Outline the events and political motivations that led to the colonies’ split from England.
The Articles of Confederation: Political and economic instability under the nation’s first constitution
In 1777 the Continental Congress met to try to come up with a constitution, or a framework that established the rules for the new government. The Articles of Confederation, our first constitution, created the kind of government the founders, fresh from their colonial experience, preferred. The rules set up by the Articles of Confederation show that the states jealously guarded their power. Having just won their independence from one large national power, the last thing they wanted to do was create another. They were also extremely wary of one another, and much of the debate over the Articles of Confederation reflected wide concern that the rules not give any states preferential treatment. (See the Appendix for the text of the Articles of Confederation.)
constitution the rules that establish a government
Articles of Confederation the first constitution of the United States (1777), creating an association of states with weak central government
The Articles established a “firm league of friendship” among the thirteen American states, but they did not empower a central government to act effectively on behalf of those states. The Articles were ultimately replaced because, without a strong central government, they were unable to provide the economic and political stability that the founders wanted. Even so, under this set of rules, some people were better off and some problems, namely the resolution of boundary disputes and the political organization of new territories, were handled extremely well.
The Provisions of the Articles
The government set up by the Articles was called a confederation because it established a system in which each state retained almost all the power to do what it wanted. In other words, in a confederation, each state is sovereign and the central government has the job of running only the collective business of the states. It has no independent source of power and resources for its operations. Another characteristic of a confederation is that because it is founded on state sovereignty (authority), it says nothing about individuals. It creates neither rights nor obligations for individual citizens, leaving such matters to be handled by state constitutions.
confederation a government in which independent states unite for common purpose but retain their own sovereignty
Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had many formal powers, including the power to establish and direct the armed forces, to decide matters of war and peace, to coin money, and to enter into treaties. However, its powers were quite limited. For example, although Congress controlled the armed forces, it had no power to draft soldiers or to tax citizens to pay for its military needs. Its inability to tax put Congress—and the central government as a whole—at the mercy of the states. The government could ask for money, but it was up to the states to contribute or not as they chose. Furthermore, Congress lacked the ability to regulate commerce between states, as well as between states and foreign powers. It could not establish a common and stable monetary system. In essence, the Articles allowed the states to be thirteen independent units, printing their own currencies, setting their own tariffs, and establishing their own laws with regard to financial and political matters. In every critical case—national security, national economic prosperity, and the general welfare—the U.S. government had to rely on the voluntary good will and cooperation of the state governments. That meant that the success of the new nation depended on what went on in state legislatures around the country.
Some Winners, Some Losers
The era of American history following the Revolution was dubbed “this critical period” by John Quincy Adams, nephew of patriot Sam Adams, son of John Adams, and himself a future president of the country. During this time, while the states were under the weak union of the Articles, the future of the United States was very much up in the air. The lack of an effective central government meant that the country had difficulty conducting business with other countries and enforcing harmonious trade relations and treaties. Domestic politics was equally difficult. Economic conditions following the war were poor. Many people had debts they could not pay. State taxes were high, and the economy was depressed, offering farmers few opportunities to sell their produce, for example, and hindering those with commercial interests from conducting business as they had before the war.
The radical poverty of some Americans seemed particularly unjust to those hardest hit, especially in light of the rhetoric of the Revolution about equality for all.16 This is a difficulty of having a narrative controlled from on high—if it doesn’t match up with the reality on the ground, new narratives can develop. Having used “equality” as a rallying cry during the war, the founders were afterward faced with a population that wanted to take equality seriously and eliminate the differences that existed between men.17 One of the places the American passion for equality manifested itself was in some of the state legislatures, where laws were passed to ease the burden of debtors and farmers. Often the focus of the laws was property, but rather than preserving property, per the Lockean narrative, it frequently was designed to confiscate or redistribute property instead. The “have nots” in society, and the people acting on their behalf, were using the law to redress what they saw as injustices in early American life. To relieve postwar suffering, they printed paper money, seized property, and suspended “the ordinary means for the recovery of debts.”18 In other words, in those states, people with debts and mortgages could legally escape or postpone paying the money they owed. With so much economic insecurity, naturally those who owned property would not continue to invest and lend money. The Articles of Confederation, in their effort to preserve power for the states, had provided for no checks or limitations on state legislatures. In fact, such actions would have been seen under the Articles as infringing on the sovereignty of the states. What you had was a clash between two visions of what America was to be about.
Profiles in Citizenship Newt Gingrich
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
History is anything but dull when it comes from the mouth of the man who has made so much of it. Newt Gingrich is the architect of the “Contract With America,” a document that helped propel the Republicans into the majority in Congress in 1994 for the first time in forty years, and made him Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1998. He is committed to crafting new ideas out of old lessons, leading his fellow citizens on a mission to restore the country to its fundamental principles. As you will see in Chapter 7, his ideas and the policies they generated still inform the political debate in this country nearly two decades later, a fact that likely encouraged him to make his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2012.
On why students should study history
“If you’ve never run out of gas, you may not understand why filling your gas tank matters. And if you’ve never had your brakes fail, you may not care about having your brakes checked. And if you’ve never slid on an icy road, you may not understand why learning to drive on ice really matters. For citizens, if you haven’t lived in a bombed-out city like Beirut or Baghdad, if you haven’t seen a genocidal massacre like Rwanda, if you haven’t been in a situation where people were starving to death, like Calcutta, you
