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Actions Taken By The Founding Fathers Essay

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After the American Revolution, the newly formed United States of America was substantially unstable as there was increasing economic and social unrest. The first written documents of constitutional authority were generally weak and ineffective. As a result, there was unrest among the colonists, and this created the urge for a newly reformed government system. The proclaimed Founding Fathers took action and put forward what they thought would be the best remedy to the new nation. Some call the Founding Fathers “democratic reformers”, however, this opinion is overall misguided and uninformed, as the Constitution and the actions taken by the Founding Fathers did not represent the majority of the people in the new nation. Therefore, the Founding …show more content…

Noted by Charles Beard, the Constitution did not reflect the interests of four major groups: slaves, indentured servants, women, and men who did not own property. This virtually left only a small fraction of American citizens who were able to voice their opinions, and since they were usually wealthy, many of the legislative decisions made by them would obviously reflect their own personal interests. Because of this, a revolt broke out in the summer of 1786, coined Shays’ Rebellion. Led by Daniel Shays, a large group of poor farmers who had suffered heavy taxes and resented the new Constitution of 1780 that even further raised the property requirements for voting. No one could hold office without being wealthy. According to Zinn, a man named Plough Jogger stated that, “I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war; been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates...been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth...The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers,” (Taking Sides 127). Although this is a very radical idea, it exemplifies how harsh the

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Daniel Shays led a rebellion after the U.S. went into economic depression. This caused the Massachusetts government to seize several farms and sell them to re-gain profits. Shays led a mob of 1,000 enraged Massachusetts farmers to get weaponry from a state warehouse in August 1786. The rebellion was a fail because Shays and other fellow comrades were arrested. All in all, Daniel Shays led a rebellion because many farmers plots of land were taken and sold for profit.

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Gordon Wood achieved great success among his peers with the publication of his book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, for which he was awarded the Bancroft Prize, as well as the John H. Dunning Prize, both in 1970. In it, Dr. Wood breaks down the process of how American political thought developed from early protests against British measures in the construction of the world's first federal republic. He does so by giving us in detail using a number of different sources, historical information on the reasoning behind the revolution. Dr. Wood walks us through how our government started with a monarchical society which was hierarchical, and later transformed, and emerged as a more recognizable modern society, in where a more commercially oriented and capitalistic government came to light. Wood writes, “[Americans] learned how to define the rights of nature, how to search into, to distinguish, and to comprehend, the principles of physical, moral, religious, and civil liberty, how, in short, to discover and resist the forces of tyranny before they could be applied.

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Shays’ Rebellion greatly alarmed politicians throughout the nation. The Constitutional improve the national level of the

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In the years 1787 and 1788 right after the Constitutional Convention, many people argued over the context of the constitution. The ratification started when the Congress turned the Constitution over to the state legislatures. Because most of the framers had already decided to discard the Articles of Confederation when drafting the Constitution, the lack of people following the articles made the legislatures feel that an unanimous vote was unnecessary. The delegates agreed that approval from only 9 of the 13 states would be adequate to ratify the United States Constitution. However, the process to ratifying the constitution was difficult including groups of people and regions who supported or opposed the ratification.

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Shay’s Rebellion “What country before ever existed without a rebellion?” a quote from Jefferson in document C. Throughout the history of the United States many conflicts and protests have occurred. One of these was Shay’s rebellion and it was caused by the government not paying war veterans their money after fighting in the war. This made the protesters threaten the court that they are going to raid the armory and many people consider them rebels for this. Although many people thought the farmers or war veterans were rebels, nevertheless they are truly freedom fighters because they stood up for what was right, kept the government aware of needs, and were not treated fairly.

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Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. He ran against John Adams twice. The first time, he came in second, making him vice president. He then ran against him in the election of 1800, which had turned into a battle of Federalist and Democratic Republicans. He had defeated Adams due to a flaw in the electrical system.

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After a fiercely fought revolution, the newly independent American nation struggled to establish a concrete government amidst an influx of opposing ideologies. Loosely tied together by the Articles of Confederation, the thirteen sovereign states were far from united. As growing schisms in American society became apparent, an array of esteemed, prominent American men united in 1787 to form the basis of the United States government: the Constitution. Among the most eminent members of this convention were Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. These men, held to an almost godly stature, defined the future of the nation; but were their intentions as honest as they seemed?

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Following the Revolutionary War, America had just gained independance from Great Britain and needed to form a new government. The Articles of Confederation were established as an attempt to create a government that was unlike Britain’s. Unfortunately, the Articles of Confederation had several weaknesses. When in the process of repairing those weaknesses, the Federalists and the Anti-federalists formed. The Articles of Confederation were very weak as well as useless to America and because of this, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists could not agree on a new type of government.

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At the time of the founding of the United States almost all other political systems in the world were authoritarian governments in which rulers fully controlled the government. It was because of oppression by England’s monarchy that the Americans protested for a government that gave the power back to the people. It was then that the Framers of the constitution established a republic. When writing the constitution the framers established a republic not a democracy, however today many people say we have a representative democracy.

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Around the time of these protests Americans were beginning to realize their rights as citizens and what their ideal government looked like. Settlers of the backcountry were rebelling against the federalists, attempting to acquire more representation in the government. The people of the backcountry were becoming more oppressed as Alexander Hamilton began to attempt to improve America’s economy with manufacturing and revenue taxes. The backcountry settlers organized violent protests, three of these rebellions being Shays’ Rebellion, Whiskey Rebellion, and March of the Paxton Boys.

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Most of the people in Qdoba thought that was smart, and that was followed up by someone saying that all ten of us should be the “Founding Fathers” of the club and anyone who wanted to join after us would have to go through a long process and never reach the status of a founding father. All of us laughed and agreed that was a great idea. We were going to be the ten people to call the shots when it came to this club, and that feeling of power was amazing. Carson also brought up the idea of creating t-shirts that really showed the club’s spirit, so we went to a t-shirt creating website and designed a shirt that had a midget standing on a burrito with the words ‘Founding Fathers’ on the front, and on the back would be the phrase ‘Every _ _ _ _ Wednesday’ (the blanks stood for a bad word, so we decided to

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rom the point of its founding, democratic government in the United States of America has faced the challenging need to overcome certain obstacles inherent in both its organization and general structure before many of its basic assumptions could be actualized. Learned and astute observers of the founding and development of American democracy noted the threatening nature of a number of these obstacles during the early days of the new republic. The study proposed here finds its importance and justification in the concept that several of the original problems of American democracy have endured with increasing ominous consequences for the full realization of democratic government in the United States. In particular, two of the most crucial

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