How Did The Rise And Fall Of The Articles Of Confederation

In fear of creating a new monarchical system, no federal court or executive leader was placed into power. This created an imbalance of power between the thirteen states and the central government. Under the Articles of Confederation, the central government had the power to pass laws but had no way to enforce them. If one state did not agree with a recently passed law, the state government of said area could choose to ignore it. One way a federal constitution could clarify these issues would be by placing an independent executive in power who is chosen by an electoral college.

To the highly-valued citizens of the United States of American, we believe in order for our newly-founded country to thrive, our constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the system of government which it has formed must be replaced and a new constitution be adopted. We believe the Articles of Confederation have proven to be ineffective and the source of many hardships in our nation. To strive to solve this significant challenge, we have created and propose a new constitution, the Constitution of the United States, and federal government. As an explanation for our reasoning, this pamphlet has been written to clarify the Articles of Confederation’s weaknesses, how the new constitution can fix these problems, and present how the Constitution

In 1787, the Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia to try to readjust the Articles of Confederation. They ended up making a new Constitution, which created a stronger central government. The Constitution gave Congress the power to tax, and it also made the states required to follow Congress’s decisions. This made the government much more effective, but it also made it more

Having just the Congress did not work out, which is why we now have multiple branches of an government. The Articles of Confederation were written in 1777, but came into play when

As it applies to the Articles of Confederation there were many weaknesses in the way it went about governing the United States. For one, the loose federation of the states was too weak to act as a foundation to be considered or act as a central government. In addition the state legislatures had too much power and in turn had the ability to influence economic issues of all kinds. This strong legislature is the same one that allowed for mob ruling and actions by debtors. The Articles of confederation were also weak because the required congress to have all 13 colonies in agreement when a new tax was to be passed.

The “search for national government” in Brinkley (2011) is broken down into five sections. The five sections are as follows The Confederation, Diplomatic Failures, The Confederation and the Northwest, Indians and the Western Lands, and finally Debts, Taxes, and Daniel Shays. In addition to discussing each section I will outline the successes and failures of the Articles of Confederation. After fighting a war with an overly restrictive and powerful federal government in the English monarchy America wanted the complete opposite from its own federal government.

After the Articles of Confederation failed because they failed to give enough power to the national government and congress, our founding father’s needed to reflect on its flaws for a new system to be set in place. Their new creation, our Constitution, was then set into place, and was created from a basis of the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation directly influence the Constitution by its failure by changing some of the responsibilities of the federal and state governments. The Articles of Confederation gave too much power to the states, and the Constitution changed that.

Congress had no power, so states had no reliance on a central power. States could obey or disobey any laws they wanted. No foreign affairs head was in place either. America was left with no diplomat and no head to their chicken. National government was forced to rely on states for militias, laws, and nearly everything.

The Articles of Confederation were approved on November 1777, which left many constraints on the federal government. The people were so worried about corruption, that they left the government powerless on all affairs, including foreign relations, military, Indian issues, and interstate disputes. In addition it denied Congress the power of taxation, the states were supposed to donate money to the government, which rarely occured. Each state had only one vote in Congress, but could send as many as seven delegates or as few as two, but if they divided equally on an issue the state lost its vote. There was not a President or independent executive and no veto over legislate decisions.

This document completely changed how the government worked. It broke it into three different branches: Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. The representatives also split Congress into two separate branches, The State of Representatives and the Senate. This gave the states the power to have two Senators and the Representatives were based on the population of the state. The Constitution also put a federal court into place.

While that was the original plan that isn't what happened. Instead, the articles of confederation got replaced by this new government that has three branches (Judicial, executive, and legislature) so that way no one had too much power. Which is known as check and balance system. There

But it became more of a reason to give U.S Congress little to no power to control the states (Historyrocket.com). Due to the little power U.S Congress had, states were fighting each other and trading off to foreign countries. Each state could only vote once, and out of thirteen states, nine of them had to approve for the vote to be ratified. If anyone had a problem with the Articles of Confederation, and wanted to change or remove something, the vote would have to be unanimous in order for it to be added, or changed or removed (Historyrocket.com). After the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Congress could not get the states to follow the treaty.

The Articles of Confederation were a document seen as the “first” constitution of the United States. This document granted the new national government power to control the military, declare war, and create treaties between the states. However, the Articles had holes in it considering the government did not have the power to tax, create laws without at least nine states’ approval, or change the Articles of Confederation without a unanimous vote. This means that the country soon fell into debt and petty arguments between state, the new government had no control. It was time for a change.

These authorities that the national government should have, were all up to the states to decide under the Articles. With the taking away some of the states rights in the Constitution, Anti-federalists feared that this would leave the states too weak, resulting in more problems. Under the new Constitution, many powers that were now in the government 's hands are: the power to levy and collect taxes, the power to regulate interstate commerce, the government set up a national court system consisting of district, circuit, and a supreme court, the government could enforce laws, there was now a house based on population, and a senate based on equal representation (two votes per state), to amend the Constitution, a ⅔ vote of Congress was needed, and a ¾ vote of the states were needed, and a majority rule was needed to pass bills. These new powers and abilities of the national government helped to create a strong, new

The new government, the Constitution, is now able to enforces taxes, which allowed money to come in and the government was able to pay off their debt. One other weakness of the articles was that it gave all power to only one house of representative from each state, the constitution try to solve this matter that creating three separate branches of power, the Legislative branch, Executive branch, and the Judiciary branch, allowing the power to be more divided. Representation was another problem in under the Articles of Confederation because a big state like Massachusetts and a small state like New Jersey both have the same amount of representatives, the Constitution made a compromise by forming two house in Congress the Senate, where each state get equal representation, and the House of Representatives, where each state is represented by the population of the state. The Constitution also fixed the problem of passing a law; under the Articles of Confederation, laws can only be passed if 9 out of 13 representatives agrees on the law because of this not much laws were passed, now under the Constitution only 51 percent of the votes to pass the law. From this readers can infer that the Constitution fixed many of the defects in the Articles