Strengths And Weaknesses Of The Constitution

The Articles of Confederation were drafted by the Continental Congress on November 15, 1777 and ratified over three years later. Motivated by concerns of mimicking the system in England that had drove many of the colonists to the United States in the first place, the colonists created a weak centralized system and focused the power on the individual states. They soon found that the Articles of Confederation provided a system that was fatally flawed and incapable of supporting the young nation. The Articles of Confederation created a weak central system of government which was incapable of standardizing currency, imposing taxation, creating a national court system, enforcing laws with an executive branch, or allowing for revisions to the original document itself. The weaknesses of the document nearly caused collapse in the United States, and resulted in the Constitutional Convention which created the Constitution that ultimately resolved these problems.
The Articles of Confederation granted Congress the right to regulate all forms of currency present in the country in Article IX. However, the Articles …show more content…
Thus, the document was intentionally weakened and setup for failure by its writers, who soon came to realize that a strong central government was necessary for national unity. The weaknesses that the Articles of Confederation introduced into the United States were largely repaired by the Constitution, and one can see the difference in the documents’ longevity through their life-spans: The Articles of Confederation lasted 7 years and the Constitution has continued to thrive for over 227 years! The stability and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution reflect a document created out of years of trial-and-error, one that signifies the very nature of