Articles Of Confederation Pros And Cons

1266 Words6 Pages

The Articles of Confederation structured the first government of the thirteen states. The thirteen states included: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. However, Rhode Island did not vote to revise the Articles right away. Therefore, the proposals of the Constitution continued to be declined by the other states due to not having a balance on votes. When Rhode Island finally sent a representative to the Constitution Convention, the Constitution was approved. The Articles of Confederation guaranteed that the thirteen states kept its sovereignty, freedom, independence, power, and jurisdiction. But, the …show more content…

The debate for the proposals of the Constitution lasted a long period of time because the States did not agree with the proposals. Compromise was needed in this situation because the Convention would have taken longer than expected. With compromise, the structure of the national legislature was finally formed after months of debates. The plan was adopted: five states agreed, four states disagreed, and two states did not vote. With Rhode Island’s vote, the debates no longer had to to continue. This led to the structure of the government: the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey …show more content…

When James Madison promised that the Bill of Rights would be added to the Constitution, New York ratified the Constitution. The biggest problem my group faced was resolving the tensions over slavery. South Carolina wanted to include African Americans in their population, yet, the South did not want to assure that African Americans were given the same inalienable rights as others. William Patterson did not agree with including slaves in the population, however he did not have a choice but to compromise. The Founding Fathers agreed to allow slaveholder states to count three-fifths of their slave population when dividing the number of state’s representatives to Congress. The Founding Fathers also used this idea to increase the direct federal tax burden of slaveholding states. We did not meet the objective of abolishing slavery because the revised Articles left the power to regulate slavery to the individual states. William Paterson acknowledged that slavery violated the ideals of an American. However, he assured that slave trading was discontinued. We also had problems with agreeing on the powers of the legislature. States such as New York, with a small population wanted representation in both houses of the legislature to be based on the population. States with a large population wanted each state to have the same number of representatives. Due to this disagreement the debate continued. Without the vote of Rhode Island, the proposals of the