The Articles of Confederation that Congress submitted to the states did not contain the language found in Article III of its draft. The Burke Amendment had effectively destroyed it. Although Congress sent the Articles to the states for their approval in late 1778, ratification did not occur until 1781. During this intervening period, Americans accepted the Articles in a de facto manner. In terms of the relationships between states and the Confederation, this meant that the impact of the Burke Amendment was immediate. Whereas Burke complained about the back-and-forth of delegates on questions of Congressional power, after the submission of the Articles to the states, Congressmen became more conscious of the limitations “chaulked out” to the Confederation. Some embraced the demarcation, asserting that any Congressional action beyond the limitation of the Articles would turn into a “right to legislate for the whole whenever they see fit.”[i] The Nationalists, who, by 1780, were a more organized and distinct group, viewed the strict limitations imposed by the Burke Amendment as a direct threat to the Revolution’s success.
Beginning in 1780, Nationalists began a sustained campaign to increase the powers of the Confederation. The darkening prospects for victory, which, by 1780, were at their lowest during the entire war, coupled with the increasing financial crisis that brought the Confederation to near insolvency, drove the renewed Nationalist push. While it is undeniable that the exigencies of the war certainly shaped the Nationalists’ political programs and response—nor should one question their sincerity in believing their programs could remedy the situation—the Nationalist political agenda of 1781–1783 reflected the core tenets of their constitutional thinking that first emerged in 1776. In fact, the convergence of their political policies with their constitutional ideas were so intertwined, it becomes difficult to see each element without the other. Undoubtedly, the Nationalists would have had a policy response to the growing problems of the early 1780s, but their underlining constitutionalism explains the obvious nationalist bent of those suggestions. Their policies could only work, they believed, with a national government possessing more sovereign power.
...Morris and the Nationalists realized that to achieve their political and constitutional objectives they would have to combat the Burke Amendment and notions of state sovereignty. At the same time, however, they were more than aware that state sovereignty was a fundamental characteristic of American constitutionalism and a full-out assault upon state sovereignty would be not only imprudent but also counterproductive. If they wanted to fix the immediate political problems while advancing their constitutional aims, Nationalists had to work within the understanding of state sovereignty while trying to persuade and demonstrate the flaws of the Articles and its protection of state sovereignty.
The groundwork for Nationalist assault upon state sovereignty began in 1780–1781, when Alexander Hamilton, recently resigned as General Washington’s aide de camp, penned a long, and probably semi-private, letter to friend James Duane and published a series of six essays titled the “Continentalist.”...
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Originally Posted by Chris
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