Making the Most of Treason: How the Articles of Confederation Won the Revolutionary War
If you are an average American who learned American history in a typical public school or a typical college or university, you probably grew up with a very negative view of the Articles of Confederation. You probably grew up viewing the Articles of Confederation as an utter failure destined to be swept aside by a superior document, the U.S. Constitution. My argument is completely different. The Articles of Confederation actually began as a wartime constitution that enabled a band of American revolutionaries to attain independence by beating the most powerful military in the world. In its time, it was a profoundly revolutionary document made by bourgeois rebels who not only avoided getting executed for treason, but also pulled off the first successful military rebellion against a monarchy in the history of the world.
The achievement of the Articles of Confederation is that it successfully unified thirteen extremely different colonies toward the common goal of militarily defeating the monarchy that jointly oppressed them all. This is achievement is more difficult than it may first appear. The original thirteen colonies began under totally divergent circumstances with completely different values and cultures that left them with little motive to unite. There is almost no overarching pattern to why the original thirteen colonies were created. The colonies included a failed start-up that got taken over by the Crown due to starvation and Native American massacres of colonists (Virginia), self-governing Puritan or Puritan-adjacent communities established by charter (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island), a community established by fishermen later granted royal colony status (New Hampshire), a refuge for English Catholics (Maryland), a land grant for a Quaker colony (Pennsylvania), colonies seized from the Dutch (Delaware, New York, New Jersey), colonies the king gave to Royalist who supported him during the English Civil War (the Carolinas), and a debtor’s colony used as a buffer against the Spanish military (Georgia).
Beginning with the New England Confederation formed in 1643, there were at least 20 different attempts to unify some or all of the thirteen colonies that all failed while the 1777 Articles of Confederation was the only one that worked. Benjamin Franklin had been proposing plans for unifying the colonies since 1751, but it would take him over 20 years before he would finally succeed.
Franklin’s first proposal to unify the American colonies appeared in a private 1751 letter to James Parker that would later be circulated as a published essay. Franklin had foreseen the coming of the French and Indian War, which would begin three years later. France was attempting to undermine the British colonies by allying with Native Americans. This development led Franklin to argue it was necessary to “unite the several governments” in order to obtain “Friendship of the Indians,” which was of “greatest consequence” in warding off the military threat of France.
By 1754, after the French and Indian War had already begun, Franklin developed his ideas further in his next proposal, “Short Hints towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies,” which proposed a colonial union, but it did not include the southern colonies yet. In the 1751 proposal, Franklin wanted a “voluntary Union entered into by the Colonies themselves,” but three years later, a dispute between the Pennsylvania and Virginia legislatures had convinced Franklin that it was necessary for Parliament to intervene.
In early April 1754, Virginia approached other colonial legislatures in order to get other states to give them the money they needed to help fight the French and their Native American allies. At first, the Pennsylvania state legislature considered raising 20,000 British pounds to help Virginia defray the cost of its defense, but eventually they refused. When Virginia first made the request, the Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania was James Hamilton, who was not exactly a favorite of the Pennsylvania Assembly but still someone they could work with. By May 1754, Hamilton had stepped down, and a new Deputy Governor, Robert Hunter Morris, was installed instead.
The Pennsylvania Assembly went back on their agreement to help Virginia pay for its defense, mainly because of their distaste for Deputy Governor Robert Hunter Morris. Compared to James Hamilton, Morris had no interest in helping Pennsylvania colonists and was transparently a stooge for the financial interests of William Penn’s sons: John, Thomas, and Richard. Unlike William Penn, a pious Quaker who established Pennsylvania as a “holy experiment” embodying religious toleration and peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, John, Thomas, and Richard Penn were mainly absentee landlords who viewed Pennsylvania as their private property and viewed the actual citizens of Pennsylvania as interfering with their ability to accumulate wealth. As a result of the Penn family’s behavior, the Assembly recanted its agreement to provide money for Virginia’s defense, because Deputy Governor Morris insisted on a clause that would exempt the Penn family’s land from taxation to pay for that defense. The Assembly, which was dominated by pacifist Quakers anyway, suddenly decided that it would not allocate money for Virginia’s military defense if doing so meant that they were implicitly consenting to Governor Morris usurping their power.
The impasse between the Pennsylvania Assembly and Governor Morris meant that thousands of miles of frontier separating the American colonies from French and Native American territory went completely undefended. The legislative conflict dragged on for over a month, by which time the American colonists had lost Fort Prince George in a May 1754 military defeat at the hands of French. Franklin was so worried by this turn of events that, in his 1754 “Short Hints” plan, he insisted that his plan for colonial union be ratified by the British Parliament.
Franklin’s “Short Hints” plan of 1754 eventually evolved into the Albany Plan of Union, proposed later that year. The Albany Plan would be much broader, incorporating some of the southern states, not just creating a union among the northern colonies. The planned union among the colonies had four main goals: make peace with Native American tribes (“hold or direct all Indian Treaties”), increase economic activity with Native Americans (“make such laws as they Judge Necessary for regulating all Indian Trade”), build new military capability (“raise and pay Soldiers, and build forts for the Defence of any of the Colonies”), and find a way to pay for it all (“make Laws And lay and Levy such General Duties, Imposts, or Taxes, as to them shall appear most equal and Just”).
Despite the threat of the French and Indian War, every single colonial legislature rejected Franklin’s Albany Plan. In some respect, the state legislatures’ rejection of the plan was a predictable consequence of local political elites who didn’t want to give up power to a new centralized government that had never been tried before.
Another reason for the failure of the plan was the conflict between “landed” and “landless” colonies. Some of the thirteen colonies had colonial charters that permitted them to expand to the Mississippi River or even all the way to the Pacific Ocean, while other colonies had no ability to expand because of geography or the limitations of their charter. The Albany Plan allocated representation based on the amount of revenue that each state contributed overall to the federal government. This put the “landed” colonies at an advantage, because they could raise revenue through selling excess lands, but the “landless” colonies had to impose higher taxes on their citizens in order to raise an equivalent amount of revenue. In addition, although the provision that allocated representation to states based on their tax contributions sounded fair, it was an implicitly pro-slavery provision that favored the states that generated more wealth from enslaving human beings.
On the other hand, the Albany Plan represents a road not taken in American political development. If the Albany Plan had been implemented, the unified colonial government would have had the ability to make peace treaties with Native Americans, as well as promote trade between colonists and Native Americans that would have drastically reduced the incentive of either party to go to war. If the Albany Plan had been in place, American colonists and the indigenous Native American inhabitants might have developed a model of peaceful coexistence instead of going down a more genocidal historical path.
The next major plan for unifying the colonies came in 1774 with Galloway’s Plan of Union. Joseph Galloway was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, but much less favorable to the emergent American independence movement than his friend. Galloway believed that the colonial governments in America had a right to retain their liberty and autonomy, but only if they united as an American branch of the British Parliament. In the Plan of Union, the British king would appoint a President-General, while the colonial assemblies would appoint a Grand Council, which had the same rank and privileges as the House of Commons in the British Parliament. Galloway’s goal was to create a constitutional remedy for mediating the disagreements between the colonies and Great Britain, but the proposal was narrowly defeated by a single vote in the Continental Congress. Eventually, the proposal generated so much backlash that the Congress voted to expunge any record of it from its legislative journals altogether.
In 1774, Galloway had been the speaker of the Pennsylvania General Assembly for 18 years, but he resigned a year later because he opposed the Assembly’s support for pursuing independence from Great Britain. By 1777, Galloway had turned against his fellow colonists to ally openly with the British army. When the British army militarily occupied the city of Philadelphia, they appointed Galloway in charge of the civil government. By 1778, the British were driven out of Philadelphia, which led Galloway to flee back to Great Britain. He never returned to America. He was tried in absentia for treason, and his estates were confiscated.
In 1775, Franklin came up with another plan for unifying the colonies, which he called the Articles of Confederation, but it was not the version of the Articles of Confederation that eventually got adopted. Franklin proposed the colonies “severally enter into a firm League of Friendship with each other, binding on themselves and their Posterity, for their Common Defence against their Enemies.” Based on the rejection of his previous proposals, Franklin anticipated that colonial legislatures would be reluctant give up power. So, this time, Franklin included a provision that allowed all the state legislatures to retain their colonial constitutions and their pre-existing laws. Like his previous proposals, Franklin’s 1775 version also included provisions to enable the national government to fight wars, make peace treaties, and conduct foreign policy. There was a provision for proportional representation based on the number of male voters in each colony, as well as a completely new provision that allowed the states to amend the Articles by a simple majority vote of the states.
Franklin’s 1775 proposal slowly withered away, never receiving an official vote. It was introduced to the Continental Congress in July 1775, about two months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord that mark the official start of the American Revolutionary War. The problem that Franklin faced is that a substantial part of the Continental Congress wasn’t ready yet to make a full break with Great Britain. If Franklin had waited only one month longer, until August 1775, when the British Parliament officially declared the colonies to be in a state of rebellion, his proposal might have passed.
It is a shame that Franklin’s original 1775 proposal for the Articles of Confederation was not the one that passed, because all of Franklin’s proposals from the 1750s up until 1775 included some provision that attempted to allocate power fairly based on proportional representation. The goal of Franklin’s proposals was to unify the colonies, but he also had a secondary goal of ensuring that colonial citizens were represented proportionally through their own state government’s participation within a larger confederation. In this sense, Franklin was designing a government for America based on the best models of federal governance available to him at the time: the cantons of Switzerland and the Dutch Republic.
The 1777 Articles of Confederation that were ultimately enacted represented a regression from Franklin’s previous proposals, because he had to abandon the principles of proportional representation that underlay all his proposals until 1775. One reason is that the states could never agree on which principle of proportional registration to support, but a more profound reason is that some political elites refused to consider the concept of proportional representation at all. For these elites, the factor that determined whether they would accept or reject Franklin’s proposals depended on whether they would retain the prerogatives and privileges as state legislators. By caring more about their own historic political privileges, the state legislators sold out the political interests of their own citizens and their right to be represented.
The ultimate reason that the Articles of Confederation finally got enacted has less to do with the merits of the ideas behind it than because the colonies finally figured out a solution to the problem that killed the Albany Plan: the conflict between “landed” and “landless” colonies. The provisions of the 1777 Articles of Confederation stated that they could not go into effect until all 13 colonies ratified it. When the Articles of Confederation were first sent to the states in 1777, 12 out of the 13 states ratified it within the first 14 months, but Maryland remained the lone holdout for almost four years.
The reason Maryland wouldn’t budge is that Maryland was a “landless” state whose boundaries were intrinsically limited by its colonial charter, but the neighboring state of Virginia had an original land grant that gave it the right to expand as far as the Pacific Ocean. Maryland’s refusal was threatening the ability of the colonies to conduct the war, because France was delaying on providing naval assistance to Maryland unless Maryland agreed to ratify the Articles of Confederation. Eventually, Virginia and the rest of the “landed” states agreed to cede their Western land claims, which finally convinced Maryland to relent and ratify the articles.
The Articles of Confederation was the result of Benjamin Franklin’s two decades of effort in getting parochial state legislators to see beyond their immediate self-interest and unite around their common interest in dislodging British rule. Without these efforts, the colonies may have never displayed the unity necessary to win the Revolutionary War. In addition, by demonstrating the unity of the colonies to outsiders, the Articles of Confederation cemented the Franco-American alliance that was a necessary condition for defeating the British. The difficulties that the Articles of Confederation experienced after the Revolutionary War should not blind us to how useful those Articles were in helping to win that war in the first place.
The Articles of Confederation also help settle a debate about whether the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, even if it wasn’t explicitly pro-slavery. When it comes to the issue of slavery, the Articles of Confederation are superior in every way to the U.S. Constitution. The United States Constitution contains the Three-Fifths Clause, which artificially inflated the amount of Congressional representation that slave states had. By contrast, the Articles of Confederation decreed that states should contribute taxes “in proportion based on the value of all land within each state,” instead of granting an advantage to states that invested more of their wealth in slaves. The United States Constitution had a Fugitive Slave Clause that mandated the return of escaped slaves to their enslavers, but the Articles of Confederation only required extradition of “fugitives from Justice,” a provision ambiguous enough to provide leeway for anti-slavery states. The Articles of Confederation included a racialized provision requiring states to provide troops “in proportion to the number of white inhabitants in each state,” but the U.S. Constitution has Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15, which is a facially neutral clause about how militias have the right to suppression insurrections, but in practice in antebellum America, it was primarily used in the South to suppress slave revolts.
The drawback to the Articles of Confederation is that it ignored Benjamin Franklin’s earlier proposals in favor of affirming the principle of state-based representation. Instead of affirming the right of the people to proportional representation under the government that rules them, the version of the Articles of Confederation that finally got enacted affirms the rights of “states” as abstract entities over the rights of people. The United States Constitution that replaced it would only compound that unfortunate error.