In the Declaration of Independence, the enacting and constituent party dispensing and delegating sovereign power is the whole people of the United Colonies.  The recipient party, invested with power, is the United Colonies, declared United States.

In the articles of confederation, this order of agency is inverted.  Each State is the constituent and enacting party, and the United States in Congress assembled the recipient of delegated power—­and that power delegated with such a penurious and carking hand that it had more the aspect of a revocation of the Declaration of Independence than an instrument to carry it into effect.

None of these indispensably necessary powers were ever conferred by the State legislatures upon the Congress of the federation; and well was it that they never were.  The system itself was radically defective.  Its incurable disease was an apostasy from the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  A substitution of separate State sovereignties, in the place of the constituent sovereignty of the people, was the basis of the Confederate Union.

In the Congress of the confederation, the master minds of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were constantly engaged through the closing years of the Revolutionary War and those of peace which immediately succeeded.  That of John Jay was associated with them shortly after the peace, in the capacity of secretary to the Congress for foreign affairs.  The incompetency of the articles of confederation for the management of the affairs of the Union at home and abroad was demonstrated to them by the painful and mortifying experience of every day.  Washington, though in retirement, was brooding over the cruel injustice suffered by his associates in arms, the warriors of the Revolution; over the prostration of the public credit and the faith of the nation, in the neglect to provide for the payment even of the interest upon the public debt; over the disappointed hopes of the friends of freedom; in the language of the address from Congress to the States of the eighteenth of April, 1783 —­“the pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature.”

At his residence at Mount Vernon, in March 1785, the first idea was started of a revisal of the articles of confederation, by an organization, of means differing from that of a compact between the State legislatures and their own delegates in Congress.  A convention of delegates from the State legislatures, independent of the Congress itself, was the expedient which presented itself for effecting the purpose, and an augmentation of the powers of Congress for the regulation of commerce, as the object for which this assembly was to be convened.  In January 1786 the proposal was made and adopted in the legislature of Virginia, and communicated to the other State legislatures.

The convention was held at Annapolis, in September of that year.  It was attended by delegates from only five of the central States, who, on comparing their restricted powers with the glaring and universally acknowledged defects of the confederation reported only a recommendation for the assemblage of another convention of delegates to meet at Philadelphia, in May 1787, from all the States, and with enlarged powers.