Five Stops, One Weak Government: A Historian's Field Notes, 1781–1787

Field Notes of Dr. Leah Okonjo, Historian

1Stop 1: Nassau Hall, Princeton, New Jersey. This stone college building once housed the national government. In June 1783, several hundred Continental soldiers who had not been paid surrounded the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, where Congress met. Congress asked Pennsylvania's leaders to call out the state militia to protect it, but they refused. With no army or money of its own, Congress left Philadelphia and met here for several months.

2Stop 2: the state archives, Providence, Rhode Island. In 1781, Congress asked the states to let it collect a 5 percent tax on imported goods to pay the war debt. Because the Articles could be changed only if all thirteen states agreed, Rhode Island's refusal in 1782 ended the plan. Rhode Island earned money from its own import taxes, and many of its leaders feared giving a distant government the power to tax. A second request in 1783 also failed to win every state.

3Stop 3: a museum in Marietta, Ohio. Congress under the Articles did pass two lasting land laws. The Land Ordinance of 1785 had surveyors divide western land into square townships, with one section in each set aside for public schools. The Northwest Ordinance, passed on July 13, 1787, set rules for dividing the territory into three to five states that would join the Union as equals of the original thirteen. It banned slavery in the territory and promised "utmost good faith" toward Native nations. Yet this was the homeland of the Shawnee, Miami, Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot and other nations. U.S. armies fought them in the years that followed, and in the Treaty of Greenville of 1795 they gave up most of what is now Ohio. These nations still govern themselves today, many of them in Oklahoma.

4Stop 4: the Assembly Room of Independence Hall, Philadelphia. The convention met here from May to September 1787 and agreed to keep its debates secret. Most of what we know comes from James Madison's notes, published in 1840, four years after his death. One long debate was about the executive. Edmund Randolph of Virginia warned that a single leader could become a king and proposed sharing the job among three people. James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that one person could act with energy and be held responsible. The convention chose one president who would serve four years and could be removed by impeachment.

5Stop 5: Gunston Hall, Virginia, the plantation home of George Mason, who enslaved many people here. In August 1787, Mason told the convention, "Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant," and he urged an end to the slave trade. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia said their states would not join without it. In a compromise, Congress could not ban bringing enslaved people into the country before 1808. Some historians point out that Virginia enslavers could profit if imports stopped, because they could sell enslaved people to states farther south. On September 17, Mason refused to sign the Constitution, partly because it had no bill of rights.