olinas,
Clinton sent a force under Arnold to Virginia, which marched unopposed
through the seaboard counties of that State in the winter of 1781. It
seemed as though the new British policy were on the verge of a great
triumph.

{105}

By this time it was becoming a grave question whether the American
revolution was not going to collapse from sheer weakness. The
confederation, as a general government, seemed to be on the verge of
breaking down. The State governments, although badly hampered wherever
British raids took place, were operating regularly and steadily, but
the only common government continued to be the voluntary Continental
Congress, whose powers were entirely undefined, and rested, in fact, on
sufferance. In 1776 a committee, headed by John Dickinson, drafted
Articles of Confederation which, if adopted promptly, would have
provided a regular form of government; but, although these were
submitted in 1777 for ratification, inter-state jealousy sufficed to
block their acceptance. It was discovered that all those States which,
by their original charters, were given no definite western boundaries,
were disposed to claim an extension of their territory to the
Mississippi River. Virginia, through her general, Clark, actually
occupied part of the region claimed by her, and assumed to grant lands
there. The representatives of Maryland in Congress declared such
inequality a danger to the union, and refused to sign the Articles
unless the land claims west of the mountains were surrendered to the
general government. {106} This determination was formally approved by
the Maryland legislature in February, 1779, and matters remained at a
standstill. At last, in 1780, Congress offered to hold any lands which
might be granted to it, with the pledge to form them into States, and,
following this, New York, and Virginia intimated a willingness to make
the required cessions. Then Maryland yielded and ratified the
Articles, so that they came into operation on March 2, 1781.

The self-styled "United States" had now travelled so far on the road to
bankruptcy that the adoption of the "Articles of Perpetual Union"
seemed scarcely more than an empty form. In the first place, the
federal finances were prostrate. The device of issuing paper money had
proved fatal, for, after a brief period, in 1775, the excessive issues
depreciated in spite of every effort to hinder their decline by
proclamations, price conventions, and po