The Articles Of Confederation Was A Dismal Failure

Towards the end of the Revolutionary War, the founding fathers decided that that the

colonies would need some form of government that would unify them. At the same time, they

decided that they wanted to avoid creating a monarchial type of government from which they

had just split. The period just after the Revolutionary War was a critical time for the fledging

country and it was important that the government formed would not only unify the colonies and

protect them, not only from foreign countries, but also from destroying themselves internally.

The Articles of Confederation, the new nation’s first attempt at creating a framework of

government, was a dismal failure. Under the Articles of Confederation, almost all of the power

was in

Under the Articles of

Confederation, there was no Executive Branch of government, no power of taxation, no right for

the central government to regulate trade, no way of enforcing any of the laws that it passed and

no right to declare war (Congress 1). All thirteen states had to ratify unanimously any legislation

for it pass (Blum 118). These restrictions severely limited the national government and made it

very weak. “The impotence of Congress made the United States a beggar in the eyes of the

world” (Blum 119). It order to rectify the problems created by the Articles of Confederation, a

convention was called to rewrite the Articles, but, when the founding fathers gathered in May of

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1787, they decided instead to write a new outline for the government of the new nation. This

new document, known today as the Constitution of the United States, provided a framework for

our government that we still follow to this day (Congress for Kids 5).

On May 25, 1787 until September 17, 1787, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met

in the State House in Philadelphia (Blum 120). This gathering, called the

When discussing and writing the framework for the new

Constitution, the delegates wanted to ensure that the new government would not be able to

become all powerful and that no one person would gain absolute power over the people. In order

to ensure that no one state would have more power than another, it was decided from the

beginning of the process that, no matter how many delegates a state sent, each state would have

only one vote when issues were voted upon. Over the next four months, the delegates met in the

State House in Philadelphia. The proceedings of these meetings were secret. Early on, the issue

of how many representatives each state would have under the new government arose. The larger

states supported the Virginia Plan in which the number of representatives was based on a state’s

population (Weatherman 2). The smaller states, afraid of losing power in the new government

because under that plan their number of representatives would be substantially less would not

accept the Virginia Plan and instead opted for the New Jersey Plan in which each state would

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