Sep 17, 2026 · 27 min · 8 segments
This is the finale of A Failed Nation. In February of 1787, the Confederation Congress faced the most awkward decision in its short and unhappy life: whether to bless a convention summoned, however…
In February of 1787, in the city of New York, the Confederation Congress of the United States sat down to consider whether to authorize a meeting that might put it out of existence.
This was the corner into which the whole strange chain of events had driven it.
A dozen men at a failed trade convention in Annapolis had called for a grand convention at Philadelphia to overhaul the government.
Six states, frightened by rebellions and disorder, had already appointed delegates and sent them on their way.
Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia, without waiting for anyone's permission.
And the Congress that now had to respond was a shadow of a body that had once declared independence and directed a war.
On many days, it could barely assemble a quorum.
Delegates drifted in and out, states neglected to send anyone, and the great questions of the day were increasingly decided elsewhere.
It had no money.
No army it could field, no power to make a citizen do a single thing.
It was, by the winter of 1787, a government that governed almost nothing, and this was the body now being asked to authorize its own succession.
It was an awkward position, and a humiliating one, and Congress knew it.
Three roads were open to it, all three led somewhere bad.
To denounce the Philadelphia Convention was to pick a public fight with six states and the most respected men in the country, a fight that a feeble Congress was in no position to win, and would only lose in the most humiliating way exposing its own impotence for all to see.
It could ignore it, to say nothing, to let it proceed unmentioned, was to confess its own irrelevance, to admit that the great questions of the Union were now being decided elsewhere, in rooms Congress did not control and had not been invited to.
And it could bless it to give the convention the stamp of legitimacy its organizers wanted, was to take up its own pen and authorize a gathering that might, before the year was out, sweep the entire Confederation into the dustbin.
Every road led somewhere bad for the Confederation, and the men in that chamber understood exactly what was being asked of them.
They sat in the Congress of the Confederation, the direct descendant of the Continental Congress that had declared independence, the body that had carried the country through the war, whatever its weaknesses now, it was the government of the United States, the only one there was.
And it was being asked to sign, or to refuse to sign, what might well turn out to be its own death warrant, to arrange, with its own hand, the terms of a meeting that could end its existence.
In February of 1787, in the city of New York, the Confederation Congress of the United States sat down to consider whether to authorize a meeting that might put it out of existence.
This was the corner into which the whole strange chain of events had driven it.
A dozen men at a failed trade convention in Annapolis had called for a grand convention at Philadelphia to overhaul the government.
Six states, frightened by rebellions and disorder, had already appointed delegates and sent them on their way.
Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia, without waiting for anyone's permission.
And the Congress that now had to respond was a shadow of a body that had once declared independence and directed a war.
On many days, it could barely assemble a quorum.
Delegates drifted in and out, states neglected to send anyone, and the great questions of the day were increasingly decided elsewhere.
It had no money.
No army it could field, no power to make a citizen do a single thing.
It was, by the winter of 1787, a government that governed almost nothing, and this was the body now being asked to authorize its own succession.
It was an awkward position, and a humiliating one, and Congress knew it.
Three roads were open to it, all three led somewhere bad.
To denounce the Philadelphia Convention was to pick a public fight with six states and the most respected men in the country, a fight that a feeble Congress was in no position to win, and would only lose in the most humiliating way exposing its own impotence for all to see.
It could ignore it, to say nothing, to let it proceed unmentioned, was to confess its own irrelevance, to admit that the great questions of the Union were now being decided elsewhere, in rooms Congress did not control and had not been invited to.
And it could bless it to give the convention the stamp of legitimacy its organizers wanted, was to take up its own pen and authorize a gathering that might, before the year was out, sweep the entire Confederation into the dustbin.
Every road led somewhere bad for the Confederation, and the men in that chamber understood exactly what was being asked of them.
They sat in the Congress of the Confederation, the direct descendant of the Continental Congress that had declared independence, the body that had carried the country through the war, whatever its weaknesses now, it was the government of the United States, the only one there was.
And it was being asked to sign, or to refuse to sign, what might well turn out to be its own death warrant, to arrange, with its own hand, the terms of a meeting that could end its existence.
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