Talk:Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union

Untitled

This page contains the text of the Articles according to several official and unofficial sources (e.g., National Archives, University of Oklahoma Law Center, etc.). In these transcriptions, the "preamble" to the Articles is as follows:

To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting. Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

However, the image of the official document (for example, see here) shows that preamble as being much longer. Does anyone know the reason behind this discrepancy, and which is the "official version"?

Mateo SA | talk 06:51, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

ok

i found your answer: "To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting. Whereas the Delegates of the United States of America in Congress assembled did on the fifteenth day of November in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy Seven, and in the Second Year of the Independence of America agree to certain articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia in the Words following, viz. "Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia."

this is what is on the preamble

i dont know why its not on the article and i dont know if i should change it or not —unsigned comment by 24.127.224.149 (talk) 01:31, 19 January 2006.

Capitalization

I noticed that the 18th century extensive use of capital letters (as seen in the text of the Constitution or Declaration of Independence, for example) doesn't show up here.

Actually, it does show in the manuscript, but the transcribed text doesn't faithfully copy that. For example, article 3 has "Liberties" but the transcribed text on the main page has that in lower case. Perhaps a nit, but still...

—unsigned comment by 12.110.134.20 (talk) 13:56, 24 March 2009.

Feel free to correct it ;-)

John Vandenberg ^(chat) 07:24, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Fixes required

Currently, this page appears to be more-or-less of a copy/paste of this.  Unfortunately, that page is incorrect, and thus, so is this one.

I recently had the desire to see what the Articles of Confederation had to say about the president of the congress.  This is what Wikipedia and Wikisource both had to say on the topic:

The United States in Congress assembled shall have authority...to appoint one of their members to preside, provided that no person be allowed to serve in the office of president more than one year in any term of three years...

But, I often like to go to the original source for things like this, and so I checkout out Wikimedia Commons, which interestingly lacks the page(s) containing article IX (and others).  I had to resort to Google Images, which allowed me to find this.  In reading page four, one can clearly see that the original says,

The united ſtates in congreſs aſsembled ſhall have authority…to appoint one of their number to preside, provided that no person be allowed to ſerve in the office of president more than one year in any term of three years.

This isn't merely a difference between capitalisations and whether or not long s's are used; the original says "one of their number to preside," not "one of their members to preside" (emphases added).

If I could find an error like this in the one and only sentence I was looking for, it would not be surprising to find that there may be other errors in this document, too.  I went ahead and fixed the members/number error, but if anyone has the time, I would recommend going through the document comparing it word-for-word with the original here.

Best,
allixpeeke (talk) 12:07, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

I just added six pages to Wikimedia Commons titled Articles of Confederation 1-5.jpg, Articles of Confederation 5-6.jpg, Articles of Confederation 7-9.jpg, Articles of Confederation 9-9.jpg, Articles of Confederation 9-13.jpg, and Articles of Confederation 13.jpg.  Unlike previous uploads of the Articles of Confederation to Wikimedia Commons, there are no gaps in the text of these uploads.  Feel free to use these six images to improve the text of this page.  allixpeeke (talk) 13:50, 4 August 2015 (UTC)