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Articles Of Confederation Strengths And Weaknesses

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The Constitution
The Articles of Confederation was an archetype constitution that created a nation of independent states only loosely connected together by a single congress. The founding fathers deliberately designed a nation with a very feeble central government. There was no judicial branch, no executive branch, there was no coining money, and there was no president. These were all intrinsic weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation that were entrusted to the states, weaknesses that would soon cause another rebellion. It was a confederation rather than a strong union, so in a sense we were playing with the other states on the team but we were not really a unit. The colonists have just been through a very bad breakup with the British king, so they didn’t want another tyrant to rule …show more content…

But they couldn’t impose the taxes to pay for all of those things. Paying federal taxes was voluntary for the states at this time under the Articles of Confederation. In order to pay for the revolutionary war, the United States had borrowed money from European investors and nations. But with no power to tax, The United States couldn’t pay back any of those debts and this created a huge economic disaster by 1787. The central government couldn’t do much to protect peace at home without any funds and with very limited power. This became abundantly clear throughout Shay’s Rebellion in 1786, when farmers in Massachusetts viciously objected to the states’ high taxes under Daniel Shays’ leadership, who was a former captain in the Continental Army. This was the first major armed rebellion in the post Revolutionary United States. The farmers in western Massachusetts organized their resistance in ways similar to the American Revolutionary struggle, but disintegrated quickly. Despite this fact, the fundamental social forces that pushed and inspired such dramatic actions remained. The rebellion established high degree of internal conflict prowling underneath the surface of

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