In 1689, the British and the French entered a long period of frequent warfare known as the Second One Hundred Years’ War. The British government had to start directing its focus towards the French rather than its colonies in the New World. Due to the constant warfare, the British did not enforce the Navigation Acts that regulated and controlled trade going to and from the colonies. This sort of political and economic strategy was called salutary neglect. The Americans enjoyed minimal interference in their trading and the American economy grew and developed under this salutary neglect. However, after the French and Indian war ended in 1763, the British government was severely in debt. It started to enforce the Navigation Acts and imposed …show more content…
Document B was from a Pennsylvania newspaper, and it called for the Americans to fight harder to expel the British from the Americas. The author wanted to politically separate America from Britain and pleaded for the American people to make this political change. After the war officially ended with signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, people started to realize that there were issues with the Articles of Confederation. In the next few years many people argued how to fix these issues and how the country should grow. Document G illustrated some of these problems. Document G was written by Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson informing him about the political turmoil in her home state. This was around the time of the Constitutional Convention, and Adams, a powerful woman, wanted to inform Jefferson that something had to be done to the Articles of Confederation to stop this unrest. Another reason why the Articles of Confederation had to be changed was because of its inability to organize militias or enact and enforce nationwide taxes. Around 1786, the common people in Massachusetts revolted because of unfair state taxes and this was called Shay’s Rebellion. The Articles of Confederation had no way of dealing with this problem, so the state itself had to