Founding America (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Jack N. Rakove [8]
That understanding did not take hold immediately. Its acceptance was more the result of the ways in which these new governments had to use their power to support the war effort. The Revolution required governments to act far more extensively and intrusively than their colonial predecessors had ever done. They had to raise taxes, soldiers, and supplies from a people who had never been asked to support a war on this scale. Inevitably, the reactions this activity provoked went beyond criticisms of specific policies to consider whether the new constitutions were as well framed as they could have been. They had been written, after all, in the midst of war, by provincial conventions that had other business to transact and little experience on which to rely.
Constitution-making also had a national dimension. In June 1776 Congress drafted Articles of Confederation to provide a constitutional framework of union. But three issues prevented it from reaching agreement on this plan of union: the rules of voting within Congress; the apportionment of expenses among the states; and the control of interior western lands. In the wake of the great victory at Saratoga in 1777, Congress mustered the determination to complete the task and sent the Articles to the states for approval. But because this completed draft granted Congress no authority over western lands, a bloc of landless states (that is, states lacking claims to lands west of the Appalachians) delayed ratifying the Confederation. Maryland, the last holdout, withheld its assent until February 1781.
By then, many national leaders recognized that the Articles would not give Congress the range of powers that the war had revealed it needed. Congress could only issue recommendations and requisitions to the states. It could not enact laws binding individuals to obey its decisions. And it lacked independent sources of revenue or the authority to levy taxes. The states generally did the best they could to comply with congressional decisions. But the impression inevitably took hold that a federal union that depended on the good faith of its member states was a government in name only.
In 1781 Congress sent its first proposed amendment of the Articles to the states: a request to be able to levy an impost (duty) on selected imports (p. 194). Like the original Confederation, this amendment required the unanimous approval of the states. And like all subsequent efforts to amend the Articles, this amendment failed to surmount that hurdle. In 1783 Congress proposed a new set of amendments designed to answer its need for revenue; these also failed (p. 213). In 1784, with the country slipping into a postwar recession and British goods flooding American markets while American ships were excluded from British harbors, Congress submitted two more proposals asking the states to grant it authority over foreign commerce (p. 217). These also failed.
By 1786 some national leaders were wondering whether the promise of the Revolution was being jeopardized by the disagreements of peacetime. Some took a long view. They thought that a population exhausted by a long and costly war could not be expected to undertake fresh projects of political reform. Others, however, worried that a union that seemed to be drifting into a condition of “imbecility” could not survive indefinitely. Britain used the non-compliance of the states with various provisions of the peace treaty to justify retaining key frontier posts at Niagara, Oswego, and Detroit. Spanish authorities in New Orleans closed the Mississippi River to American navigation, preventing frontier farmers from exporting their produce and sparking a sharp sectional dispute in Congress. West Indian ports remained closed to American merchantmen. Under these and other pressures, a single union of thirteen states might break up into two or three regional confederations, each pursuing