Confederation Vs Constitution

One of the major factors in which influenced the United States constitution was the failures of the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation were a written form of laws that the United States first used when they first separated from Britain. The Articles of Confederation could not impose taxes and because of this, they were weak. The United States Constitution writers used this to their advantage and learned from the Articles mistakes. Some of the mistakes in the Articles were that the government could not collect taxes, and because of this, they were unable to fund war and pay for many expenses due to the reason that they could not have people pay taxes, which made this government very weak and unstable. The Constitution

One idea which writers used in the United States Constitution was the idea of popular Sovereignty. John Locke discussed that government representatives gain their authority through the people, and not through hereditary succession. He wrote that the people who are governed should be the ones to elect their leader. The Constitution allows people to vote and the people give authority to the government. When Britain was in control the people did not have a voice and the writers did not want this to happen again. One more exceptional idea that came from the Enlightenment, was the idea of natural rights. This idea was one of the ideas in which Enlightenment thinker John Locke came up with. Locke discussed how people have certain rights which both men and women have that cannot be taken. He called these rights natural rights and said that the government is made to protect these rights. Political leaders are not born into their positions, they earn them through the election process (consent of the governed). No man can have more rights than another and people are born equal, with the right to vote. After the writers disliked the monarchies in England, they wanted to make sure they had a capable leader. Something else in which originated from the Enlightenment was separation of power. Charles de Montesquieu, another Enlightenment thinker, wrote the The

Lack of representation was one thing in which the colonies wrote about in their grievances to Britain. Colonists had no representation in their government. They included this in their list of grievances sent to Britain to show that they wanted to have a say in their leaders. Because of this, the writers got the idea of popular sovereignty where the people have the most say in who the leader is. In the Constitution, the people elect the members of Congress who have power to levy taxes. The people now have the opportunity to have a say in the leaders of the country, under the United States Constitution. People did not have representation in the leaders so writers came up with the idea of popular sovereignty. The writers figured that this would impact the government’s leaders and give the people representation. The writers experienced this and wanted to fix it in the United States government. The quartering act was another act in which Britain imposed that was highly disliked by the colonists. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston and Thomas Jefferson wrote the United States of America’s Declaration of Independence. In the Declaration, they wrote, “He has combined with others to subject United States to a jurisdiction foreign to [the] constitution, and unacknowledged by [the] laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For Quartering