaping labor or service lawfully claimed in an original state. The promise of good faith toward Indigenous peoples and protection of their lands was a stated rule, not evidence that dispossession and conflict had ceased. State cessions and federal surveys did not by themselves establish that Indigenous rights had been extinguished.[37]

A contested constitutional basis

The Articles contained no express territorial clause equivalent to Article IV, section 3 of the later Constitution. Western cessions and congressional resolutions created a practical setting for territorial administration, but the scope of Congress’s constitutional power remained debatable. In Federalist No. 38, Madison described Congress’s creation of new governments and arrangements for admitting states as undertaken “without the least color of constitutional authority.” He nevertheless explained why public necessity had prompted the measures.[38]

That criticism is essential to a responsible account. It prevents the ordinance trilogy from being treated as proof that all these powers were expressly and uncontroversially granted in 1777. At the same time, Madison’s argument presupposed a government operating under constitutional limits. The ordinances reveal both the substance of national governing activity and the pressure that activity placed on the existing constitutional framework.

The 1787 ordinance also called its protected provisions articles of compact. Its vocabulary is a useful reminder that compact and constitutional government were not mutually exclusive ideas. The question is what institutions, powers, obligations, and protections a particular compact established.[39]

6. Constitution, compact, and the treaty analogy

The treaty interpretation has a real historical basis. The Articles originated in an agreement among states, retained their sovereignty, described a league of friendship, and depended extensively on state governments. An account that suppresses those features would be less accurate and less persuasive than one that explains them.[4]

Madison’s Federalist No. 43 offers the strongest concise statement of the analogy. In discussing how the Confederation could be superseded without every state’s consent, he reasoned from its legislative ratification and the principles governing compacts between sovereigns. He invoked reciprocal obligations and breaches as possible grounds for releasing parties from the old arrangement.[40]

This context matters. Madison was defending the proposed Constitution’s ratification procedure against the Confederation’s unanimity problem. His analysis is evidence of the Articles’ compact foundations and contested authority; it is not a comprehensive description of everything their institutions did. Conversely, contemporary references to a federal constitution do not make their retained-sovereignty provisions disappear.

The most defensible conclusion therefore combines the evidence: the Articles were the United States’ first national constitution, formed as a confederal compact whose structure retained features associated with treaties among sovereign states. Calling them merely a treaty leaves out their organization of a continuing government. Denying every meaningful treaty analogy leaves out part of the historical debate. Their constitutional identity is best demonstrated through the text and its operation, rather than settled by a contest over a single label.

7. Limits, reform, and continuity after 1787

The Confederation’s weaknesses were substantial. Congress lacked a general power to levy taxes directly on individuals and lacked the later Constitution’s broad commercial-regulation power. Dependence on state compliance, fiscal shortfalls, difficult voting rules, and unanimous amendment requirements impeded action. Yet Congress possessed fiscal powers, exercised military and diplomatic functions, and operated judicial mechanisms. “Limited government” and “no government” are not interchangeable descriptions.[41]

Nine-state assent was required for enumerated major decisions, not every item of congressional business. Similarly, there was no separate executive presidency equivalent to Article II, but there were administrative officers and functions. The court provisions and the actual capture and Trenton proceedings make a blanket claim of “no judiciary” misleading. Precise descriptions of these limits explain the reform movement better than absolute statements.[42][20][27]

Congress’s February 21, 1787 resolution sought revision. The Philadelphia Convention instead produced a new constitutional structure, signed September 17, 1787, with a different ratification mechanism. Article VII required conventions in nine states, rather than the congressional agreement and unanimous legislative confirmation specified by the Articles. New Hampshire supplied the ninth ratification in June 1788; the new government commenced in March 1789. These milestones should be kept distinct.[11][43][44]

The transition combined change with continuity. Article VI of the new Constitution preserved prior debts and engagements. Its Article III provided a permanent Supreme Court and federal judicial power extending to controversies between states. That carried forward the principle of national interstate adjudication within a different system; it did not retrospectively ratify the Decree of Trenton, whose authority arose under Article IX.[43][45]

The territorial story supplies a particularly concrete example. On August 7, 1789, the new Congress enacted legislation adapting the Northwest Ordinance so that it could continue in effect under the present Constitution. Officers’ relationships to the new executive were adjusted. The act treated the Confederation’s territorial legislation as an existing governmental achievement requiring adaptation, not as an episode outside American constitutional history.[46]

The Articles thus belong at the beginning of the history of the United States’ written national constitutions. Their limitations explain why the constitutional system changed. Their institutions, judgments, and legislation explain why the years before 1789 cannot be reduced to an interval without constitutional government.

8. The 2017 interpretive exchange

During the National Collegiate Honors Council Partners in the Park program, the Klos educators challenged a National Constitution Center presentation describing the Articles as a treaty. The published correspondence records Naomi Yavneh Klos’s January 19, 2017 letter to Jeffrey Rosen, Michael J. Gerhardt’s January 24 response defending the treaty characterization, and the subsequent invitation to continue a scholarly discussion with students.[47]

The exchange raises a useful educational question: how can a confederal compact function as a constitution, and what does each label reveal or obscure? The answer should be tested against the Articles’ provisions, contemporary usage, the Trenton proceedings, and the territorial legislation, while presenting the treaty argument fairly.

The Center’s current online materials explicitly identify the Articles as the first American constitution. However, the published 2017 correspondence already noted similar online language. Those materials alone do not establish a formal retraction, a date on which an exhibit changed, or a causal connection between the correspondence and a later revision. A stronger claim about a retraction should be accompanied by the relevant acknowledgment or dated exhibit evidence.[48]

Partners in the Park group with historical documents at the National Constitution Center
National Collegiate Honors Council students and educators at the National Constitution Center during the 2017 Partners in the Park program. The supplied exhibit description identifies Mark Kehres and historical printings of the Annapolis report, the Constitution, and congressional acts, together with a Huntington document. Image retained from the original collection page.

Read the published correspondence and the Partners in the Park program account.

9. A guide to the thirteen articles

This reading guide identifies the principal subjects. Qualifications in the original text matter; the summaries are not substitutes for the document.[49]

ArticlePrincipal subject
INames the confederacy the United States of America.
IIReserves state sovereignty and powers not expressly delegated.
IIIEstablishes the league’s purposes and mutual-assistance obligations.
IVRegulates interstate privileges, movement, commerce, extradition, and recognition of judicial records and proceedings, with stated exclusions and conditions.
VOrganizes state delegations, voting, recall, tenure, support, and legislative protections.
VIRestricts state diplomacy, alliances, and military action, while providing exceptions and militia duties.
VIIAssigns appointment of officers at or below colonel to the states raising land forces for common defense, or as those states direct.
VIIIProvides for a common treasury funded through state taxation, with a land-value basis for apportionment.
IXDefines principal congressional powers, specified courts and interstate adjudication, administration, the presiding office, and voting requirements.
XAllows a Committee of the States to exercise delegated powers during recess, excluding powers whose exercise requires nine states in Congress.
XIProvides for Canada’s accession and requires nine states’ consent for admission of another colony; its wording differs from the later Constitution’s new-state clause.
XIIRecognizes prior congressional bills of credit, borrowing, and debts as obligations of the United States.
XIIIRequires observance of delegated congressional determinations, declares perpetual union, and establishes unanimous legislative confirmation of alterations agreed to in Congress.

Read the complete Articles and inspect the manuscript through the National Archives.

Selected primary-source extracts

Extracts below retain historical language. Paragraphing and capitalization are regularized for readability; omissions are marked. They are reading texts, not diplomatic transcriptions of the collection objects. The linked editions provide the complete context.

Article II: retained sovereignty and delegated authority

Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.

The same sentence reserves powers and recognizes delegation.[4]

Article IX: judicial finality

… the judgment and sentence of the court, to be appointed in the manner before prescribed, shall be final and conclusive; …

Read with the surrounding requirements for selection, participation, adjudication, and transmission to Congress. The clause is not a general adjudication of every private title within a disputed territory.[21]

Article XIII: observance and alteration

Every State shall abide by the determinations of the United States in Congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them. And the Articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State.

The observance obligation applies to matters submitted by the confederation; the amendment rule separately requires every state legislature.[10]

March 26, 1784: one nation and the federal constitution

That these United States be considered in all such treaties, and in every case arising under them, as one nation, upon the principles of the federal constitution.

Congress retained this language while debating instructions for commercial negotiations.[12]

February 3, 1786: constitutional means of obtaining money

The federal constitution authorises the United States to obtain money by three means; 1st by requisition; 2d, by loan; and 3d, by emitting bills of credit.

From the committee’s financial report entered in the journals, followed by its analysis of inadequate state payments.[13]

February 21, 1787: the adopted convention resolution

Resolved that in the opinion of Congress it is expedient that on the second Monday in May next a Convention of delegates who shall have been appointed by the several States be held at Philadelphia for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the States render the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union.

The existing federal Constitution was the object of revision.[11]

August 7, 1789: adapting the Northwest Ordinance

Whereas in order that the ordinance of the United States in Congress assembled, for the government of the territory north-west of the river Ohio may continue to have full effect, it is requisite that certain provisions should be made, so as to adapt the same to the present Constitution of the United States.

The statute’s preamble expresses both continuity and the need for institutional adaptation.[46]

Editorial approach

This edition distinguishes constitutional text from later practice, adopted measures from proposals, contemporary evidence from retrospective accounts, and historical sources from collection attributions. It retains the original exhibit media while replacing the former page’s unrelated presidential tables and repetitive narrative with a focused constitutional study. Manuscript provenance and any further documentation of the 2017 interpretive exchange remain open research questions.[50]

Scholarly notes and sources

Sources checked October 1, 2026. JCC refers to the Library of Congress edition of the Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, edited by Worthington C. Ford and successors (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904–1937). Citations use printed page numbers; digital-image numbering may differ. Links include page views and, where helpful, complete volume scans.  OpenAI, ChatGPT, provided assistance with historical research, source verification, and HTML editing for this website.

  1. National Archives, “Articles of Confederation (1777)”, introduction and transcription, identifying the Articles as the first United States constitution and distinguishing adoption in 1777 from operation beginning March 1, 1781; Law Library of Congress, “The Articles of Confederation: The First Constitution of the United States” (2011). These modern institutional descriptions are corroboration; the argument in this essay rests principally on the document and contemporary records. ↩
  2. Continental Congress, Lee Resolution, July 2, 1776, and Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (National Archives). The Articles supplied a written national constitutional framework for an already declared independence, rather than first creating American independence in 1781. ↩
  3. Articles of Confederation, arts. I–III, V, VIII–XIII. “Constitutional” is used here to describe a continuing fundamental arrangement of public authority, membership, obligations, and institutional procedure; it is not a claim that the Articles possessed the structure or enforcement mechanisms of the Constitution of 1787. ↩
  4. Articles, arts. II–III. State sovereignty and expressly delegated congressional powers appear in the same instrument. “Federal” in contemporary documents must be read in its eighteenth-century confederal setting, without importing all the later features of the federal government. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
  5. Articles, art. V: annual appointment as state legislatures directed, recall, delegations of two to seven, one vote per state, and a three-years-in-six limit on service. These are institutional rules, not a system of representation apportioned to population. ↩
  6. Articles, art. IX, on peace and war, diplomacy, coinage regulation, borrowing, bills of credit, weights and measures, post offices, military administration, and specified judicial powers. Treaty-making and Indigenous-affairs provisions contain qualifications that should not be omitted when describing congressional authority. ↩
  7. Articles, art. VI. Its restrictions on diplomacy, interstate alliances, peacetime forces, and state warfare are qualified by congressional consent and specified exceptions, including invasion and imminent danger. The article requires a disciplined state militia; it does not simply prohibit all state armed forces. ↩
  8. Articles, arts. VIII and XIII. Article VIII assigns the laying and levying of requisition-related taxes to state legislatures; Article XIII obliges states to abide by congressional determinations in matters submitted to Congress. An obligation can be legally binding even when enforcement is institutionally weak. ↩
  9. Articles, art. IV. Its privileges-and-immunities language concerns “free inhabitants,” with specified exceptions; extradition follows an executive demand, and full faith and credit extends to other states’ judicial records and proceedings. The provision should not be paraphrased as an unlimited guarantee of all rights to every person. ↩
  10. Articles, art. XIII: observance, perpetual union, and alteration agreed to in Congress and confirmed by every state legislature. This amendment procedure differed from the later Constitution’s Article V. ↩1 ↩2
  11. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (hereafter JCC), XXXII, February 21, 1787, pp. 71–74; Library of Congress scan. The adopted resolution appears on p. 74. Earlier motions and the editors’ notes in the same entry must not be conflated with the final wording. The phrase “federal Constitution” refers to the existing system that the convention was to revise. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
  12. JCC, XXVI, March 26, 1784, pp. 169–170; Library of Congress scan. In considering instructions for commercial negotiations, Congress retained the instruction treating the states as one nation on the principles of the federal constitution. This is a congressional instruction concerning proposed treaties, not a quotation from a completed treaty. ↩1 ↩2
  13. JCC, XXX, February 3, 1786, pp. 44–48, especially p. 45; Library of Congress scan. The passage is in the committee report on federal finances entered in the journals. It is evidence of contemporary constitutional terminology, not an amendment conferring new powers. ↩1 ↩2
  14. JCC, V, June 12 and July 12, 1776, Library of Congress scan. Congress selected the confederation committee in June; the draft was reported July 12. John Dickinson was its principal drafter. For the final text see JCC, IX, November 15, 1777, Library of Congress scan. Draft provisions and the final thirteen articles are different texts. ↩
  15. National Archives, Articles of Confederation, introduction; JCC, IX, November 15, 1777, Library of Congress scan. Adoption at York in 1777 and the completion of ratification in 1781 were separate events. “The Constitution of 1777” is an explanatory shorthand, not the instrument’s formal title. ↩1 ↩2
  16. JCC, XIX, February 12, 1781, pp. 138–140, reproducing Maryland’s “Act to empower the delegates of this State in Congress to subscribe and ratify the Articles of Confederation.” The House assent is dated January 30, the Senate assent February 2, and the document bears Governor Thomas Sim Lee’s name. Its operative provision makes the Articles obligatory on Maryland when subscribed as authorized. This distinguishes legislative authorization from the March 1 completion. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
  17. JCC, XVIII, October 10, 1780, pp. 915–916, Library of Congress scan. The resolution provides for ceded lands to benefit the union and form republican states with the rights of existing states. The edited journals also print proposed or struck-out material: only the adopted resolution should be quoted as law. Maryland’s reservation of its western interests is in JCC, XIX, pp. 139–140. ↩
  18. JCC, XIX, February 22, 1781, p. 186 (scheduling completion); March 1, pp. 213–223 (ratification and text); March 2, pp. 223–224 (completed ratification, attendance, Huntington, and Thomson). The editors identify the record sources and the changed journal heading. Library of Congress scan. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
  19. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “French Alliance, French Assistance, and European Diplomacy during the American Revolution, 1778–1782”; National Archives, “The Treaty of Alliance with France”. The treaties of alliance and amity and commerce were signed February 6, 1778, before completed Articles ratification. This chronology does not support a claim that a fully ratified Articles constitution was a legal prerequisite to the alliance. ↩
  20. JCC, XIX, March 2, 1781, pp. 223–224; Articles, art. IX; Constitution of the United States, art. II. Huntington presided when the Articles took effect. Congress’s president and the later President of the United States were constitutionally different offices. Article IX imposes a maximum of one year in any three on service as congressional president; it does not create a separate Article II-type executive. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
  21. Articles, art. IX, interstate-dispute clause. It prescribes selection of commissioners or judges, permits continuation when a party refuses to participate under the specified conditions, provides for final and conclusive judgment, and requires transmission of the proceedings and sentence to Congress. The private-right-of-soil clause that follows supplies a distinct procedure with conditions. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
  22. JCC, XXIV, January 3, 1783, pp. 6–32, containing the returned proceedings and the December 30, 1782 judgment; decree at pp. 31–32. Library of Congress scan. “Charter boundary” is the operative wording. The judgment resolves Connecticut’s state claim and awards jurisdiction and pre-emption to Pennsylvania; it gives no explanatory opinion. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
  23. JCC, XXIV, pp. 10–12, on Connecticut’s attempt to include private claimants and the court’s refusal; Henry M. Hoyt, Brief of a Title in the Seventeen Townships in the County of Luzerne (Harrisburg: Lane S. Hart, 1879), p. 45, commissioners’ December 31, 1782 letter to John Dickinson. The letter is advisory, not a supplemental judicial disposition of individual titles. ↩1 ↩2
  24. Oscar Jewell Harvey, A History of Wilkes-Barré, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, completed by Ernest Gray Smith, III (Wilkes-Barre: Raeder, 1927), pp. 1304–1305, describes forwarding a decree copy to Dickinson and reports receipt and filing of the letter on January 2, 1783. Hoyt, Brief, p. 45, transcribes the letter; printed signature lists differ between Hoyt and Harvey. No inference about the destination of a particular surviving manuscript is warranted from this transmission alone. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
  25. Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council, January 6, 1783, Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, XIII (Harrisburg, 1853), pp. 474–476. Council read the agents’ report dated January 2 enclosing the decree and the commissioners’ letter, adopted a proclamation signed by John Dickinson and attested by Timothy Matlack, and ordered publication. The primary January 6 proceedings are distinct from Harvey’s January 2 filing account. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3
  26. Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, VI, “The Connecticut-Pennsylvania Territorial Dispute,” editorial note (Princeton University Press; National Archives, Founders Online). The claim of uniqueness is limited here to an Article IX interstate Court of Commissioners reaching a final judicial judgment, excluding disputes settled by agreement and the separate capture jurisdiction. ↩
  27. Federal Judicial Center, “Penhallow v. Doane’s Administrators”, especially the account of the Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture, established in 1780. Compare Articles, art. IX. Trenton was not the first national judicial activity of every kind, and the Confederation did not lack all judicial institutions. ↩1 ↩2
  28. Vanhorne’s Lessee v. Dorrance, 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 304, 310–320 (Circuit Court, Pennsylvania District, April Term 1795), official report. Justice William Paterson’s jury charge concerns the Confirming Act of March 28, 1787, private property, and statutory conditions. This was a circuit-court case, despite its inclusion in early United States Reports. For conflict and later settlement see Harvey and Smith, III, chs. XXIV–XXV and ch. XXXIV. ↩
  29. Images and embedded videos retained from the supplied “Articles of Confederation html old.txt.” Collection captions are attributed as such; reproduction does not independently authenticate an object, its provenance, or every statement in an older video. Original remote image sources, enlargement links, and four video addresses have been preserved. The unrelated modern presidential and spouses tables are omitted from this constitutional essay. ↩1 ↩2
  30. JCC, XXVI, April 23, 1784, pp. 275–279; Library of Congress scan; Library of Congress, contemporary printing of the April 23, 1784 resolution, with the 1785 land ordinance. “Ordinance of 1784” is the conventional name for the adopted resolution. Use the final text, not the earlier draft’s names or rejected provisions. ↩
  31. JCC, XXVI, April 19, 1784, pp. 247–248, and final April 23 text, pp. 275–279; U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “The Ordinance of 1784”. Jefferson’s proposed restriction after 1800 did not survive into the enacted measure. Modern summaries that quote the committee proposal require this qualification. ↩
  32. JCC, XXVIII, May 20, 1785, pp. 375–381, “An Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of Lands in the Western Territory”; Library of Congress scan. The statute specifies six-mile-square townships and numbered one-square-mile lots. Its original numbering pattern should not be confused with later revisions of the survey system. ↩
  33. JCC, XXVIII, May 20, 1785, p. 378. Lot 16 was reserved for maintenance of public schools within the township. The ordinance also reserved other lots for future federal disposition; it is inaccurate to say that every other lot was immediately sold or that the reservation itself established functioning schools everywhere. ↩
  34. JCC, XXXII, July 13, 1787, pp. 334–343; National Archives, Northwest Ordinance: manuscript and transcription. The ordinance establishes appointed offices and a staged territorial legislature and supersedes the April 23, 1784 resolutions in its concluding provision. Its operation concerns the territory northwest of the Ohio. ↩
  35. Northwest Ordinance, governmental provisions and compact art. V. Five thousand free male inhabitants of full age triggered representative government; property and residency qualifications applied. Article V contemplated three to five states and admission at sixty thousand free inhabitants, with a proviso allowing earlier admission under stated conditions. These are different thresholds. ↩
  36. Northwest Ordinance, compact arts. I–III: religious liberty, habeas corpus, jury trial, protections of property and contract, proportional representation, and encouragement of schools and education. These provisions are substantial protections but not a universal modern declaration of equal citizenship. ↩
  37. Northwest Ordinance, governmental voting qualifications and compact arts. III and VI. Article VI prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude subject to a criminal-punishment exception and includes a fugitive-labor proviso. Article III promises good faith toward Indigenous peoples and protection of their lands and liberty. The text is evidence of stated rules, not proof that those promises were consistently honored or that cessions by states extinguished Indigenous rights. ↩
  38. James Madison, Federalist No. 38, January 15, 1788, concluding discussion of Congress’s administration of western lands and creation of governments. Madison challenges the constitutional authorization while explaining the measures’ necessity. Compare Articles, arts. II, IX, XI; the text contains no express territorial clause equivalent to Article IV, section 3 of the later Constitution. This contemporary criticism is an argument about authority, not a later judicial holding invalidating the ordinances. ↩
  39. Northwest Ordinance, introduction to its six articles of compact and concluding repeal clause. Its description of the articles as a compact, unalterable except by common consent, demonstrates that compact language and governmental organization could coexist in a single foundational legislative scheme. ↩
  40. James Madison, Federalist No. 43, January 23, 1788, discussion under item 9, ratification by nine states. The treaty analogy is deployed in an argument about replacing the Confederation without unanimous consent, including reciprocity and prior breaches. Its context does not erase the analogy; it identifies the question Madison was answering. ↩
  41. Articles, arts. II, VIII–IX and XIII; Madison, Federalist No. 38. Distinguish lack of general direct taxing and commercial-regulation powers from lack of all fiscal powers: Congress could requisition, borrow, and emit bills of credit. Distinguish inadequate enforcement from absence of legal obligations, and specified nine-state requirements from a claim that every decision required nine votes. ↩
  42. Articles, art. IX, concluding voting provisions. Enumerated major decisions require nine states; other questions, apart from day-to-day adjournment, require a majority of the United States in Congress assembled. The nine-state rule should not be generalized to all legislation or all business. ↩
  43. Constitution of the United States, arts. I–IV and VI–VII. The new Constitution redistributes legislative, executive, and judicial powers; Article VI preserves prior debts and engagements, while Article VII specifies ratification by nine state conventions. That procedure differs from Article XIII of the Articles and must not be described as an ordinary amendment unanimously approved under it. ↩1 ↩2
  44. Library of Congress, “The United States Constitution”, and National Archives, Articles of Confederation. Distinguish signing in September 1787, the ninth ratification in June 1788, and the new government’s commencement in March 1789; these are separate milestones. ↩
  45. Constitution, art. III, secs. 1–2; Articles, art. IX. Both provide national mechanisms for interstate controversies, but with different institutional structures. Nothing in Article III purports to ratify the Trenton judgment retrospectively. ↩
  46. “An Act to provide for the Government of the Territory North-west of the river Ohio,” August 7, 1789, ch. 8, 1 Stat. 50–53, official scan. The preamble explains that adaptations are needed for the existing ordinance to continue in effect under the present Constitution. The statute is concrete evidence of continuity combined with institutional change. ↩1 ↩2
  47. Naomi Yavneh Klos to Jeffrey Rosen, January 19, 2017; Michael J. Gerhardt to Stanley Yavneh Klos, January 24, 2017, forwarded by Rosen January 26; Naomi Yavneh Klos response, January 31, 2017, reproduced on Historic.us, “NCHC Partners in the Park”. This is the participants’ published correspondence, not an independently authenticated archive of every subsequent exchange. It documents an interpretive disagreement, not by itself a later formal retraction. ↩
  48. National Constitution Center staff, “10 reasons why America’s first constitution failed” (November 17, 2022), explicitly describes the Articles as the first American constitution. The 2017 Klos letter already observed similar wording in the Center’s online resources; current wording alone therefore cannot establish when a position changed or prove that the correspondence caused a change. Its broad institutional summary is not used here in place of the Articles’ precise provisions. ↩
  49. Articles of Confederation, complete transcription and manuscript access. The article-by-article guide is an editorial summary, not a substitute for the text. In particular, Article XI speaks of Canada and “other colony”; it should not be silently rewritten as the later Constitution’s general new-state admission clause. ↩
  50. Editorial method: this revision prioritizes the adopted text, dated congressional proceedings, the Pennsylvania Council minutes, and published judicial and statutory records. Modern institutional sources and scholarly editions supply context. Numbered citations distinguish reports, proposals, adopted acts, later recollections, and collection descriptions. Research and editorial assistance: OpenAI, ChatGPT, October 1, 2026; historical claims should be evaluated against the linked sources rather than this assistance credit. ↩

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