50 Fun Facts About Articles of Confederation

Which British colony did the Articles of Confederation pre-approve to join the union whenever it chose?

Canada was promised automatic admission by Article XI, an open invitation to the British province of Quebec that was never taken up.

Which last state to ratify the Articles of Confederation held out until rivals gave up western land claims?

Maryland gave in only in February 1781, after Virginia signalled it would cede its vast western territory to Congress. The other twelve states had all ratified two years earlier.

Shays' Rebellion, the farmers' revolt that discredited the Articles of Confederation, erupted in which state?

Massachusetts courts were stripping indebted farmers of their land, so armed crowds led by war veteran Daniel Shays forced the courthouses to shut.

Which two branches of government, both added by the Constitution, did the Articles of Confederation leave out?

Executive and judicial powers had no home of their own: there was no president to enforce the laws and no national courts to interpret them, only a one-chamber Congress.

Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress could only ask the states for funds because it lacked which power?

Levying taxes stayed with the states, which were sent requests for their share and often failed to pay in full. The other three powers all belonged to Congress.

What did Congress under the Articles of Confederation ban from the Northwest Territory in its 1787 ordinance?

Slavery was barred by the ordinance's sixth article, though the same article let slaveholders reclaim anyone who escaped into the territory from one of the original states.

Which president's first inaugural address cited the Articles of Confederation to argue no state could secede?

Abraham Lincoln told the seceding South in 1861 that the Union was 'much older than the Constitution', tracing it back through the Articles to the Continental Association of 1774.

The insult 'not worth a Continental' mocked which product of a cash-starved Congress during the Revolution?

Paper money rolled off the presses until Continental bills sank so low that they stopped passing as currency at all.

Which blunt motto appears on the Fugio cent, the first coin authorized under the Articles of Confederation?

Mind Your Business sits at the bottom of the 1787 copper, under a sun, a sundial and the Latin word Fugio, 'I fly', a reminder to its holders that time is passing.

Which American envoy in France shrugged off Shays' Rebellion with 'the tree of liberty must be refreshed'?

Thomas Jefferson went on to say the tree's 'natural manure' was the blood of patriots and tyrants, and he refused to be alarmed by the revolt back home.

Under the Articles of Confederation, how was voting power in Congress shared between large and small states?

One vote per state gave little Delaware exactly the same weight as Virginia, no matter whether a delegation numbered two members or the maximum of seven.

States raised trade barriers against one another in the 1780s because the Articles denied Congress which power?

Regulating commerce was left to each state, and by September 1786 the rival barriers were bad enough that delegates from five states met to look for a cure.

Which state's lone veto sank a national tariff, since amending the Articles took every state's consent?

Rhode Island said no and the tariff died, leaving Congress without customs revenue. In 1787 it was also the only state that sent nobody to the Philadelphia Convention.

How many of the 13 states had to agree before Congress under the Articles could declare war or make treaties?

Nine states, more than a two-thirds majority, had to back every major decision, and with delegations often missing from the chamber that bar was hard to reach.

With Congress too broke to raise troops against Shays' Rebellion, who paid for the army that crushed it?

Wealthy merchants, more than 125 of them, put up over £6,000 to field about 3,000 militiamen, a private army standing in for the one the nation could not afford.

What were Daniel Shays and his followers trying to capture when they marched on Springfield in January 1787?

The federal armory held the weapons the rebels wanted, but its defenders answered with two cannon firing grapeshot, killing four men and scattering the rest.

Why did the 1783 peace treaty with Britain sit unratified for months in Congress under the Articles?

Too few delegates showed up to make a quorum, and Congress had no way to force attendance: rarely were more than half of its sixty or so members in the room.

Under the Articles of Confederation, who controlled how delegates to Congress were appointed and could recall them?

State legislatures settled how delegates were named each year, and every state paid its own, so members of Congress answered to their home governments rather than to voters.

Which limit on members of Congress appeared in the Articles of Confederation but not in the Constitution?

Term limits kept any delegate to three years of service in every six, a rotation rule that the Philadelphia Convention chose to drop.

Under the Articles of Confederation, each state's share of national expenses was meant to reflect what?

Its land values, buildings and improvements included, were to set each state's bill under Article VIII. A 1783 amendment to switch the yardstick to population fell two states short.

Which 'Penman of the Revolution' chaired the committee that first drafted the Articles of Confederation?

John Dickinson earned the nickname with his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in the 1760s, and the committee's draft, in his handwriting, went before Congress on July 12, 1776.

In which Pennsylvania town, its refuge while the British held Philadelphia, did Congress adopt the Articles in 1777?

York sheltered Congress from September 1777 to June 1778, and the town now styles itself the first capital of the United States, a title historians dispute.

Article III of the Articles of Confederation described the bond between the states as a 'firm' what?

League of friendship was meant literally: the states stayed sovereign and joined hands only for common defense, the security of their liberties and their general welfare.

The full title of America's first constitution is 'Articles of Confederation and' which two-word phrase?

Perpetual Union was a promise as well as a title: the last article declared that 'the Union shall be perpetual', yet the whole arrangement was replaced eight years after it took effect.

The Articles of Confederation took effect in March 1781, months before which decisive siege of the Revolution?

Yorktown fell that October, so a charter Congress had been following informally since 1777 was legally in force only for the war's last major land campaign.

Whose June 1776 resolution urged Congress to break with Britain, seek foreign allies and plan a confederation?

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia packed all three demands into one motion on June 7, and Congress answered by creating three committees, one for each task.

The committee to draft the Articles of Confederation was named a day after the committee to write what?

Declaration of Independence drafters, the Committee of Five, were appointed on June 11, 1776. The next day a committee of thirteen, one member per colony, got the confederation job.

Which Connecticut delegate alone signed all four great state papers, the Articles of Confederation among them?

Roger Sherman, who started out as a shoemaker, put his name to the Continental Association of 1774, the 1776 declaration, the Articles and the Constitution.

Which president of Congress under the Articles is sometimes wrongly called the first US president?

John Hanson was the first to serve the full one-year term the Articles laid down, but he merely chaired Congress and held none of the powers of the later presidency.

Which 'Financier of the Revolution' did Congress appoint as its Superintendent of Finance in 1781?

Robert Morris also persuaded Congress to charter the Bank of North America, the first chartered bank in the United States, then resigned in 1784, frustrated by the government's weakness.

Which Hudson Valley town names the 1783 'conspiracy' of unpaid officers that Washington calmed with a speech?

Newburgh was where the army lay in camp. Washington disarmed his officers by putting on spectacles and remarking that he had grown gray and almost blind in his country's service.

After unpaid soldiers surrounded Congress in Philadelphia in 1783, to which New Jersey town did it flee?

Princeton's Nassau Hall became the temporary capitol after Pennsylvania's leaders would not promise to protect the delegates, and Congress never sat in Philadelphia again under the Articles.

Which state capital hosted Congress in 1783–84 and named the 1786 convention that urged revising the Articles?

Annapolis saw Washington hand back his commission to Congress in December 1783 and the peace with Britain ratified three weeks later, both inside its State House.

Who was the main author of the 1786 report urging all states to meet in Philadelphia and revise the Articles?

Alexander Hamilton wrote it after only five states turned up for a meeting on trade, turning a flop into the call that produced the Constitutional Convention.

At which Virginia plantation did two states' delegates meet in 1785 to settle shared use of the Potomac River?

Mount Vernon's owner, George Washington, hosted the talks, and their success prompted Virginia to invite every state to a wider meeting on trade the following year.

A rejected 1786 treaty with Spain would have closed which river to American boats for 25 years?

The Mississippi carried western settlers' crops to market, so giving it up in return for trade privileges in Spanish ports would have strangled them. Congress never ratified the deal.

What did Britain refuse to give up after 1783, a defiance Congress under the Articles was too weak to punish?

Frontier forts stayed in British hands for more than a decade, with London pointing to America's own unkept promises to Loyalists, until a new treaty settled the quarrel in the 1790s.

After Congress sold its last warship in 1785, which raiders preyed on American cargo ships in the Mediterranean?

Barbary pirates from Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli took tribute from Europe's great powers, but the United States had neither the cash to pay them nor a navy to refuse.

Which state was the first carved from the Northwest Territory, which Congress organized under the Articles?

Ohio joined the Union in 1803 by the route to statehood that the Northwest Ordinance had mapped out, and four more states followed it from the same territory.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 reserved one square mile in every western township to support what?

Public schools got Lot 16, near the centre of every township, and western states later added a second school section, Lot 36.

Which Constitutional Convention deal gave Congress a House based on population and a Senate of equal states?

The Great Compromise is also called the Connecticut Compromise, after the delegation that proposed it, and it fixed each state's share of the Senate at exactly two members.

Which New Jersey delegate offered the 'Small State Plan' at the Constitutional Convention to rival Virginia's?

William Paterson wanted to amend the Articles of Confederation rather than replace them. His plan was defeated, but the small states' demand for an equal voice survives in the Senate.

Which 1783 agreement, ratified by Congress under the Articles, formally ended the Revolutionary War?

Treaty of Paris terms made Britain recognize the United States, but Congress could not make the states keep the promises given in return, such as letting Loyalists seek compensation.

Which shared pen name signed the 85 Federalist essays that attacked the 'insufficiency' of the Confederation?

Publius was the mask worn by three authors, and from No. 15 onward a run of essays set out how the Articles had failed to govern the country.

Which state's June 1788 ratification, the last one needed, put the Constitution in force and doomed the Articles?

New Hampshire's vote was the ninth, and the day after the news reached Congress in July 1788 the delegates shelved a bill to admit Kentucky, judging that the new government should deal with it.

Which everyday service did the Articles put under the 'sole and exclusive' control of Congress?

The post office was one of the few national services Congress really ran, with authority to charge whatever postage was needed to cover its costs.

Whose April 1787 memo 'Vices of the Political System of the United States' catalogued the Confederation's failures?

James Madison wrote it after studying confederacies ancient and modern, then reached Philadelphia eleven days early so that he could set the convention's agenda.

Which Irish-born secretary served Congress for its entire life, from 1774 until the Constitution took over?

Charles Thomson also helped design the Great Seal, and he kept it in his own custody through the handover from the Confederation to the new government.

Which breakaway 'state' in present-day East Tennessee won seven votes in Congress in 1785, too few for admission?

Franklin, renamed from Frankland to court the famous Philadelphian's support, carried on for about four and a half years before North Carolina took back full control.

Which fraction, later notorious in the Constitution, first appeared in a failed 1783 amendment to the Articles?

Three-fifths was the share of the enslaved population to be counted when dividing the national tax bill among the states. The amendment fell two states short of unanimous approval.