Congress of the Confederation

The Congress of the Confederation was the central governing body under the Articles of Confederation, and the Federalist essays present it through a defining tension: it possessed important national responsibilities, yet lacked an effective way to make the states perform them. Its failures to secure compliance and its prior service during the Revolution furnish contrasting evidence in the argument for a more capable union.

Constitutional Position and Powers

The proposed Constitution, James Madison argues, would not so much give the Union an entirely new set of powers as make its existing powers more effective. The Confederation Congress already possessed authority over war and peace, armies and fleets, treaties, finance, and other major national matters. Regulation of commerce was a new power, but the essay distinguishes that addition from the broader institutional change: the proposed system would replace an ineffectual means of administering many existing powers with a more effective one.

Taxation makes the distinction especially clear. Under the Articles, the Congress could require the states to supply indefinite sums for the common defense and general welfare. The proposed government would instead be able to require contributions from individual citizens. Madison’s comparison is institutional rather than merely verbal: neither states nor individuals, he observes, would be bound in practice by a demand they could simply disregard. The central defect was therefore not an absence of authority on paper, but the difficulty of turning national decisions into compliance.

State Compliance and National Paralysis

The Confederation’s operating structure made important measures depend on the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills. Each measure had to pass through the administrations of the states, where local rulers could judge national policy according to immediate interests and conveniences. That repeated review exposed common plans to local suspicion and preference, weakening the prospect of sustained cooperation among assemblies deliberating separately and under different circumstances.

Noncompliance developed incrementally. Initially, states supplied unequal and disproportionate shares in response to Congress’s requisitions. The shortfalls of some then gave other states both a precedent and an incentive to contribute less: why should one state bear more than its share when others failed to meet theirs? As each state yielded to immediate interest or convenience, support for the common government receded in turn. The resulting feedback loop transformed uneven compliance into a systemic crisis.

By the time the essays describe the condition, national measures had not been executed and state delinquencies had arrested the machinery of government. Congress could scarcely maintain even the forms of administration while the states considered a more substantial substitute for the existing system. Elsewhere the crisis is rendered as national humiliation: public debts lacked satisfactory provision for discharge, British-held posts remained in foreign hands despite stipulations for their surrender, Spain excluded Americans from navigation of the Mississippi, and the national government lacked troops, treasury, and the power to respond with force. These conditions illustrated the distance between possessing nominal national responsibilities and being able to discharge them.

The Revolutionary Congress as a Counterexample

The Congress that conducted the country through the Revolution supplies a different part of the argument. Madison recalls that it was smaller than its proposed constitutional successor, was not chosen by or responsible to citizens at large, and deliberated under secrecy. Though its members were appointed annually and could be recalled, they generally continued for three years and, before ratification of the Articles, sometimes longer. Congress also handled the country’s foreign affairs and bore an extraordinary share of responsibility for its fate during the war.

Those circumstances, Madison contends, created ample grounds to suspect that foreign influence might corrupt the public councils. Yet the record offered in the essay is one of trust maintained: the public trust was not betrayed, and the purity of the councils in this respect had not even suffered from whispers of calumny. The example does not erase the Confederation’s operational weakness. Instead, it separates two questions that could otherwise be confused: whether public representatives could be trusted, and whether the institutional arrangement could reliably secure collective action from the states.

Institutional Diagnosis and Constitutional Change

The Congress’s difficulties are treated as evidence about the design of the Confederation, not simply as an indictment of the people who served in it. Madison notes that when the Articles were submitted for ratification, the states’ many objections and proposed amendments did not identify the great structural error that experience later revealed. The defects became legible through trial: state requisitions could not reliably produce the cooperation the Union required.

This retrospective diagnosis shapes the case for constitutional reform. The new system is defended as an invigoration and more effective administration of powers already largely entrusted to Congress, rather than as an unrestricted transfer of ordinary internal affairs to a consolidated government. Madison describes federal powers as few and defined, directed principally toward external matters such as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce, while the states retain numerous and broad responsibilities for the lives, liberties, property, and internal order of their people. In that account, the Confederation Congress’s record is both warning and precedent: the national government had carried the country through the Revolution, but a government dependent on state-by-state compliance could not reliably sustain the Union in ordinary administration.