Federal Versus State: Federal Vs. State

Federal Versus State Many different aspects of governments go through power struggles, but sometimes it is which government itself is more powerful. The struggle between Federal Government and the state has existed since colonization. Both often feel that one should have more power than the other, but also are unsure which one does in fact have more power. Several events and documents have changed these standings over time in many different ways. One of the first documents created that gave some sort of enlightenment to whether the state or the Federal Government had more power was the Articles of Confederation in 1781. When the Articles of Confederation were ratified in 1781, they gave some sort of structure to the two sides of the power …show more content…
While the South could have gained complete control of their own government through the states if they had one, they did not get to have that control because they lost. This meant that the entire southern portion of the United States’s state governments lost any power they had once had. The Federal Government could do whatever they felt necessary and make practically any decision they wanted without worrying about the state governments taking over. The Federal Government was in complete control. While the northern states still had some control over what happened in government. The states that truly wanted to have control before, the southern states, had no big role in government. The war caused the South to lose all of their previous government officials because no previous officials were aloud to hold office again. The war ruined any chance that the states had of gaining the majority of or full power. It really ruined any good chance of the southern states having This seemed to be the case until something called Reconstruction …show more content…
At first during Reconstruction, Lincoln was president and he had no plans of letting any confederates back into the political or military field anytime soon. This all changed when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became the president. Andrew Johnson was born a southerner so he tended to not want to punish the South too harshly. When the South realized that all they were getting was basically a slap on the wrist, they decided to try and take control of their government once again. Former confederates took back their prior roles in the southern government and meanwhile, Johnson was just hoping that the rest of the post-war problems would work themselves out. For a while, all was well in the South again during the time Johnson was in office. Once again though, everything changed a couple years later. The majority of the voters lost faith in Johnson and he even tried to veto two things that Congress thought needed to be put in place. Congress overruled his veto in the end, but most voters found him to be doing a horrible job at being president. Lucky for Johnson’s non-supporters, 1866 was election year. Several Radical Republicans were voted in and they were ready to make changes. In 1867, they completely changed the South by redoing the South’s entire government. This is when the Federal Government knew it