Articles Of Confederation Dbq

The Articles of Confederation were drafted sometime between 1776 and 1777 by the Continental Congress. Prior to the Articles of Confederation the Continental Congress “assumed a number of rights and responsibilities, such as creating the Continental Army, printing money, managing trade, and dealing with debt” (Shultz, 2014, p. 119). They had done all of this without the authority of the people or sovereign power, this is why the Articles of Confederation were created. The Articles of Confederation were presented to the states for ratification but only 8 states would ratify it within the first year. It would take until 1781 to get all 13 states to ratify it, which is what it took to before the Articles of Confederation could take effect.

119). The Articles had all the governing power in a single legislature. This meant that there was no president or monarch to be the executive power. Instead of this they had a representative from each state that was called the Committee of the States. The Committee of the States was the most centralized power but it was minimal power. “The Continental Congress, on the other hand, had five powers under the Articles: (1) to declare war and make peace; (2) to make international treaties; (3) to control Indian affairs in the West; (4) to establish a currency; and (5) to create and maintain a postal service” (Shultz, 2014, p. 120) The achievements of the Articles were that they “established the United States as a government of laws that placed limits on the government’s authority and (2) the Articles created a national citizenship, which gave equal rights to qualifying members” (Shultz, 2014, p. 120). This left America with no titles or people being coded for classification. The biggest achievement of the Articles was that they organized the newly acquired western

This became a huge problem because the new nation could not pay an army to fight wars. On top of that they did not know who would regulate the currency or who would maintain credit. To try and fix the debt problem Congress chartered a national bank. For the bank to operate they needed capital. The way they came up with to get capital was to tax import goods at 5%. According to the Articles they would need a unanimous vote for the tax to pass. Rhode Island would not vote for the tax because they relied too much on foreign trade for its economy. Therefore the bill did not pass. The third thing was that “commerce between states suffered because there was no centralized authority to manage it. Because each state had its own currency, its own levels of inflation, and its own taxes, it was difficult to transport goods across state lines or engineer large programs that would encompass an entire region” (Shultz, 2014, p.