This time is known generally as the Articles of Confederation period. The same agreements that unified the 13 colonies to fight the Revolutionary War pretty much continued, along with the Continental Congress. As the states acted more as independent countries, most governance was within the states- the Congress had fairly little power, and few talented politicians went there, preferring to go into state politics.

There have been various assessments of this time. The older one ( John Fiske, 19th c.) was that it was a time of crisis, because the weak Congress had a very limited power to conduct diplomacy and a very hard time dealing with the enormous debt of the War. One example of this would be Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts. The merchants of the Boston were unable to get further credit from their overseas European suppliers- those merchants didn't want to take any more notes and printed money from the Colonies, they wanted hard currency, like gold or silver. That hard currency was scarce in the Colonies, and many - especially in the western regions- were doing a lot of trading with just notes- like IOU's. The Boston merchants managed to get a new law passed that required all public debts ( like taxes) to be paid with hard currency, hoping to wring more hard currency out of people's pockets into the economy. This was very hard on the western farmers: if they couldn't find hard currency to pay their taxes, their farms could be sold by a court to anyone who could. So in 1786 there was a taxpayer revolt, with mobs of angry farmers preventing those courts from conducting business. In this older interpretation, the time of crisis, of course, was resolved by the adoption of the Constitution. Oh, and that Hamilton guy helped a lot after that was ratified.

On the other hand, there were some useful accomplishments under the A of C, maybe the most important being the Land Act of 1785 and the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 . The Land Act regularized the surveying of the new territories and land ownership, which had been a very large problem in the early Colonies, where deeds were often vague and overlapped each other. The Northwest Ordnance dispensed with all the previous overlapping claims of the Colonies for the new territories in the west and provided the framework for admitting them as new states ( eventually Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan) . It also stipulated that there would be no slaves in those new states. So, some ( like Merrill Jensen) have looked upon the A of C period as one of , well, if not dynamic growth, at least not crisis, saying perhaps the factional democracy of the individual states under the Articles better expressed the radical ideas of the soldiers in the Revolution than the Constitution would in 1787, and that, really, the Constitution should therefore not be considered as inevitable.

This short period of only several years also gets modern political interest- and bias. Libertarians today embrace the A of C period as something of a hopeful golden age , where true freedom reigned, before Americans were shackled and even crushed by a huge Federal government. Those who worship the Constitution tend to view it as a bumbling, disorganized prelude to 1787, during which everyone was saying, gosh, there's got to be a better way to govern this place let's have a Convention. I confess my own interest in history of technology puts me with the latter. One example of this bumbling would be the misadventures of John Fitch and James Rumsey, who had each invented a steamboat - very different ones. Fitch had vague monopoly patents with some states, including his home of Pennsylvania, and demonstrated his boat first. Rumsey had a vague design patent from Virginia and a claim to have been working on his boat before Fitch ever began his. In 1788 they got into a patent fight. There was no simple way, under the A of C, to have made sure their patents did not overlap before they were granted and to sort out the claims once there was a dispute, and it might have been very handy if the US had gotten a steamboat 20 years before Fulton.... Someone could say that eventually some patent agreement between the States might have been hammered out under the A of C... but the Constitution spelled it out immediately. And so Fitch and Rumsey got the first-ever hearing by the first ever US Patent Commission.

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Thomas J Slaughter Merrill Jensen and the Revolution of 1787