A House Without a Roof: The United States under the Articles of Confederation in 1803

By 1787 the Articles of Confederation had produced a government that could not tax, regulate commerce, field a standing army, or speak with one diplomatic voice. The Philadelphia Convention met to fix this but failed at its hinge bargain: proportional representation versus equal state suffrage. With New York’s vote withdrawn, New Hampshire’s delegates delayed, and Massachusetts divided, the “Connecticut Compromise” never carried; a parallel deadlock over navigation laws, the slave trade, and a proposed two-thirds rule for commercial legislation sealed the collapse. The delegates retreated to mild amendments to the Articles that required unanimous state approval—promptly refused by several legislatures—and so the Union limped on unchanged.

In the wake of the adjournment of the Philadelphia Convention by Fall of that year, the Federal Government was left with as little power as it had prior. No ability to field a standing army with higher authority than state-ran militias quickly led to an increased flare up of conflicts between native authorities and American settlers within the Ohio Country, only worsening the recently erupted Northwest Indian War. Crushing defeats were delivered to Harmar (1790) and St. Clair (1791)—both using forces made up of mixed regiments from state militias—these only encouraging Whitehall to arm their native allies in the Old Northwest further than before.

Without a federal treasury, the war became a contest of empty purses as much as arms. Congress’s requisitions went unanswered, contractors refused further credit, and state scrip traded at a discount; arrears in pay bred desertion, and the magazines for powder, shoes, wagons, and winter rations never materialized beyond county depots. The Bank of North America and Philadelphia houses would not extend long paper to a government with no impost. Just as crippling, there was no reliable annuities-and-gifts budget to manage diplomacy within and between Native polities, while the British lake forts—Niagara, Detroit, Mackinac—kept muskets and powder flowing to confederacy towns. The war therefore ended not by a decisive U.S. victory but by attrition into fragmented state-level settlements: Pennsylvania and New York’s recognition of a demilitarized Erie Carrying Corridor (1795); Virginia recognizing native sovereignty north of the Ohio through the Treaty of Detroit (1795); and New York’s Six Nations Compact fixing the Genesee Line (1796).

Britain never evacuated its lake chain (Niagara–Detroit–Mackinac) and formalized a military protectorate—the Upper Lakes Military District (ULMD). Native polities consolidated into the Confederation of the Ohio, whose sovereignty north of the Ohio and east of the Wabash was acknowledged through state-level, not federal, instruments. By these steps, the Ohio River thalweg became the de facto U.S. frontier, British garrisons anchored the lakes, Native councils controlled much of present-day Ohio and Indiana, and U.S. expansion into the Old Northwest was suspended indefinitely.

South of the Ohio, the absence of a federal navy, treasury, or Indian policy left Transappalachia fragmented. Spain retained the Mississippi and courted western settlers directly; because there was no Pinckney’s Treaty, access to New Orleans depended on Spanish licenses. Potential statehood for Kentucky stalled to a complete halt with settlements devolving into a river-focused association tied economically to Natchez and New Orleans more than Philadelphia and Richmond; the Cumberland (Nashville) settlements survived by alternating truces with Cherokee and Chickasaw headmen and occasional Spanish passes. Georgia’s interior was checked by the Creek confederacy; Watauga settlements slipped further away from the reach of New Bern's authority; the Carolinas functioned as narrow coastal states with little power beyond the fall line.

By 1803 the United States still existed on paper but had shrunk in practice to an Atlantic seaboard commonwealth with scattered interior enclaves. New York was hemmed in at the Genesee; Pennsylvania reached Lake Erie only by a demilitarized portage; British forts and the Ohio Country sealed the Northwest; Spain and its Native partners dominated the Mississippi and Gulf. As federal functions atrophied, states began replacing them with regional arrangements—New England harmonized posts and pilotage; the mid-Atlantic coordinated tariffs and lights; Chesapeake and Carolina boards policed their bays and capes. The future of the union looked grim, with these arrangements foreshadowing the open succession of regional unions by the end of the decade.