Articles Of Confederation Dbq Analysis

The two most important problems which made the Articles of the Confederation a poor form of government stemmed from their lack of power; specifically their lack of power to collect taxes and lack of power to raise an army. These issues led to the creation of the Constitution and in turn led to more issues due to differences between Federalists and Antifederalists. To combat the new come issues, compromises were struck between the given groups within the government. These compromises were called the Great Compromise and the Three/Fifths Compromise. The Articles of the Confederation lack of power to collect taxes and raise an army can be seen along with other problems in document two’s image “Rough Sailing Ahead”. This image is of a boat, representing the articles, being slammed with waves, representing the issues. As seen in document two, each wave represents a particular problem facing the articles. The two given reasons can be seen as more important in the image because the waves reflecting them

The major two issues were how states were represented and how population was defined. Document four shows a bar graph giving the population of the specific states in 1790. States with a smaller population would be favored if there were to be completely equal representation in the government On the other hand, states with a larger population would be favored if there were to be representation based on population. The answer to the problems are seen in document six. This document has a simple graph showing the solution to representation in government through two separate houses, one based on population and one based on equal representation. Also, the definition of population was questioned as to whether slaves were counted or not. To deal with this the Three/Fifths compromise was struck. Each slave counted as three/fifths of one