HIST 405 - Historical Essay1 HIST-405-2-2-3--graded-2.docx

HIST 405 - Historical Essay1 HIST-405-2-2-3-- Confederation and Constitution The Articles of Confederation, the nations first constitution, was drafted after the American colonists declared independence from Britain (Keene, Cornell, & O’Donnell, 2013). From the beginning, the Articles of Confederation had many problems. The Articles of Confederation gave each state sovereignty, power, jurisdiction, and freedom. It kept the national government very weak, only allowing the national government to secure general welfare, defence, and liberties. The articles created a weak decentralized form of government that lacked the power to tax and compel state obedience to treaties it negotiated (Keene, Cornell, & O’Donnell, p.154, 2013). Soon it became apparent for the need of a stronger government, which eventually lead to the Constitution Convention in 1787. A stronger central government with executive and judicial branch was created under the new Constitution of 1787. This allowed for the imposing of taxes. The change also led to the creation of a two-party system. The Strengths and Weaknesses of The Articles of Confederation and The Constitution of 1787 One of the many problems with the Articles of Confederation is that it did not give the confederate government a lot of power. They could not tax Americans and only had the ability to request that each individual state fund government business (Keene, Cornell, & O’Donnell, 2013). Since the government had no empowerment to tax, the state had no financial means for solving the different problems in which regularly occurred (Miller, 2013). The Articles of Confederation drafted by Congress in 1777 failed to unify the nation because in this document, the empowerment of the government of the United States was limited (Burrell, 2014). This made it almost impossible for the state officials to fulfil their daily duties in the economic, political and social areas (Burrell, 2014). Moreover, there existed no executive