The union that took three years to sign

The Declaration is a day. The Articles of Confederation are a queue, and the queue is the point. Congress agreed the text on 15 November 1777 and sent it out to the thirteen states as a printed pamphlet over the signature of Henry Laurens, its president. Eight delegations put their hands to the engrossed parchment on 9 July 1778. The rest came in one at a time. Maryland signed on 1 March 1781 — three years, three months and two weeks after the text was finished — and only then did the United States have a written frame of government at all.

Everything difficult about the early republic is legible in that delay.

What Maryland was holding out for was land. Several of the large states — Virginia most of all — held colonial charters that ran their western boundaries to the Mississippi, or to the Pacific, depending on how generously a seventeenth-century clause was read. Maryland's boundaries stopped where they stopped. A union in which Virginia could sell the west and Maryland could not was, in Annapolis's reading, a union with a permanent creditor and a permanent debtor built into it. Maryland refused to ratify until the western claims were ceded to the confederation itself. Virginia eventually moved, and Maryland signed, and the land that later became five states passed to the union rather than to the states that claimed it. The smallest party at the table extracted the largest concession in the room by doing nothing for three years.

What the delegations bought with the wait was a document that could not do very much. Article II says the plain thing out loud: each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power not expressly delegated. Congress could declare war, treat with foreign powers, run a post office and settle disputes between states. It could not lay a tax. It could requisition money from the states, which is a way of saying it could ask. Nine of the thirteen had to agree to the important measures, and every one of the thirteen had to agree to change a word of the Articles themselves — the amendment rule that eventually killed the frame it protected, when a modest impost to fund the war debt died because a single state would not have it.

That is the standard indictment, and it is fair. It is also incomplete, because the thing did what it was built to do. Under the Articles the union fought a war to a finish, negotiated a peace in 1783 that recognised American independence on generous terms, and passed the Northwest Ordinance — the arrangement that turned the ceded western land into new states admitted as equals rather than into colonies of the old thirteen. A government too weak to tax still managed the single most consequential land settlement in the country's history, and managed it on a principle that has held ever since.

Read the roll and the same lesson appears in miniature. Forty-eight men signed, not fifty-six, and the delegations sign as blocks: New Hampshire first at the top of the right-hand column, Georgia last at the foot of the left. Sixteen of the forty-eight had already signed the Declaration two years earlier — Samuel Adams, John Hancock's Massachusetts colleagues, Roger Sherman, Robert Morris, Elbridge Gerry among them. The other thirty-two are men most Americans have never heard of, and they are half the reason the union exists: the second-string delegates who stayed in Philadelphia doing procedural work while the famous names went home to run their states.

The parchment records that unevenness honestly. Some delegations sign complete; some sign with two men where the roll allows seven. New Jersey does not appear until November 1778, Delaware until February and May 1779, and Maryland's two signatures sit alone at the bottom of the sheet, dated more than two years after the men above them. Nothing about the document pretends the union arrived all at once.

The Articles are usually taught as the failure that made the Constitution necessary, and the 1787 convention did replace them wholesale eight years later. But the failure was specific, not general: the frame could not raise revenue and could not amend itself. It could hold a coalition of thirteen jealous governments together through a war and a peace, which almost nothing else in 1777 could have done. The men who wrote the Constitution did not start from nothing. They started from a working list of exactly which two things had gone wrong.

The document worth remembering, then, is not a mistake and not a monument. It is the first draft of a federal republic, signed slowly, by people who were not sure they wanted one, and improved on the evidence.

The document worth remembering, then, is not a mistake and not a monument. It is the first draft of a federal republic, signed slowly, by people who were not sure they wanted one, and improved on the evidence.