For the 237th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Daughters of the American Revolution offered “Constitution Minutes.” Here is our third.
(The Nathaniel Massie Chapter of the DAR offered local events on Constitution Day, September 17th.)
Constitution Minute – Articles of Confederation
The “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” was adopted by the Continental Congress on November 15th, 1777, and presented to the states for ratification. It was the first governing document, or constitution, of the United States of America.
Based to some extent on the Iroquois “Great Law of Peace,” it gave the new country the tools to win the War of Independence. Among those were creating the Continental Army with Washington as its commander, creating the legal stature to obtain loans to fund it, and creating a way to negotiate for peace (the Treaty of Paris). It also devised the means to add additional states to the union on equal footing with existing states.
Though the Articles provided enough structure to hold the new states together during the war with Great Britain, it was not strong enough to provide a post-war central-governmental adhesive to prevent the states from splitting apart.
Nevertheless, it was an effective tool by which a specific governmental structure could be evaluated, and provided the legal framework for the peaceful transition which led to the development of a new governmental structure: the Constitution.
