Articles of Confederation

Overview

The Articles of Confederation was the original constitution for the United States began being written and signed by the several states in 1777, a year after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and would later be fully signed by all of them by 1779.^{(Roark, et al. 2019, pp. 564-565)} It initially gave very few powers to the federal government, so much so that it was too ineffective at functioning as a proper government, later requiring a new constitution to be drafted thirteen years later.^{(Roark, et al. 2019, p. 579)}

Issues

The Articles of Confederation had several issues with how it functioned, causing major issues for the federal government, and intern the United States itself. There were primarily three major issues that it had troubles dealing with:^{(Roark, et al. 2019, p. 579)}

1. Paying down the large war debt.
2. Making peace with the Indians.
3. Creating a plan for western settlement.

Because the Articles of Confederation could not raise taxes on it’s own, it was unable to pay any war debts it had to France or the soldiers in the Revolutionary War, which would cause the Newburgh Conspiracy. Initially the sale of western lands was the plan to offset the governments financial problems, but the Naive American’s power of the territory made this impossible, making it harder to expand west as well. These problems got especially bad from 1784 to 1786, at which point Americans started to believe that the government was too weak to solve these problems.^{(Roark, et al. 2019, p. 579)}