Nevertheless, necessity compelled them to consider some sort of federation.  The second Continental Congress had hardly opened its work before the most sagacious leaders began to urge the desirability of a permanent connection.  As early as July, 1775, Congress resolved to go into a committee of the whole on the state of the union, and Franklin, undaunted by the fate of his Albany plan of twenty years before, again presented a draft of a constitution.  Long and desultory debates followed and it was not until late in 1777 that Congress presented to the states the Articles of Confederation.  Provincial jealousies delayed ratification, and it was the spring of 1781, a few months before the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, when Maryland, the last of the states, approved the Articles.  This plan of union, though it was all that could be wrung from the reluctant states, provided for neither a chief executive nor a system of federal courts.  It created simply a Congress of delegates in which each state had an equal voice and gave it the right to call upon the state legislatures for the sinews of government—­money and soldiers.

=The Application of Tests of Allegiance.=—­As the successive steps were taken in the direction of independent government, the patriots devised and applied tests designed to discover who were for and who were against the new nation in the process of making.  When the first Continental Congress agreed not to allow the importation of British goods, it provided for the creation of local committees to enforce the rules.  Such agencies were duly formed by the choice of men favoring the scheme, all opponents being excluded from the elections.  Before these bodies those who persisted in buying British goods were summoned and warned or punished according to circumstances.  As soon as the new state constitutions were put into effect, local committees set to work in the same way to ferret out all who were not outspoken in their support of the new order of things.

[Illustration:  MOBBING THE TORIES]

These patriot agencies, bearing different names in different sections, were sometimes ruthless in their methods.  They called upon all men to sign the test of loyalty, frequently known as the “association test.”  Those who refused were promptly branded as outlaws, while some of the more dangerous were thrown into jail.  The prison camp in Connecticut at one time held the former governor of New Jersey and the mayor of New York.  Thousands were black-listed and subjected to espionage.  The black-list of Pennsylvania contained the names of nearly five hundred persons of prominence who were under suspicion.  Loyalists or Tories who were bold enough to speak and write against the Revolution were suppressed and their pamphlets burned.  In many places, particularly in the North, the property of the loyalists was confiscated and the proceeds applied to the cause of the Revolution.