The Articles of Confederation gave the national Congress a short list of powers, mostly over war, foreign affairs, coinage, and disputes between states, and withheld the two powers that would have let it actually govern: taxation and the regulation of commerce. That gap is the whole story of the powers and failures of the Articles of Confederation. Within eight years of taking effect in 1781, the system had defaulted on foreign debt, watched a domestic rebellion go unanswered, and been replaced.
What Congress Could Do
Article IX listed the powers of the Confederation Congress, and the list was deliberately narrow. Congress alone could declare war, negotiate treaties, and manage alliances with foreign nations. It handled relations with Native American groups outside state boundaries. It could coin money and set the value of coins, including those minted by the states themselves. It ran a national postal service and set uniform weights and measures. And it served as the final court of appeal for boundary and jurisdictional disputes between states, a real function at a time when overlapping territorial claims were everywhere.1National Archives. Articles of Confederation
That looks substantial written down. In practice, almost every one of those powers required nine of the thirteen states to agree before Congress could act. Declaring war, entering a treaty, coining money, borrowing funds, and appropriating money all sat behind the supermajority threshold. Only routine procedural questions cleared with a simple majority.2National Constitution Center. Articles of Confederation Delegates were frequently absent and state delegations often split, so reaching nine votes on anything contested was genuinely hard.
What Congress Could Not Do
The absent powers mattered more than the granted ones. Congress had no authority to tax anyone. Article VIII set up a common treasury funded by contributions from the states, apportioned by the value of surveyed land in each state. Congress could ask for these contributions. It could not compel them. If a state refused to pay, there was no legal mechanism to force compliance.3Legal Information Institute. Historical Background on Taxing Power
States treated the requests accordingly. Collectively, they paid a fraction of what Congress asked. New Jersey at one point repudiated its entire requisition, arguing it had already paid enough through tariffs on goods imported through neighboring ports in New York and Philadelphia.3Legal Information Institute. Historical Background on Taxing Power
Congress tried to fix the revenue problem by amendment and failed twice. A 1781 proposal for a modest five-percent tariff on imports died when Rhode Island refused to approve it. A revised 1783 version died when New York withdrew its earlier support. Amendments required unanimous approval from all thirteen state legislatures, so a single state could kill any reform.
The other missing power was commerce. Congress could not regulate trade between the states or impose uniform commercial rules. Each state set its own tariffs, trade barriers, and navigation laws, often in direct conflict with its neighbors. States with major ports taxed goods passing through to landlocked neighbors. Without a national authority to settle these disputes or create a common market, interstate trade became a chaotic mess.1National Archives. Articles of Confederation
Why the Structure Was Built to Be Weak
The design was intentional. Article II stated that each state retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence along with every power not expressly given to Congress.1National Archives. Articles of Confederation That was the organizing principle of the whole document. After years under British rule, the framers wanted a national government that could not accumulate enough power to threaten the states.
So the entire national government was a single legislative body. No president. No cabinet. No national courts. Administrative work fell to congressional committees handling everything from foreign correspondence to military oversight.2National Constitution Center. Articles of Confederation
Every state cast exactly one vote regardless of population. Delegates were chosen by their state legislatures and answered to those legislatures, not to voters directly. Delaware carried the same weight as Virginia, which had roughly ten times the population. A handful of small states could block measures supported by a large majority of the country.2National Constitution Center. Articles of Confederation
And changing any of this required clearing an almost impossible bar. Article XIII barred any alteration unless Congress agreed and every state legislature confirmed the change.4H2O. Article XIII, Articles of Confederation Any single state could veto any reform. The two failed tariff amendments proved unanimity among thirteen states with competing economic interests was essentially unattainable.
The Failures in Practice
The structural weaknesses produced real crises. The most immediate was money. The government stopped paying interest on its debts to France in 1785 and defaulted on installments due in 1787. Whatever resources Congress could scrape together went to repaying Dutch investors, because Amsterdam was the only realistic source of future loans.5Office of the Historian. U.S. Debt and Foreign Loans
The breaking point came with Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 and 1787. Farmers in western Massachusetts, crushed by debt and aggressive tax collection, took up arms and tried to seize a federal arsenal in Springfield. Secretary of War Henry Knox asked Congress to send troops. Congress agreed in principle but could not raise the money or the men, because the states would not provide either. A privately funded militia organized by Massachusetts eventually put the rebellion down. The national government could not protect its own arsenal.
Interstate commerce had deteriorated into something close to an economic cold war. States with busy ports taxed goods bound for neighboring states. Paper money flooded the economy and inflation spiraled. The central government watched with no authority to intervene.1National Archives. Articles of Confederation
What the Articles Got Right
Not everything failed. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the most significant legislative achievement under the Articles and shaped American expansion for decades. It set rules for governing the vast territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, ceded by states that had given up their western claims.6National Archives. Northwest Ordinance
It created a three-stage path to statehood. Congress first appointed a governor, a secretary, and three judges to administer each territory. Once a district reached five thousand free adult male inhabitants, residents could elect their own assembly and send a non-voting delegate to Congress. At sixty thousand, the territory could draft a constitution and apply for admission on equal footing with the original thirteen states.6National Archives. Northwest Ordinance
The ordinance also prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the territory.7National Constitution Center. The Northwest Ordinance Five future states, including Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, eventually entered the union through this framework. The principle that new states would join as equals, not colonies of the existing states, became a permanent feature of American governance.
Replacement by the Constitution
The first attempt at reform was the Annapolis Convention in September 1786. Delegates from five states met to discuss interstate commerce, but attendance was too thin to do anything substantive. They issued a resolution calling for a broader convention in Philadelphia the following May.
That convention opened in May 1787 and quickly concluded that patching the Articles was not enough. Rather than proposing amendments requiring unanimous state approval, the delegates drafted an entirely new Constitution with a stronger central government that could tax, regulate commerce, and enforce its own laws. The new document replaced unanimity with approval by three-fourths of the states for future amendments.
New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify on June 21, 1788, and the new government began operating on March 4, 1789.8National Constitution Center. The Day the Constitution Was Ratified Nearly every major provision of the Constitution answered a specific failure the framers had watched unfold: the taxing power for the requisition failures, the commerce clause for the interstate trade wars, and the new amendment process for the impossibility of unanimous consent.