From Articles to Constitution

In practice

Start with the design that failed. The Articles kept nearly all power with the states on purpose — after a king, a weak center looked like safety (Gov 022). The cost arrived quickly: a Congress that could not tax could only ask, and the states stopped answering, leaving war debts unpaid (Gov 024). Then came the test: indebted farmers closed Massachusetts courts, and the confederation government could not raise the force to respond — a privately funded militia did (Gov 025). Delegates went to Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles and replaced them instead (Gov 026). Every major feature of the replacement answers a named failure. The representation fight between large and small states ended in a two-chamber Congress — a House by population, a Senate by state (Gov 029). Fear of concentrated power produced two mechanisms working as a pair: functions divided across three branches (Gov 031), and each branch armed to restrain the others (Gov 032). Fear of the new center itself was answered with a promise — a bill of rights, the price of ratification (Gov 037). And the Articles' final defect, a unanimity rule that made repair impossible, became an amendment process that is hard but usable: two-thirds to propose, three-fourths to ratify (Gov 039, Gov 040). Read this way, the Constitution is less a theory than a repair record.