rity. Insensibly the Congress and the
Continental army found themselves dependent upon thirteen sovereign
masters. The feebleness with which the war was supported sometimes
strikes one as incredible; but the amazing difficulty of maintaining an
army of ten thousand troops for the achievement of independence, in the
very colonies which had raised twenty-five thousand for the conquest of
Canada, was due less to the lack of resources, or to indifference to the
result, than to the uncertain authority of Congress, the republican fear
of military power, and the jealous provincialism which had everywhere
been greatly accentuated by the establishment of the new state
constitutions. Washington's army naturally looked with contempt upon a
Government that could not feed or clothe its own soldiers. Congress,
jealous of its authority for the very reason that it had none,
criticized the army in defeat and feared it in victory. The State
Governments, refusing to conform to the recommendations of Congress,
alternately complained of its weakness and denounced it for usurping
unwarranted power. Each State wished to maintain control of its own
troops, and was offended if, in the Continental forces, its many
military experts were not all major-generals. The very colony which gave
little support to the army when war raged in another province, cried
aloud for protection when the enemy crossed its own sacred boundaries;
and, with perhaps one eighth of its proper quota of men at the front,
with its requisitions in taxes unpaid, wished to know whether it was
because of incompetence or timidity that General Washington failed to
win victories.

After all the wonder is rather that Congress accomplished anything than
that it did so little. A Frenchman, asked what he did during the Terror,
replied that he lived. It was no small merit in the Continental Congress
that it held together and maintained even the tradition of union; a
higher merit still that in the midst of war it fashioned a federal
constitution which the thirteen States, more divided by jealousy and
their newly won authority than they were united by a common danger,
could be induced to approve. Yet this task the Congress with difficulty
got accomplished. In 1777, after months of debate, it adopted the
Articles of Confederation. Leaving political sovereignty in the several
states, they provided for a federal legislature with a very limited
authority to make laws, but no federal executive