The Articles of Confederation

A Nation at War Without a Government

Here is a detail most people never learn: the United States fought most of the Revolutionary War without a national government. The Declaration of Independence announced separation from Britain, but it created no structure to actually run a country. Congress had been operating on improvised authority since 1774. As the war dragged on, it became painfully clear that the states needed some binding framework to coordinate the war effort, manage foreign alliances, and eventually govern the peace.

John Dickinson of Pennsylvania was given the task of drafting that framework. He presented his draft to Congress in July 1776 — the same month independence was declared. But agreement did not come quickly. States wrangled for over a year about representation, war debts, and — most bitterly — which states would control the vast unsettled western lands claimed by colonial charters. Congress finally approved the Articles of Confederation on November 15, 1777, in the middle of a brutal war, while the Continental Army was preparing to enter its desperate winter at Valley Forge.

Even after approval, ratification stalled for years. Maryland, which had no western land claims of its own, refused to ratify until Virginia and other states surrendered their claims to the region north of the Ohio River. Maryland held out for over three years. Ratification was finally completed on March 1, 1781 — meaning the United States fought nearly the entirety of the Revolutionary War, including the pivotal victories at Saratoga and the eventual siege of Yorktown, under no legally ratified government at all.

God Named Directly in the Founding Text

Unlike the Constitution that would later replace it, the Articles of Confederation named God explicitly, and did so at the most solemn moment in the document — the closing ratification clause, where the states bound themselves to the union:

Read that sentence carefully. The delegates did not simply say the states had agreed. They said God had 'inclined the hearts' of the state legislatures toward agreement — meaning that even the political willingness to unite, something that had been agonizingly difficult to secure for over a year, was credited not to persuasion or compromise alone, but to the moving of God upon stubborn human hearts.

This is precisely the pattern of Proverbs 21:1 — that even the wills of rulers and legislatures are not beyond the reach of God's sovereignty. The delegates who wrote 'the Great Governor of the World' were not being poetic. They believed, as a matter of theology, that the union itself existed because God had bent hearts that human argument alone could not bend.

A Weak Union, and Why That Mattered

The Articles created what was, by design, a loose confederation of sovereign states rather than a strong national government. Congress could declare war, negotiate treaties, and coin money, but it had no power to levy taxes directly — it could only request funds from the states, who often ignored the requests. There was no independent executive and no national court system. Every significant law required the approval of nine of the thirteen states, and amending the Articles required unanimous consent from all thirteen — a bar so high it was nearly impossible to clear.

• Negotiated and secured the 1783 Treaty of Paris, in which Britain formally recognized American independence.
• Passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, one of the most consequential laws in early American history — it banned slavery in the vast Northwest Territory and declared that 'Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.'
• Provided the framework, however fragile, that carried the fledgling nation from the middle of a war to a fragile peace.

But the weaknesses were severe. With no power to tax, Congress could not pay Revolutionary War veterans what they were owed or maintain a standing army. States printed their own competing currencies and taxed each other's goods. By 1786, economic desperation among small farmers in western Massachusetts — many of them war veterans facing debt and foreclosure — erupted into Shays' Rebellion, an armed uprising that the weak national government proved powerless to put down without relying on a privately funded state militia.

Shays' Rebellion became the wake-up call. If the union could not even keep order within its own borders, independence itself was at risk of collapsing into chaos or, worse, into thirteen separate and quarreling nations vulnerable to foreign powers picking them off one at a time. Delegates who had been reluctant to strengthen the national government now agreed something had to change.

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Looking Ahead

In May of 1787, delegates gathered once more in Philadelphia — officially to revise the Articles of Confederation. What emerged instead was something far more ambitious: an entirely new framework of government, forged over a hot summer of argument, compromise, and — as we will see — at least one moment where the whole convention nearly broke apart until an eighty-one-year-old statesman called the room to prayer.