Congress Invites the States to Send Delegates to a Convention in Philadelphia: February 21, 1787

This text comes from our book, The American Venture.

It was not long before the Articles of Confederation began to show their weaknesses as a model for a national government. Congress had to rely on states for revenue, and since the states were unwilling to contribute to the national government, it was constantly short of money. Attempts to change this situation by amendments to the Articles failed, because such amendments had to be approved by all the states. The national government, moreover, could not fulfill the promises it had made in the Treaty of Paris to protect the property of loyalists in the states. Instead, states seized loyalist lands and forced the loyalists to leave the United States. Congress simply could not enforce its will in this matter. Nor could it settle disagreements between states; if such dissensions continued, they would destroy the union of the states that been forged in the revolution.

Foreign powers were taking advantage of the weakness of the United States government. Great Britain continued to hold on to forts in the Northwest that it had promised to abandon in the Treaty of Paris. When Congress complained, the British government retorted that the United States had themselves violated the treaty: they had not paid the debts they owed to Great Britain, nor had they protected loyalist property rights in the states. Spain, too, still held on to the settlements of Natchez and Vicksburg on the U.S. side of the Mississippi River and was protecting the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee tribes that were raiding American settlements on the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers.

An old map of the Northwest Territory

One lasting achievement of the first United States government was a body of laws Congress passed to govern the western territories (lying between the Appalachians and the Mississippi) gained from Great Britain after the war. Congress approved these laws, called the Northwest Ordinance, on July 13, 1787. The Ordinance governs United States territories to this day.

But, even if it could, the Northwest Ordinance came too late to convince many Americans that the Articles of Confederation were an effective instrument of government. A rebellion in Massachusetts, for one thing, filled many with forebodings of the future. Heavy debts and tax burdens had weighed heavily on the common farmers of Massachusetts—and when the state government did nothing to alleviate the burdens, the farmers rose in rebellion. Under their leaders, Daniel Shays, Eli Parsons, and Luke Day, farmers engaged state militia in three battles but were defeated in each instance. The rebellion, which had begun in January 1787, was crushed by March.

Though the Massachusetts militia had capably handled “Shays’ Rebellion,” some Americans pointed out that the federal government had been powerless to help. This, added to the fact that Congress could do nothing to settle disputes between states, induced Virginia and Maryland to call a convention of the states to discuss what could be done to make the Articles of Confederation a more effective instrument of government.

The Pennsylvania state house, Philadelphia, where the constitutional convention was held

But only five states sent delegates to the convention that met at Annapolis, Maryland in September 1786. With such a paltry number, the only thing the delegates could do was call for another convention. Congress agreed, and on February 21, 1787, invited the states to send delegates to a convention that was to meet in Philadelphia. The goals of the convention were to be modest—it was only to revise the Articles of Confederation to make “the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government, and the preservation of the Union.” Several of the delegates who came to Philadelphia, however, had different goals. They did not want simply to revise the Articles of Confederation; they wanted to replace them with an entirely new system of government.