ng system of the South. There
were contests over the apportionment of taxes and the quotas of troops
for common defense. To these practical difficulties were added local
pride, the vested rights of state and village politicians in their
provincial dignity, and the scarcity of men with a large outlook upon
the common enterprise.

Nevertheless, necessity compelled them to consider some sort of
federation. The second Continental Congress had hardly opened its work
before the most sagacious leaders began to urge the desirability of a
permanent connection. As early as July, 1775, Congress resolved to go
into a committee of the whole on the state of the union, and Franklin,
undaunted by the fate of his Albany plan of twenty years before, again
presented a draft of a constitution. Long and desultory debates followed
and it was not until late in 1777 that Congress presented to the states
the Articles of Confederation. Provincial jealousies delayed
ratification, and it was the spring of 1781, a few months before the
surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, when Maryland, the last of the
states, approved the Articles. This plan of union, though it was all
that could be wrung from the reluctant states, provided for neither a
chief executive nor a system of federal courts. It created simply a
Congress of delegates in which each state had an equal voice and gave it
the right to call upon the state legislatures for the sinews of
government--money and soldiers.

=The Application of Tests of Allegiance.=--As the successive steps were
taken in the direction of independent government, the patriots devised
and applied tests designed to discover who were for and who were against
the new nation in the process of making. When the first Continental
Congress agreed not to allow the importation of British goods, it
provided for the creation of local committees to enforce the rules. Such
agencies were duly formed by the choice of men favoring the scheme, all
opponents being excluded from the elections. Before these bodies those
who persisted in buying British goods were summoned and warned or
punished according to circumstances. As soon as the new state
constitutions were put into effect, local committees set to work in the
same way to ferret out all who were not outspoken in their support of
the new order of things.

[Illustration: MOBBING THE TORIES]

These patriot agencies, bearing different names in different sections,
were sometimes ruthle