The question that I will be discussing today is the important differences between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution and why each document was approved at the time it was written. During the 1700s, the 13 colonies were under the rule of Great Britain, and a lot of people think that they just got fed up with it after a while, but there were reasons for the colonies declaring their independence and eventually, war. The main reason was that after the French and Indian War, Britain had a lot of war debt. King George III decided that the easiest way to pay back Britain’s debt was to heavily tax the colonies. They didn’t have a right to do this, but in their minds, they didn’t care. This started a sequence of events that could’ve
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The Articles tried to put power away from the government and congress, which sounds good on paper, but it left the government with too little power to enforce anything. Here are some examples. No federal courts, all laws enforced by state courts, no taxing power given to congress, amended only by approval of all states, and only state government can act directly on the people (Comparison of Constitution and Articles of Confederation). What’s listed here isn’t necessarily bad, but it left the government vulnerable and weak. Yes, they were trying to be different than the British government, but the government needs to have a certain amount of power to be able to enforce the laws it puts out. With these laws in place it would’ve been chaos, and the United States wouldn’t have been united anymore. The Declaration was different. It was thoroughly thought through and was designed with an end goal in mind, while the Articles seemed to be a stand-in. The Declaration supported things like exercising sovereignty between the states and government, a separate federal court system to settle matters between the states, congress has power to lay and collect taxes, and both the central government and state government can act on the people (Comparison of Constitution and Articles of Confederation). All of these were created to combat what the British had been doing. The Declaration established a clear line between the people and their governments, and it balanced the power out so that the parties were balanced. The Founding Fathers knew what they wanted the country to be like after the war, and The Declaration proves that as well as
The Articles tried to put power away from the government and congress, which sounds good on paper, but it left the government with too little power to enforce anything. Here are some examples. No federal courts, all laws enforced by state courts, no taxing power given to congress, amended only by approval of all states, and only state government can act directly on the people (Comparison of Constitution and Articles of Confederation). What’s listed here isn’t necessarily bad, but it left the government vulnerable and weak. Yes, they were trying to be different than the British government, but the government needs to have a certain amount of power to be able to enforce the laws it puts out. With these laws in place it would’ve been chaos, and the United States wouldn’t have been united anymore. The Declaration was different. It was thoroughly thought through and was designed with an end goal in mind, while the Articles seemed to be a stand-in. The Declaration supported things like exercising sovereignty between the states and government, a separate federal court system to settle matters between the states, congress has power to lay and collect taxes, and both the central government and state government can act on the people (Comparison of Constitution and Articles of Confederation). All of these were created to combat what the British had been doing. The Declaration established a clear line between the people and their governments, and it balanced the power out so that the parties were balanced. The Founding Fathers knew what they wanted the country to be like after the war, and The Declaration proves that as well as