The era 1781–1789 takes its name from the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the new United States, ratified by the Second Continental Congress on 1 March 1781. This decade has sometimes been described as an era in which America experienced disastrously weak government under an inept Confederation Congress, an unstable economy that brought the nation to the brink of depression, and a society torn by violence and class conflict; in sum, a decade when the new republic threatened to unravel completely.
On the surface things did look bleak. But overt problems notwithstanding, the new nation made great strides in important ways. While national leadership was wanting during the Confederation period, there remained a strong center of political stability in most states. Both within the Confederation Congress and without, a healthy debate continued in the wake of the Revolution between Federalists, who pressed for a strong central government, and Antifederalists, who stressed preservation of individual liberties protected by strong state sovereignty. This political division culminated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the elections that followed of the first constitutional government, and the promulgation of the Bill of Rights in the form of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
The 1780s also saw a rebirth of American merchant trade as the Confederation Congress established diplomatic relations and forged commercial ties with continental Europe and its Caribbean colonies. Agriculture benefited from the start of a dynamic westward expansion into the Ohio Valley, and with passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Confederation Congress established the framework for further westward movement through its organization of the Northwest Territory, thus providing the blueprint for systematic transition from territory to statehood down to the present. The ordinance did more: it prohibited slavery in the new territory, which marked the first time any federal action was taken restricting the advance of the "peculiar institution," a vital precedent often invoked in the next century.
Overall, though, this progress was masked by political conflict—not only between Federalists and Antifederalists but between tidewater merchant interests and western agrarians—and by economic instability brought on by the lack of a national currency and the confusion generated by a muddle of state currencies. These problems were mostly a continuation of conflicts dating back to early in the colonial period, problems the Confederation Congress was too weak to cope with.
Political and Social Unrest
The currency mess created by thirteen fully sovereign states working at cross purposes was a problem that symbolized for ordinary people and legislators alike the need to somehow modify and weaken state sovereignty without sacrificing individual liberties in the process. The economic dislocation caused by the absence of federal authority, and the growing rift between large and small states over a host of economic and trade issues, drove the desire to reform the Articles that characterized much of the politics of the decade. This problem played out as well within many states. A tidewater/piedmont (eastern seaboard versus backcountry) schism in many states played powerfully into the economic instability of the era. In New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, for example, violence erupted as paper-money factions (usually debtor farmers and unskilled labor) fought a virtual class war against tidewater merchants, lawyers, and the landowning elite in an attempt to address the crisis that an absence of usable currency created for farmers and wage workers.
Shays'S Rebellion, on the western frontier of Massachusetts in the heart of the Berkshire Mountains, was the worst of these confrontations. In 1786 frontier farmers in Stockbridge took the law into their own hands, in what quickly became a symbol across the nation of widespread class-oriented social unrest. The rebels, led by former Continental army captain Daniel Shays, were suppressed by eastern Massachusetts militia driven by well-to-do merchants from the eastern seaboard of the state. This social unrest, repeated elsewhere n America, generated enormous support in the new nation for a revision of the Articles of Confederation. In 1787 a convention initially called only to reform the Articles matured into a full-blown movement to scrap it and start anew in developing a workable government framework for the infant republic.
The Constitutional Convention
The debates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 encapsulated the experience of the Confederation era. It was as if the decade formed a period of trial and error as Americans, divided politically into Federalist and Anti-federalist camps, moved toward a resolution that preserved both the order that a stable nation required to function in a world of nations and the liberty uniquely espoused by the founders, hard won in the Revolutionary War. The Constitution was very much a product of both the conflicts and successes of the Confederation. The Constitution embodied the enduring principles of representative government so central to the ideology and content of the Articles, and it uniformly incorporated all the legislative, diplomatic, and expansionist successes of the 1780s. More than anything else, it accommodated Antifederalist demands that state sovereignty be preserved even as the federal government was imbued with a new sovereign power of its own. The key notion that sovereignty could be divided was a revolutionary republican idea born entirely of the Confederation experience. Fears of executive autocracy and restoration of the monarchy experienced by colonial America were assuaged by severe checks on presidential power. Representative self-government as a basic operating principle was vested in a House of Representatives that looked very much like the old Confederation Congress. Elite fears of mob rule, with Shays's Rebellion and its like elsewhere in the 1780s, were met by the creation of the U.S. Senate as an upper house (building on a colonial model), and power over the military vested in the president. These were accommodations made possible only by the reality of experience endured in the decade beginning at the end of the American Revolution.
These accommodations framed by the Constitution of 1787 were tested in the final chapter of the Confederation era, the ratifying election campaigns in the states in 1788. In these separate polls each state was asked to elect delegates to a ratifying convention that would establish the Constitution drafted the year before as the law of the land. All the issues raised by the experiences of the 1780s, as well as the ideological conflicts between Federalists and Antifederalists, were played out in these ratifying elections, as the Confederation era drew to a close.
The nine states needed to ratify the Constitution were co-opted by the promises made by the victorious Federalist delegates to the ratifying conventions, who promised a Bill of Rights to meet Antifederalist fears of tyrannical authority vested in a strong central government. Critical as were the issues of that decade, tumultuous as were the politics, uneven as the economy turned out to be, the Confederation era of the 1780s stands as the gateway to the permanent establishment of the democratic republic most Americans wanted at the time of the American Revolution.
Bibliography
Borden, Morton. The Antifederalist Papers. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965.
Jensen, Merrill. The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781–1789. New York: Knopf, 1950.
Jenson, Merrill, and Robert A. Becker. The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976–1989.
Kenyon, Cecelia M., ed. The Antifederalists. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1966.
—Carl E. Prince
