A Just and Lasting Peace : The Articles of Confederation and the Philadelphia constitution

By 1787, before and at the Philadelphia convention, it was clear the American elites were concerned that the union, under the Articles, would simply fly apart.

They feared secessions of any number of states and that, once out, states might recombine into two or more distinct and reciprocally independent unions.

They especially feared development of two or three unions in place of the one.

Nobody contemplated war to stop any such thing.

In complete defiance of the process of one-at-a-time amendment by unanimous consent of all the states that was specified in Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation as well as of the perpetuity of the union therein insisted upon, the men of Philadelphia wrote a completely new constitution for the individual states to take or leave.

And the states were to do that by a process the men of Philadelphia had themselves invented for the purpose, again in defiance of Article XIII, according to which their new constitution would take effect for ratifying states once nine states had agreed.

If any states chose not to ratify but at least 9 signed on the oh-so-perpetual union would be smashed.

And those men of Philadelphia were quite seriously concerned states of the south or a sprinkling of small states from all over might not sign on, but were willing to take that risk and live with the resulting rupture of the union.

There was no talk of fighting a war to save the perpetual union by forcing holdouts in if at least nine states, but not all states, ratified.

And while the Articles of Confederation had repeatedly emphasized and insisted upon it, all talk of the perpetuity of the union was omitted utterly from the Philadelphia constitution.

The Congress, whose authority rested on the Articles of Confederation, took up the cause of Philadelphia and unconstitutionally (with reference to the Articles) and illegally sent the Philadelphia constitution to the states on September 28, 1787.

New Hampshire became the 9^th state to agree on June 21, 1788.

From that moment the Articles were dead and the union an open question.

The new government went into effect in New York City on March 4, 1789, but only for states that had ratified by that date.

North Carolina and Rhode Island were still out.

North Carolina ratified on November 21, 1789; Rhode Island was last on May 29, 1790.

Both had held out over two years.

And yet, by December of 1860 the Philadelphia constitution and the union within it had both mysteriously become perpetual and, not only that, but worth the bloodiest war in the nation’s history to continue.

A unionist court in 1868 accepted the Lincoln/Johnson line that secession was not only unconstitutional but impossible and simply had not happened.

None of the states of the Confederacy had ever actually left the union, said the Supremes.