Articles of Confederation Article II

Articles of Confederation Article II reserved to each state every power, jurisdiction, and right not expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled. Its reservation of undelegated authority stands at the center of the Federalist critique of the Confederation: in Hamilton’s account, it obstructs any inference that the national government may compel state compliance, while the proposed Constitution’s grants and supremacy are bounded by their constitutional purposes.

Text and Constitutional Setting

Article II, as Hamilton presents it, declares that each state retains every power, jurisdiction, and right not expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled. The rule therefore defines the Confederation through express delegation: authority remains with the states unless the national government has been explicitly granted it. Hamilton treats this language not as a minor reservation but as a controlling interpretive constraint on claims about federal power.

The rule appears within a wider institutional problem. The Confederation’s measures depended on the states for execution, and national decisions consequently required the concurrence of thirteen distinct sovereign wills. When states failed to comply with requisitions, the national government lacked an independent means of carrying its measures into effect; unequal compliance encouraged other states to withhold support, until Congress scarcely possessed the means to maintain even the forms of administration. Article II’s insistence on express delegation sharpened the question of whether any coercive authority could be inferred despite the absence of an express grant.

The Enforcement Dilemma

Hamilton identifies the want of a constitutional sanction for national laws as a palpable defect of the Confederation. The United States had no expressly delegated power to exact obedience or punish disobedience by fines, loss of privileges, or another constitutional means. Nor did the text expressly authorize force against delinquent states. To infer such a power from the nature of the political compact, he argues, would collide with Article II’s reservation of all powers not expressly delegated.

That collision creates the dilemma at the heart of his criticism. Either the national government must be understood to lack constitutional power to enforce its own laws, or the reservation must be contradicted or explained away. Hamilton presents the first conclusion as an extraordinary constitutional anomaly: a government whose laws issue from the Union but which has no constitutional means to secure their execution. In practice, the enforcement gap leaves national measures dependent on the decisions of separate state administrations, each judging proposed action through its own immediate interests and local priorities rather than a shared assessment of national circumstances.

Fiscal Consequences of Reserved Powers

The Federalist argument links this structural weakness to the public treasury. States had multiplied tax laws and tried new collection methods, yet their treasuries remained empty; popular administration and scarce money, associated with weak and restricted trade, frustrated substantial direct collections. Hamilton reasons that a general Union would better support commerce and make duty collection simpler and more effective, strengthening the revenue available for public needs.

The Confederation’s quota system presents a related problem of fairness and capacity. Neither land values nor population, Hamilton argues, offers a reliable common measure of the states’ relative wealth. He contrasts Virginia with North Carolina, Pennsylvania with Connecticut, and Maryland with New Jersey to show that fiscal ability does not necessarily correspond to either land or population. He also notes that the active wealth of King’s County, in New York, greatly exceeds what a comparison based on land or population alone would suggest about its relation to Montgomery County. Against this uneven background, quotas fail both as a dependable source of national revenue and as a just measure of state contributions.

The Proposed Constitution as a Contrast

Hamilton’s argument does not treat every national power as unlimited. In discussing the proposed Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause and Supremacy Clause, he maintains that these provisions make explicit what follows from establishing a federal government with specified powers: laws enacted to carry those powers into execution must be effective, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution must prevail over conflicting state law. The limiting phrase matters. Federal measures outside constitutional powers are usurpations, not supreme law.

He likewise assigns judgment in the first instance to the national government and, ultimately, to its constituents, the people. If federal authority exceeded its proper bounds, the people could appeal to the constitutional standard and take measures to redress the injury. His contrast is thus between a Confederation whose express-delegation rule, as he reads it, prevents an effective national sanction and a proposed Constitution that supplies workable national authority while limiting that authority to its constitutional foundation.

Significance in the Federalist Argument

Article II becomes more than a reservation of state powers: it is the textual hinge between state sovereignty and the Confederation’s inability to secure common action. Hamilton uses it to show why an implied coercive power would be difficult to reconcile with the existing text, while the practical record of failed requisitions demonstrates the consequences of leaving national decisions dependent on state discretion. The same interpretive tension recurs in his defense of the new plan, where federal supremacy is legitimate only for laws made pursuant to constitutional powers.

The rule’s force in these essays therefore lies in both its language and its institutional effects. Its express-delegation standard marks what the national government may claim under the Confederation; in Hamilton’s account, it also exposes how a government without adequate enforcement and revenue authority can become unable to perform essential functions. The proposed Constitution is defended as a change in that arrangement, not as a declaration that reserved state authority has disappeared.