A stagnant economy and a weak national government contributed to the failure of the Articles of Confederation, a panel of American history scholars told an audience of 50 in the Rockefeller Center on Friday. Each speaker offered an alternative analysis of the circumstances that led to the creation of the Constitution in the panel, "Why does America have the Constitution of 1787?: New Historical Perspectives," moderated by Dartmouth history professor Joseph Cullon.
Early U.S. leaders drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1776 to serve as structural documents for the founding government. They were ratified in 1781.
The Congress of the Confederation, the national government set up by the Articles, lacked a significant source of revenue, which created an untenable situation, said Pauline Maier, the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"The Confederation had no money and no revenue stream," Maier said. "What that meant in a practical sense was that the government could not service the national debt. That was not sustainable."
The Constitution of 1787 gave Congress "wall-to-wall taxing power" to address this issue, Maier said, which became controversial as states decided whether to ratify the Constitution.
Maier said that the founding fathers did not envision the Constitution as an inflexible document, and did not anticipate that it would survive for hundreds of years.
Jack Rakove, a political science and history professor at Stanford University, said that a combination of factors prompted the creation of the Constitution.
The Constitution's authors sought to address a lack of supervision of public revenue and commerce, an inability of the national government to assert authority over the states and the single branch system of government, which lacked checks and balances, Rakove said.
Most importantly, Rakove said, the authors decided that the country needed a universal system of laws to apply equally to all citizens.
Woody Holton, professor of history and American studies at the University of Richmond, agreed that the Articles of Confederation gave the states and citizens too much power, an issue addressed at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
"All of the 13 state constitutions were much more democratic than the national Constitution," Holton said. "Ordinary farmers had much more power from 1776 to 1787. The Constitution took some of that power away from ordinary people."
Holton added that the recession in the late 1780s led the founding fathers to shift taxation power to the federal government, hoping that the national government could enact policies to strengthen the economy.
The Constitution was written to address problems with international and interstate relations, interactions between state and national government, and tensions between the elite and farming classes, all of which were inadequately regulated by the Articles of Confederation, said Max Edling, a research fellow in the history department at Uppsala University in Sweden.
The panel was part of a two-day conference, "Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s," which was organized by economics professor Douglas Irwin.
