You know, we are so incredibly obsessed with
success stories, aren't we? Like, we study the
winning companies, the triumphant leaders, the
systems that just flawlessly execute whatever
they're programmed to do. Right, the highlight
reels. Exactly. But I mean, think about the device
you're listening to this on right now. You don't
actually learn how its operating system works
when everything is running smoothly. Oh definitely
You learn exactly how it works when it's spectacularly
Systemically crashes. Yeah, the the blue screen
of death is arguably the greatest teacher of
architecture We have I mean whether that's in
computing or you know in nation building nation
building, right? And today we are going to look
at the ultimate blue screen of death in American
history we're taking a deep dive into the rough
draft of the United States. The very rough draft.
So rough. Today, we're pulling our insights from
a massive source stack, specifically the Comprehensive
Wikipedia Archive on the Articles of Confederation.
Welcome to the deep dive. We are thrilled you're
here with us. Glad to have you. Because today,
we are exploring a spectacular failure. Understanding
why the US's first operating system crashed is
going to teach you everything about why systems,
whether that's in government, business, or just
like your own life, why they need this incredibly
delicate balance between centralized structure
and individual freedom. Yeah, it really is a
masterclass in the unintended consequences of
trying to design a perfect system. Because you
have to remember that people designing this were
incompetent. They were, I mean, some of the most
brilliant political minds of their century, but
they were designing a system while actively running
away from a trauma. The trauma of a tyrannical
king. Exactly, a very recent trauma. OK, let's
unpack this. Yeah. Because before a system can
fail, it obviously has to be built. But why was
it built in the first place? You might think,
oh, they just needed some rules for the colonists.
Sure, just a basic rule book. Right. But looking
through our sources, this wasn't just a domestic
rule book. It was basically an international
PR campaign. It was the ultimate startup pitch
deck. I love that analogy. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, the American colonies
in 1776 were outlaws. I mean, they were committing
treason against the most powerful empire on the
planet. And they knew with absolute certainty
they could not win that war alone. They needed
foreign intervention. They needed angel investors.
They needed France and Spain to give them money,
weapons, naval support. But you can't just walk
into the court of King Louis VI and say, hey,
we're a bunch of chaotic rebels. Please give
us millions of dollars. Right. The geopolitical
reality of 18th century Europe simply didn't
allow for that. Thomas Paine argued this point
brilliantly actually in the closing pages of
the first edition of Common Sense. Oh yeah. He
pointed out that the custom of nations required
a formal declaration of independence and a formal
framework of government. Like European monarchies
wouldn't mediate a peace or provide aid to subjects
they viewed as merely rebelling against another
legitimate monarch. Because that sets a bad precedent
for them. Exactly. So they needed the Americans
to look like a legitimate, organized nation.
Proof that these colonies would be reliable trading
partners after the war was over. So on June 7,
1776, Richard Henry Lee stands up in the Continental
Congress and says, we need to declare independence
and we need to form a confederation. Right now.
Right now. Yeah. And they create these overlapping
committees. Yeah. John Dickinson ends up leading
the committee of 13 to actually draft this thing.
And they basically have to write a business plan
that proves to the whole world they're a unified
entity. But here is the profound irony of all
that. They needed a system to impress Europe
with their unity and strength, right? Right.
But the system they actually designed was intentionally,
fundamentally weak. It's wild. They essentially
designed a government with zero teeth. Zero.
Let's look at the actual rules they came up with.
The Articles of Confederation didn't establish
a strong nation. The document literally called
it a firm league of friendship. Just a group
of buddies hanging out. Yeah, that phrasing is
so revealing of their mindset. Under the articles,
each state retained its absolute sovereignty.
Meaning they were basically their own independent
countries. Exactly. The central government, this
unicameral Congress, was only given the specific
powers that the former colonies had recognized
as belonging to the British Crown and Parliament.
Which was what exactly? Mostly war. Peace, diplomacy,
that's it. Everything else was left entirely
to the states. Okay, I want to pause on that
word, unicameral, just so we are all on the same
page here. Today, we're used to a bicameral system,
a House of Representatives and a Senate that
kind of balance each other out. Right. Unicameral
means there was just one single room of lawmakers.
And the voting structure in that room was completely
absurd. Each state got exactly one vote in Congress.
Just one. Imagine you're living in Virginia at
the time, right? You've got this massive population,
a huge economy, and your state has the exact
same voting power as tiny Delaware. You send
a delegation of anywhere from, what, two to seven
members to this Congress, but when it came time
to actually vote, your entire state cast one
single ballot. Which... practically guaranteed
to gridlock on a structural level, I mean it's...
It's bad. But it gets even more complicated when
you look at how long it took just to agree to
these rules. Oh, the timeline is crazy. Right.
The drafting was finished in late 1777, but ratification
required unanimous consent from all 13 states.
It took three and a half years to get everyone
to sign on. See, this is where I have to push
back on the logic of these founding fathers.
How did they possibly expect to win a war against
the British Empire with a government where one
single state could hold up the entire country
for over three years. It's a great question.
I mean, our source material highlights that Maryland
literally refused to sign until March of 1781.
The fighting was almost over by then. Yeah. And
the reason Maryland held out is, well, it's fascinating
because it exposes the deep internal fractures
of the so -called friendship. It was over a massive
real estate dispute. Of course it was. Real estate?
Always, right. Maryland wanted the larger states,
especially Virginia, to give up their claims
to the Western lands, the territory west of the
Ohio River. Because Maryland didn't have Western
borders. Exactly. So they feared being economically
eclipsed by these giant neighbor states who would
just keep expanding westward and selling land
to pay off debts. Maryland basically said, we
won't budge until Virginia agrees to cede those
lands to the National Union. Wow. It is staggering
to think about conducting a desperate war under
those conditions. I guess brings us back to that
deep -seated fear you mentioned earlier. Why
on earth would brilliant men design something
so incredibly fragile? Because they were absolutely
terrified of centralized power. You have to put
yourself in their shoes. They were sacrificing
blood and treasure to escape a king and a distant,
unrepresentative parliament. The absolute last
thing they wanted to do was accidentally create
a new king or a new tyrannical parliament right
in their own backyard. To them, liberty meant
local control. A weak central government was
wasn't a bug in the code. It was the feature.
It was the primary feature. But, I mean, designing
a weak government sounds great for freedom in
theory. What happens when that weak design meets
the brutal, unforgiving reality of actually fighting
a war and, you know, managing a wartime economy?
Total systemic failure, just total collapse,
because the most glaring flaw of the Articles
of Confederation was that Congress had absolutely
no power to tax, none whatsoever. None. They
could only request money from the states. And
when I was reading this Parthasaurus material,
I couldn't help but think about living in a chaotic
shared house. Oh, this should be good. Like,
imagine living with 12 other roommates and buying
groceries and paying the rent. It's completely
voluntary. Good luck with that. Right. You just
put a jar on the kitchen counter and say, hey,
guys, if you feel like it, chip in for the electricity
bill. Eventually, the power gets shut off, and
everyone is going to starve. It's a really fun
analogy, but to make it historically accurate,
you have to imagine those roommates are also
heavily armed. Oh, right. Hold deep religious
prejudices against one another and have conflicting
legal claims to the backyard. Fair point. So
it's even worse. Much worse. The reality was
grim. The states rarely paid their requests in
full. Often they paid nothing at all. So Congress,
desperate to fund the Continental Army, just
started printing paper money, which as anyone
who has studied even basic economics knows leads
to massive runaway inflation. Unbelievable inflation.
The currency depreciated so completely that it
birthed the phrase, not worth a continental.
Wow. Imagine you're a farmer in 1779 trying to
sell your wheat to the army. The quartermaster
pays you in continental paper money, but by the
time you walk home, that paper has lost half
its purchasing power. Geez. By the late 1770s,
George Washington was writing to the president
of the Continental Congress, John Jay, stating
that it took a wagonload of money just to buy
a wagon load of provision. And the human cost
of that is just heartbreaking. I mean, the Continental
Army nearly starved to death during multiple
winters. Congress had promised these soldiers
pensions, like half pay for life, but they had
absolutely no mechanism to actually fund those
obligations. They were writing checks that their
structural bank account just couldn't cash. And
the military leaders were acutely aware of how
dangerous this was. General Henry Knox, he was
a brilliant artillery commander. He complained
bitterly about the situation. He said the army
hated being treated like 13 armies. They wanted
to be one continental body. Exactly. Knox actually
used to toast to a hoop to the barrel. A hoop
to the barrel. Yeah. Meaning they desperately
needed a strong, binding union to hold all the
individual wooden staves of the states together.
otherwise the barrel just falls apart under pressure.
Well the barrel definitely started falling apart.
Yeah. Because it wasn't just grumbling, right?
You had unpaid Pennsylvania veterans who actually
mutinied. They did. They marched on Philadelphia
and literally forced the Continental Congress
to flee the city. The national government had
to run away from its own unpaid army. It's astonishing.
Which brings up a really fascinating psychological
shift. this trauma of a weak government. You
know, the starving troops, the begging for funds,
the mutinies. It fundamentally changed the worldview
of the military leadership. It nationalized them.
Exactly. It nationalized them. It explains exactly
why generals like George Washington and Henry
Knox, who suffered through the absolute worst
of the article's inefficiencies, later became
the fiercest advocates for a strong, muscular
constitution in 1787. Because they lived it.
Their wartime experience proved to them that
without a strong central authority, the nation
couldn't survive. OK, so you've got government
that can't tax, can't pay its soldiers, and has
to literally flee its own capital. You would
think a system this broken would be completely
useless, but here's where it gets really interesting.
Oh yes. Despite all of this, despite massive
embarrassments on the world stage, this paralyzed
Congress managed to pull off something incredibly
forward thinking right at home. The great paradox
of the Confederation period. It was simultaneously
a disaster and highly visionary. Yeah. Let's
look at the disasters first because I was reading
this section on their foreign policy and I honestly
couldn't believe it. Am I reading this right?
The 1783 Treaty of Paris, the actual treaty that
formally ended the Revolutionary War, languished
for months. because Congress couldn't even get
enough delegates to show up to form a quorum
to ratify it. That is entirely accurate. A quorum
is the minimum number of members required to
be present to make proceedings valid. Under the
Articles, they needed nine states present to
ratify a treaty. And they couldn't get them.
They literally couldn't get enough guys in a
room to officially end the war with Great Britain.
That's so embarrassing. And the embarrassments
continued. Thomas Jefferson was sounding the
alarm about the Barbary Pirates American ships
in the Mediterranean. Right, a huge crisis. He
warned that European powers wouldn't respect
them because the Confederacy needs to show its
teeth. But they had no Navy and no money to build
one. And furthermore, because the national government
was so weak, they couldn't even force the British
to evacuate their military forts on the American
frontier, which the British had explicitly promised
to do in the peace treaty. The British basically
looked at the US government and said, who's going
to make us leave? You. much they were an international
laughingstock. Right. So keeping all that complete
paralysis in mind, how does this exact same government
manage to fundamentally shape the map of America
and, incredibly, to ban slavery in a massive
chunk of the country. What's fascinating here
is that we have to look at the underlying mechanics.
Remember how we said Congress had no power to
tax? Yeah, the voluntary roommate jar. Exactly.
That meant they had no revenue stream to pay
off their massive war debts. But what did they
have? They had land. Ah. the western lands that
Maryland forced Virginia to give up. Bingo. The
states had voluntarily given up their overlapping,
conflicting claims to the territories west of
the Appalachian Mountains. Selling that land
was literally the national government's only
mechanism to generate revenue. They couldn't
tax your income, but they could sell you a farm
in Ohio. But to sell it, they had to organize
it. Makes sense. This led to two monumental pieces
of legislation. First, the Land Ordinance of
1785. This created the grid system, the townships,
the square mile sections that organized the land
for sale. Think about that the next time you
are flying over the American Midwest. Like you
look down out of the airplane window and see
those perfectly square patches of farmland stretching
for thousands of miles. Yeah. You're looking
at the direct physical legacy of the Articles
of Confederation. They had to draw those squares
so they could sell them to pay the army. It's
a perfect example of necessity driving innovation.
And then came the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
This organized the Northwest Territory, what
would eventually become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Wisconsin. A huge amount of land.
Massive. It set up the brilliant protocol for
how a territory becomes a new equal state rather
than just remaining a subordinate colony of the
original 13. But most remarkably, it abolished
slavery in these new territories. It declared
that new states admitted from this region would
never be slave states. It's wild to hold those
two thoughts in your head at the same time. Like
the same government that couldn't collect a voluntary
tax to keep its own lights on. was setting a
precedent that the national government would
expand westward, not the individual states. Right.
And they were drawing a line in the sand on slavery
that would basically set the stage for the next
80 years of American history. It was unquestionably
their greatest triumph. But unfortunately, drawing
the map of the future wasn't enough to save the
system from its own structural rot. The land
sales were just too slow to fix the immediate
economic crisis. It was too little, too late.
Exactly. The breaking point finally arrived,
forcing a radical and frankly highly controversial
pivot. Let's talk about the collapse because
this is where the story turns into a thriller.
The economic anxiety among the political elite
was peaking. Our sources highlight Shays' rebellion
in 1786 in western Massachusetts. Yes. Now it's
easy to just call this, you know, an uprising
of debt -ridden farmers shutting down the courts.
But the underlying mechanism here is tragically
ironic. The bitter irony is what makes it so
important. These farmers in Massachusetts, led
by Daniel Shays, were largely revolutionary war
veterans. Right. They were the exact same soldiers
who hadn't been paid by the weak Continental
Congress because Congress couldn't tax. Yep.
So they go home, broke, and then the state government
of Massachusetts decides to aggressively tax
them to pay off the state's own war debts. It's
brutal. And Massachusetts demands payment in
hard currency, gold and silver, which didn't
even exist because of the massive paper money
inflation we talked about earlier. It was a vicious,
inescapable cycle. The state was seizing their
farms and throwing these veterans into debtor's
prison for failing to pay taxes with money that
the national government had failed to pay them
in the first place. That's insane. And when Shays
and his men took up arms and shut down the courts
to stop the foreclosures, the national government
was completely powerless to intervene. They had
no standing army to send. Massachusetts had to
raise a private militia funded by wealthy Boston
merchants just to crush the rebellion. Which
absolutely the political elite across all the
states. I mean, state government suddenly seemed
entirely incapable of maintaining basic order.
Which gave Alexander Hamilton the opening he
needed. Ah. Hamilton. Yeah. Hamilton was a fierce
nationalist. He had served as Washington's top
aide and saw the dysfunction firsthand. He spearheaded
the Annapolis Convention in 1786, sensibly to
discuss trade barriers between the states. But
only five states bothered to send delegates,
right? Right. It was a flop. But Hamilton used
that failure to issue a sweeping call for a much
larger convention to be held in Philadelphia
the following year in 1787. And here is the absolute
crux of the drama. I want to slow down here because
this is the moment everything changes. The Confederation
Congress officially endorsed this Philadelphia
Convention, but they gave it a very specific,
limited mandate. Extremely limited. The delegates
were authorized for the sole and express purpose
of revising the Articles of Confederation. Revising.
That was the legal boundary they were given,
but they didn't revise them. They closed the
doors of Independence Hall. They swore themselves
to absolute secrecy windows nailed shut in the
sweltering summer heat. Miserable. And over the
course of the summer, they threw the Articles
of Confederation entirely in the trash. They
wrote a completely new constitution that created
a vastly more powerful central government, a
president, federal courts, the power to tax,
the power to regulate commerce. So what does
this all mean? I really have to push back here
on the mythology of the founding fathers. Did
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton basically
stage a quiet legal coup d 'etat? Well, look
at the actual text of the Articles of Confederation
article to 13. It explicitly states that any
alteration to the document required the unanimous
consent of all 13 state legislatures. It was
a perpetual, unbreakable contract. That is what
it said. But then they write this new document.
And Article 7 of their new constitution says
it only needs nine states to ratify it to go
into effect. They broke their own unbreakable
contract to save the country. That tension is
exactly what historians and legal scholars have
debated for centuries. Was it an illegal coup?
Yeah. Let's synthesize the debate from the sources.
Some modern legal scholars, like Francisco Forrest
Martin, argue that the Articles of Confederation
had already lost their binding legal force before
the Philadelphia Convention even started. Wait.
How does a constitutional document just lose
its force? Through the concept of material breach
in contract law, the states themselves had been
constantly violating the rules of the Articles
for years, making their own unauthorized trade
deals flat out ignoring funding requests, failing
to send delegates. In international or contract
law, if multiple parties flagrantly violate the
core tenets of a contract, the other parties
aren't necessarily bound by its rules anymore.
The contract is voided by behavior. Okay so the
argument is the contract was already void because
literally everyone was ignoring it. Right. What's
the other perspective? The other perspective
is the pragmatic one offered by James Madison
himself at the time. In Federalist number 40
Madison essentially just waves the legal objection
away. Really? He just ignores it? Pretty much.
He argues that the survival and happiness of
the American people were vastly more important
than adhering strictly to a flawed paralyzing
document. He basically tells the public the issue
of whether we exceeded our authority is moot.
The system is broken beyond repair. The people
need a government that works. So let's move on
and vote on this new framework. It's the ultimate
example of better to ask forgiveness than permission,
but done on a national constitutional scale.
Precisely. And it worked. By September 1788,
the Confederation Congress essentially voted
itself out of existence, acknowledging that the
new constitution had received enough ratifications
to take over. Wow. The transition was completely
peaceful, which is historically rare, but it
was absolutely a fundamental, radical break from
the legal framework that had preceded it. It
is such an incredible journey. We started with
this deeply idealistic league of friendship,
this voluntary roommate agreement built on the
profound fear of central power. Yeah. And over
the course of less than a decade, the harsh,
pragmatic reality of fighting a war, managing
an economy and preventing localized rebellions
forced them to realize that a functioning society
requires a government with the actual coercive
power to govern. It's the ultimate lesson in
the pendulum swing of power. If you push too
far toward pure decentralization, you get chaos,
rampant inflation and a government that has to
flee its own unpaid soldiers. But if you push
too far toward centralization, you risk tyranny.
Exactly. The constitution they eventually wrote
in Philadelphia was an attempt to find the middle
ground, a federal system that shared power between
the national center and the local states. And
that balance between local autonomy and central
authority. It isn't just a dusty history lesson.
It is the exact same tension you see us still
navigating. today. Every single day. Every time
we debate states' rights versus federal mandates,
whether that's regarding health care, environmental
regulations, or education, we're having the exact
same argument they were having in 1787. We are
still trying to figure out how many hoops we
need to keep the barrel together without crushing
the staves. Perfectly said. Now, to wrap up this
deep dive, we want to leave you with a fascinating
what -if that we found buried in the source text.
Something for you to ponder long after you finish
listening. This is a wild one. It really is.
In the original Articles of Confederation, Article
11 contained a very special clause. It provided
a blanket, automatic pre -approval, for the province
of Quebec, essentially Canada, to join the United
States if it wanted to. You know, debate needed,
no vote required. The door was just wide open.
Obviously, Canada never took them up on the offer.
But imagine for a second, think about how completely
paralyzed and intentionally weak this league
of friendship was just trying to manage the eastern
seaboard of the current U .S. Barely managing.
Right. Now imagine them trying to govern a massive
decentralized voluntary alliance that stretched
all the way through the frozen expanses of the
Great White North. The gridlock wouldn't have
just been regional. It would have been truly
continental. It makes you wonder how quickly
that operating system would have crashed and
what entirely different country might have emerged
from the wreckage. Thank you for taking this
deep dive with us. Keep questioning the systems
around you and we'll catch you next time.