Why the Articles of Confederation will not save us from liberalism

Why the Articles of Confederation will not save us from liberalism

In June 1788 Patrick Henry asked who had authorized the framers to write “We, the People” instead of “We, the States.” His case for the Articles of Confederation still has defenders, and we hear it in a stronger form, that a return to the Articles would save the country. This paper argues that the Articles stood on the same ground the Constitution stands on. The states that formed the league had already grounded their governments in the people, the league added no other source of authority, and the framers of 1787 ended it by appealing to the premise it shared. A return to 1781 would restore the premise that produced 1787.

The claim

When Virginia’s convention met in June 1788 to decide on the Constitution, Patrick Henry opened his attack on a single phrase. He asked “who authorised them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of a confederation.” The next day he said the whole contest turned “on that poor little thing—the expression, We, the people, instead of the States of America.” He defended the government he meant to keep: “Under this same despised Government, we commanded the respect of all Europe.” Virginia ratified anyway, and the phrase Henry hated still opens the Constitution.

Henry’s case has living defenders. Sheldon Richman’s America’s Counter-Revolution (2016) calls the Constitution “a counter-revolution, in many ways a reversal of the radical achievement represented by America’s break with the British empire.” William J. Watkins Jr. subtitled his book on the period Recovering the Anti-Federalist Values of America’s First Constitution (2016). Alexander Salter, writing in Front Porch Republic on the anniversary of the Articles in 2020, concluded that “to revitalize American public life, we should revisit this period in our nation’s history and pay careful attention to its lessons.” The case has a Christian form as well. Gary North called the Constitution the product of a coup and wrote that with its ratification “a Christian nation became, judicially and covenantally, a politically pluralist nation.”

None of the passages quoted here promises that a return to the Articles would save the country, and North denies it. We hear the promise anyway, and it rests on their claim that the Articles were the better founding.

The claim measures the wrong thing. The Constitution gave the central government powers the Articles withheld, and that is a question about how much a government controls. Our compass asks a different question, where a government’s authority comes from, and on that question the Articles and the Constitution give the same answer. The answer is liberal. We use the word in its original sense, not the party label: the premise that men are born free and equal, so that the right to rule comes from the people and government exists first to protect what each of them owns (What Is Liberalism?). Richman counts the Articles’ liberalism in their favor. “Dispersed power is a pillar of liberalism,” he writes, and after listing what decentralization brings, “The Articles of Confederation, though hardly perfect, embraced those principles.” If the Articles rest on the liberal premise, going back to them changes how much the government does and leaves what it is untouched. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

What the Articles say

Congress agreed to the Articles of Confederation on 15 November 1777, and they took force on 1 March 1781, when Maryland ratified. Their second article sets the terms for everything after it: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” The third names the relation the states entered, “a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare.”

Locke stated the premise in one sentence about men: “Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent” (§95). The Articles say the same of states. Each keeps its freedom and independence. Each is equal, with one vote in Congress whatever its size (Art. V). None is bound by a change it has not accepted, since no article may be altered unless the change is “confirmed by the legislatures of every state” (Art. XIII). Any league of sovereigns has that shape, and a league of Christian kings would have it too. What made this league liberal was what its members were, and section 03 takes that up.

The machinery follows the premise. A state could recall its delegates “at any time within the year” (Art. V), so the men in Congress held their seats at the pleasure of the states that sent them. No one could serve as president of Congress “more than one year in any term of three years” (Art. IX), so the union’s presiding officer never stayed long enough to become its head. Congress could fix each state’s share of the common expenses and could not collect it, because the taxes were “laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of the several states” (Art. VIII). A state was bound by the votes of the others only because it had first agreed to the Articles. Locke’s men are bound the same way. Once they consent to make one body politic, it is one “wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest” (§95).

In one clause the Articles reached inside the states. Neither Congress nor any single state could create a hereditary rank: “nor shall the united states, in congress assembled, or any of them, grant any title of nobility” (Art. VI). The league that left each state free in nearly everything bound all of them to this much of the equality premise.

The ratification clause shows how the authors divided the work. It credits “the Great Governor of the World” with having inclined “the hearts of the legislatures” to approve the Articles, and the delegates then ratify them “by virtue of the power and authority to us given for that purpose” and “in the name and in behalf of our respective constituents.” God inclined the legislatures’ hearts. The constituents gave the power. The Declaration had divided the work the same way, with men “endowed by their Creator” with rights and governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The Articles mention God more warmly than the Constitution does, and like the Constitution they place the power with the governed.

Who the states were

A league is what its members are, and the members had described themselves before the league existed. Between 1776 and 1780 every state but Connecticut and Rhode Island, which kept their colonial charters, wrote a new constitution. Several opened with a declaration of rights that states the premise outright. Virginia’s came first, adopted on 12 June 1776: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent,” and “That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them” (§§1–2). Pennsylvania’s followed in September: “That all men are born equally free and independent,” and “all power being originally inherent in, and consequently derived from, the people” (Arts. I, IV). Massachusetts in 1780 put the premise in the words we use for the nut of liberalism: “All men are born free and equal” (Art. I).

States without a declaration of rights said the same in their preambles and opening articles. Georgia’s constitution speaks for “the representatives of the people, from whom all power originates.” New York’s convention declared “that no authority shall … be exercised over the people or members of this State but such as shall be derived from and granted by them” (Art. I). New Jersey’s held that even the king’s authority had been “by compact, derived from the people, and held of them.”

Article II says each state “retains its sovereignty.” Massachusetts said whose sovereignty it was, in words that track Article II: “The people of this Commonwealth have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and independent state; and do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not, or may not hereafter, be by them expressly delegated to the United States of America, in Congress assembled” (Art. IV). Pennsylvania said the same: “the people of this State have the sole, exclusive and inherent right of governing and regulating the internal police of the same” (Art. III). The sovereignty the Articles reserved to the states belonged, by the states’ own account, to their peoples.

Massachusetts also said plainly what a state is. Its preamble calls the body politic “a voluntary association of individuals” and “a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people.” It enacts itself in a sentence the Constitution would echo seven years later: “We, therefore, the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the Great Legislator of the Universe … DO agree upon, ordain and establish” this constitution. It thanks God and ordains in its own name. And it denies the order in which a son inherits his father’s charge. No title to public privilege, it says, is “hereditary” or “transmissible to children.”

This answers Henry’s question. “We, the States” was never an alternative to “We, the People,” because the states that explained their sovereignty located it in their people. Madison made the point while defending the Constitution: ratification would come “from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves” (Federalist 39). Virginia’s own convention, with Henry in the room, ratified with the declaration that “the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” Henry and Madison disagreed about which people should be sovereign. Neither doubted that the people were.

Where it came from

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. The Articles came from the same motion as independence. On 7 June 1776 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States,” that alliances be sought abroad, and “That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.” By 12 June Congress had appointed three committees, one to draft the Declaration and one to settle the form of the confederation, and John Dickinson became the principal writer of the Articles. Independence and union were proposed in one motion, by one Congress, on one premise.

Hamilton named the confederation’s deepest flaw in Federalist 22, and it was a shortage of popular consent: “It has not a little contributed to the infirmities of the existing federal system, that it never had a ratification by the PEOPLE.” The Articles rested “on no better foundation than the consent of the several legislatures.” His remedy was the same premise with the middleman removed: “The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” The Federalists did not break with the premise of 1776. They faulted the Articles for holding it at one remove.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth. The case for the Articles is built from three, and each is real.

Local rule. God governs men through near rulers as well as distant ones. On Jethro’s counsel Moses “chose out able men out of all Israel, and he made them captains of thousands and captains of hundreds” (Exod. 18:25). When the tribes picked their own men, Moses still set them in office: “Take to yourselves wise and understanding and prudent men for your tribes, and I will set your leaders over you” (Deut. 1:13). Peter tells Christians to submit to governors “as unto them that are sent by him,” the king (1 Pet. 2:14). In every one of these texts the near ruler is real, and his office comes down to him from above. The Articles kept the nearness and reversed the direction. Congress was sent by the states, recalled by them at will, and held only what they “expressly delegated.”

Limits on rulers. Scripture limits the ruler, and it limits him with God’s law. Israel’s king was to write out the law and “read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord thy God … that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren” (Deut. 17:19–20). The Articles limited Congress with the powers the states held back, every power “not by this confederation expressly delegated” (Art. II). The Tenth Amendment carried the rule into the Constitution without the word “expressly,” reserving undelegated powers “to the States respectively, or to the people.” A limit set by the owner of a power can be lifted by the owner. A limit set by God cannot be lifted by anyone.

Union. Scripture binds a people together under God. The tribes of Israel were “the twelve sons of Jacob,” blessed by one father (Gen. 49:28), and when their elders made a covenant with David at Hebron they made it “before the Lord” (2 Kingdoms 5:3 [2 Sam. 5:3]), with a king God had already chosen. A covenant sworn before God binds those who come after. When the Gibeonites deceived Israel, “the princes of the congregation sware to them” (Josh. 9:15), and the oath still bound Israel in the days of David (2 Kingdoms 21:1–2 [2 Sam. 21:1–2]). The Articles invoked “the Great Governor of the World” and called the union perpetual. The states that ratified them had also declared a right no pledge could bind. Virginia called it an “indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish” any government that failed its ends (§3), Pennsylvania and Massachusetts said the same, and the Declaration of all thirteen called it “the Right of the People.” The Articles carried a solemn pledge and the word perpetual, and their parties kept the right to undo both.

Where it leads

Locke had a name for the condition the Articles created. Every independent government on earth, he wrote, stands in the state of nature toward the others, and a league does not change that: “I have named all governors of independent communities, whether they are, or are not, in league with others: for it is not every compact that puts an end to the state of nature between men, but only this one of agreeing together mutually to enter into one community, and make one body politic” (§14). By Locke’s own definition, thirteen sovereign states in a league of friendship were thirteen men in the state of nature with a treaty between them.

Locke also said what men in that state do next. They lack “an established, settled, known law,” “a known and indifferent judge,” and “power to back and support the sentence” (§§124–126), so that “mankind, notwithstanding all the privileges of the state of nature, being but in an ill condition, while they remain in it, are quickly driven into society” (§127). The Federalists made that argument about the states. In April 1787 Madison listed the vices of the confederacy, and the seventh was “want of sanction to the laws, and of coercion in the Government of the Confederacy.” Without them, he wrote, the federal system “is in fact nothing more than a treaty of amity of commerce and of alliance, between so many independent and Sovereign States.” Hamilton named its “great and radical vice” as “LEGISLATION for STATES or GOVERNMENTS, in their CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES” (Federalist 15). They described Locke’s state of nature and proposed Locke’s way out of it.

The way out broke the Articles’ own rule. Article XIII forbade any alteration not “confirmed by the legislatures of every state,” and the Constitution’s seventh article made “the Ratification of the Conventions of nine States” sufficient. Madison defended the break twice, and both times he appealed to the premise beneath the Articles. In Federalist 40 he invoked “the transcendent and precious right of the people to ‘abolish or alter their governments as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness,’” citing the Declaration, and he reminded his readers that “it was by this irregular and assumed privilege of proposing to the people plans for their safety and happiness, that the States were first united.” In Federalist 43 he asked “On what principle the Confederation, which stands in the solemn form of a compact among the States, can be superseded without the unanimous consent of the parties to it?” His first answer appealed to “the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed,” the law the Declaration had invoked. His second was the law of treaties.

The Articles were not overthrown by men who had abandoned 1776. They were overthrown by men quoting it. On Madison’s rule a compact of free and equal parties offers two remedies when it disappoints them: write a new compact, or walk away from the old one. The framers of 1787 took the first. In December 1860 South Carolina’s convention took the second. Its declaration quoted Article II of the Articles, that “each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,” and appealed to “the law of compact”: “the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other.” The failure it charged, first and at length, was the refusal of “fourteen of the States” to return fugitive slaves. It was the rule Madison had stated in Federalist 43, turned on the union Madison built and spent in the defense of slavery.

In March 1861 Lincoln answered from the same document. The faith of the states, he said, had been “expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation.” Each side quoted the half of the Articles it needed. The Articles had promised perpetuity to parties that kept the right to abolish any government that failed them, and in 1861 war settled the contradiction.

What going back would restore

Suppose the Articles were restored tomorrow. Every power not expressly delegated would return to the states, and each state would hold it on the terms of its own constitution. Michigan’s opens, “We, the people of the State of Michigan, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of freedom … do ordain and establish this constitution,” and its first section reads, “All political power is inherent in the people” (Art. I, §1). The authority sent home to Lansing would be claimed as the people’s, because the people are the only source Michigan’s constitution names.

God ordains every power that is, whatever the power claims about itself (Rom. 13:1). The claim still decides what a government believes it may grant and take back, and we have already watched Michigan answer a question sent back to it. In June 2022 the Supreme Court overruled Roe and returned the power over abortion “to the people and their elected representatives,” adding in Justice Scalia’s words that such questions are settled “by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting” (Dobbs). That November Michigan’s voters approved a citizens’ initiative that wrote a new section into their Declaration of Rights: “Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” a right that includes “abortion care” (Art. I, §28). Sending the question to the states sent it to a sovereign people, and the sovereign people answered. A restored confederation would send nearly every question the same way.

Massachusetts shows the same thing in the other direction. Its constitution of 1780 required public support of “public protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality,” and it grounded the requirement in a grant: “the people of this Commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require” it (Art. III). In 1833 the state’s voters ratified an amendment that replaced the article (Amendments, Art. XI). What the people had granted, the people withdrew, by the right they had declared “indefeasible” (Art. VII). A Christian establishment that rests on the people’s will lasts as long as the people’s will does.

A smaller sovereign is still a sovereign people. The Articles would change the size of the body that rules and leave untouched its claim to rule by its own authority. They are not the old paths. They are the same road, a few miles back toward where it began.

What we do instead

If the Articles will not save us, neither will a stronger charter or a weaker one. The answer that has to change is the one the Articles and the Constitution share, that authority comes from the people.

The old paths begin with the authority no man can claim to have created, a father’s. A man who wants authority recovered in the nation recovers it first where God placed it first. He rules his house as a son under the Father “of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:15), and he answers for how he rules it. He submits to the elders of his church, who “watch for your souls, as they that must give account” (Heb. 13:17). He learns the names of the lesser magistrates set over him, and he tells them what God requires, as Nathan told David, “Thou art the man” (2 Kingdoms 12:7 [2 Sam. 12:7]). Our companion paper Faithful in a Very Little sets out those duties in full.

He honors the rulers he has and prays “For kings, and for all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:2). And he stops looking for rescue in a charter. “Trust not in princes, nor in the children of men, in whom there is no safety” (Ps. 145:3 [146:3]). A charter is the children of men, put in writing.

Eight objections

“A league is only a treaty between sovereigns, and Scripture honors treaties.” This is the strongest objection. Solomon and Hiram “made a covenant between them” (3 Kingdoms 5:26 [1 Kings 5:12]), and a league among Christian kings who rule by God’s grant would carry none of the premise this paper examines. We grant it. What made this league liberal was its parties. Each state that explained its sovereignty located it in its people, and the Articles added no other source of authority. The objection’s best form follows from that: restore the Articles and rebuild the states on authority received from God. Under that plan the Articles would do no harm, and they would do no saving either. The change of premise in the states would do the saving, and that change is what this paper argues for.

“The Articles name God, and the Constitution does not.” True, and it settles nothing about authority. The ratification clause credits “the Great Governor of the World,” and the Constitution names the Lord only in its date, “the Year of our Lord.” But the sentence that names God in the Articles places the authority elsewhere, since the delegates ratify “by virtue of the power and authority to us given” by their constituents. To thank God for inclining hearts is not to receive authority from him. Gary North, who called 1787 a coup, judged that the Articles “did not explicitly deny that the God of the Bible is Lord over all governments, nor did they affirm it.” Michigan’s constitution, quoted in section 07, thanks God and names the people in its first two sentences. A charter can name God in every article and still answer the question of authority the way Locke did.

“The states had Christian oaths and established churches.” Many did, and they were real goods. North located the break of 1787 in the Constitution’s ban on religious tests for federal office, but the Articles had no test for Congress either. The tests belonged to the states, and Massachusetts shows what became of one. Its constitution required the governor and legislators to declare, “I believe the christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth” (Frame of Government, ch. VI, art. I), and it taxed for “public protestant teachers.” The same constitution declared “All power residing originally in the people” (Art. V). Massachusetts later dropped the officers’ declaration (Amendments, Arts. VI–VII), and in 1833 its voters ended the establishment (section 07). A Christian test that rests on a sovereign people is a test the sovereign people can repeal. North still refused the Articles as the remedy. “We cannot expect to go back to the Articles of Confederation,” he wrote, and he called the document “a halfway covenant.”

“The Constitution was an unlawful coup, and Christians should hold to the last lawful order.” The convention was called “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation,” and it wrote a new constitution with a new rule of ratification. Madison did not deny the irregularity. He justified it by the right to alter or abolish. The objection proves too much. The Articles existed only because thirteen colonies broke with the order over them by appeal to that same right, and Madison said as much, that “the States were first united” by the same “irregular and assumed privilege.” Whoever condemns 1787 as rebellion against a lawful compact has to condemn 1776 as rebellion against a lawful king, and the Articles with it. Paul settles what a Christian owes now: “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1), and the power that is today is the government of the Constitution, not the Confederation Congress.

“The Articles governed communities, not individuals.” Hamilton made the observation, and it is accurate. The Articles legislated for states “in their CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES,” and the Constitution reaches each citizen directly. But the corporate bodies were compacts of individuals. Massachusetts called itself “a voluntary association of individuals,” and Virginia began from men “by nature equally free and independent.” The Articles treated each state as an individual, with one vote and one veto apiece, and the states described themselves as made of individuals. That is individualism twice over, not a shelter from it.

“Historians call the founding era republican, not liberal.” A school of historians that runs from Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic (1969) reads the Revolution through classical republicanism, with its concern for civic virtue and its fear of corruption, rather than through Locke. The republican reading changes the account of what a people needs in order to govern itself well. It does not change the account of who governs. Brutus, writing against the Constitution, put the premise plainly: “In every free government, the people must give their assent to the laws by which they are governed. This is the true criterion between a free government and an arbitrary one.” He opposed the Constitution because “a free republic cannot succeed over a country of such immense extent,” which is an argument about size. The republican and liberal readings disagree about the character of the sovereign people. They agree that the people are sovereign.

“Smaller is safer.” Often it is, and Christians have good reasons to prefer near government to distant government. We do not argue against the states or against local office. The lesser magistrate holds a real office, and we ask men to learn theirs by name. But the claim under examination is that the Articles would save us, and a smaller sovereign saves no one from the premise that makes it sovereign. A state statute that protects unborn children is just and Michigan’s Section 28 is not, and both rest on the same claim of authority, the will of a people that keeps the right to change its mind.

“Israel under the judges was a league of tribes without a king.” Judges gives that age its own verdict: “in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own sight” (Judg. 21:25). The tribes were not sovereign parties to a compact. They were brothers, sons of one father (Gen. 49:28), ruled by the God who raised up their judges, and when the men of Israel tried to confer rule by their own act, Gideon refused it: “I will not rule, and my son shall not rule among you; the Lord shall rule over you” (Judg. 8:23). The law had already provided for a king, “the ruler whom the Lord God shall choose” (Deut. 17:15). The Articles reproduced the absence of a king without the God who ruled in his place.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not say the Articles and the Constitution made the same government. They differed in nearly every grant of power. The argument concerns the premise beneath the grants.

It does not deny the Christian features of the founding-era states. The oaths, the establishments, and the Christian men who wrote and ratified the Articles were real. The argument holds that those features stood on a sovereign people, and in Massachusetts they fell to one.

It counsels no resistance, nullification, or secession. Section 06 followed the compact theory to South Carolina in 1860, and we do not follow it there. Christians owe the government they have obedience, taxes, and honor (Rom. 13:7).

It stands or falls on one premise. If the Articles or the states that made them located authority in God rather than in the people, the conclusion fails. A reader who rejects the conclusion should produce the article that does it.

Texts and editions

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844).

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§14, 95, 124–127.

Richard Henry Lee, resolution moved in the Continental Congress, 7 June 1776.

Virginia Declaration of Rights (adopted 12 June 1776), §§1–3.

Constitution of New Jersey (1776), preamble.

Constitution of Pennsylvania (28 September 1776), Declaration of Rights, Arts. I, III–V.

Constitution of Georgia (5 February 1777), preamble. Constitution of New York (20 April 1777), Art. I.

Articles of Confederation (agreed to 15 November 1777, in force 1 March 1781), Arts. II, III, V, VI, VIII, IX, XIII, and the ratification clause.

Constitution of Massachusetts (1780), Preamble, Declaration of Rights, Arts. I, III–VII, and Frame of Government, ch. VI, art. I. Articles of Amendment, Arts. VI–VII, XI (1833).

Declaration of Independence (1776). Constitution of the United States (1787), Preamble, Art. VII. Amendment X (1791).

Resolution of Congress calling the federal convention, 21 February 1787.

James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States” (April 1787), no. 7.

Brutus, No. 1 (18 October 1787).

The Federalist Nos. 15 and 22 (Alexander Hamilton) and Nos. 39, 40, 43 (James Madison) (1787–1788).

Patrick Henry, speeches in the Virginia ratifying convention, 4 and 5 June 1788, in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (1981), 5.16.1–2.

Ratification of the Constitution by the State of Virginia (26 June 1788).

Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union (24 December 1860).

Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (4 March 1861).

Constitution of Michigan (1963), Preamble and Art. I, §§1, 28 (§28 approved by initiative, 8 November 2022).

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969).

Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), 379, 486, 571.

Sheldon Richman, America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited (Ann Arbor: Griffin & Lash, 2016), 1, 55.

William J. Watkins Jr., Crossroads for Liberty: Recovering the Anti-Federalist Values of America’s First Constitution (Oakland: Independent Institute, 2016).

Alexander William Salter, “Liberty or Empire? Reconsidering the Articles of Confederation,” Front Porch Republic, 1 March 2020.