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 politely, to replace it. Six states had already sent delegates to Philadelphia without waiting for permission. John Jay thought the whole thing legally “questionable.” Madison found Congress “much divided and embarrassed.” And on February 21st, by a vote of eight states to one, the dying government did the strangest thing a government can do — it authorized the meeting that would end it, leashing the delegates to the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation,” even as it named the real goal in the same breath: “a firm national government.” It was a leash that would not hold for a single day. This is the story of how the most useless Congress in American history did one genuinely useful thing at the end — it got out of the way — and of a failed nation that, having watched its every weakness laid bare, refused to give up on self-government, and resolved instead to try again.
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