Articles_of_Confederation

The articles of Confederation were originally created to be the new country’s, the United States, form of government. However, they ended up simply being an example of what the new country could improve upon. Since they were so new in government and to running a country, the delegates did not exactly make the best or strongest government. So, later they had a convention and after much argument, settled on the form of government that still exists today: the constitution. The delegates of the constitutional convention knew that the articles of confederation weren’t working correctly, so to replace it, they needed a new structure, one with increased power for the central government so that the government would actually be able to control the individual states, a way for the central government to be able to tax, and more force that could keep the states from separating into 13 different countries. According to Edmund Morgan’s “A Critical Period” the Articles of Confederation did not do a good enough job of giving sufficient power to the central government compared to the different state governments. The states were each able to decide their own currency, who they traded with, what they would tax, and how they could run their own state government. The central government had no way of controlling all of the states because the Articles of Confederation gave most of the power to the states, rather than the central government for fear of the central government becoming too strong so that each state was essentially its own country. If they had not finally truly united under the constitution, they would continue to be vulnerable to the many stronger and older countries that were just watching and waiting for this brand new country to break so that they may claim the land if the government were to fail so that there would be 13 different and weak countries. So, with the Articles not giving enough power to the central government, having no way for the central government to tax citizens in order to finance the war, and each state being so weak and not unified, the Articles clearly had to go, and a new government had to be formed—the constitution. For years after the American Revolution, the Articles served as the country’s government. When it became clear after shay’s rebellion, (A rebellion of the farmers of the United States protesting that the government had not repaid them for their various services in the American Revolution even when because of their service, most had gone bankrupt and could not afford their land anymore. The farmers got together to protest and the government had a bit of a difficult time settling the protest.) that the Articles were not working because the government was hardly strong enough to settle the protest, delegates from each state were chosen for the constitutional convention. The delegates worked hard for many months to discuss how the country should be run, and how to improve from the Articles of Confederation. They discussed the new structure of the central government, with three branches including a Supreme court, a judicial branch, and an executive branch and how the government should ensure that it cannot get too powerful—a system of checks and balances so that each branch “checked” another branch so that each branch can check on another so that no one branch may become too powerful. Once they had successfully revised the constitution many times and had all the main ideas down, they set it out to a vote—from all the states so that each state could vote the constitution into action. Only nine of the thirteen states were needed to ratify it and it was very successful in the ratification by most states. However, some Antifederalists still argued the constitution needed a bill of rights. After the bill of rights was added, some people still had problems with the Bill of Rights, saying that it could give too much power to the people. In the end, however, the Bill of Right was kept and the Constitution was ratified. Next, the constitution was put into action and the people voted George Washington into the executive branch as the president of the United States, and finally, the Constitution had replaced the Articles of Confederation. There was a great need for the constitution in the U.S. The Articles gave too much power to the individual states and not enough power to the central government—it had no way to regulate tax or trade and without the unity the central government provided, the many different states were vulnerable to conquering from other stronger countries. Although the Articles were a good way to learn from mistakes and fix them, the articles would not be enough to hold the states together so they needed to be changed into a much better government—the Constitution. Without changing to the constitution, the articles could easily contribute to the reason the U.S. would break up or be conquered by other countries, meaning without the change, this country had the potential to be nonexistent.