From Colonies to Confederation

Long before 1776, the American colonies had real practice governing themselves. The Mayflower Compact (1620) bound Plymouth's settlers to make their own laws for the "general good." Virginia's House of Burgesses (founded 1619) was the first elected legislative assembly in the colonies, and by the 1700s most colonies had their own elected assemblies handling local matters, even while remaining under the British Crown. That balance shifted sharply after the costly French and Indian War (1754-1763), when Britain, deep in debt, began taxing the colonies directly for the first time -- the Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend Acts (1767) among them. Colonists objected not simply to the taxes themselves but to being taxed by a Parliament in which they had no elected representation, a grievance summarized in the slogan "no taxation without representation." Tensions escalated through the Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), and Britain's punitive response, until the First Continental Congress (1774) and then the Second Continental Congress (1775) brought the colonies together to coordinate resistance, and eventually, in July 1776, to declare independence outright.

Having just broken from a king they saw as tyrannical, the newly independent states designed their first national government, the Articles of Confederation (drafted 1777, ratified 1781), to be as weak as possible on purpose. The Articles created only a single-chamber Congress, with no separate executive and no national court system, and each state, large or small, got exactly one vote. Congress could ask states for money and soldiers but could not force them to comply, could not regulate trade between states or with other countries, and could not amend the Articles at all without unanimous consent from all thirteen states. This weakness was not an accident, but it quickly became a crisis. When heavily indebted farmers in western Massachusetts, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, rose up in 1786-87 in what became known as Shays' Rebellion to stop courts from foreclosing on their farms, the national government had no army of its own and no money to raise one -- it could only watch as Massachusetts scrambled to put the rebellion down using a state militia. Shays' Rebellion convinced many leaders that a national government too weak to keep basic order was as dangerous, in its own way, as one too strong.