Pros And Cons Of The Articles Of Confederation

The Articles of Confederation that was adopted in 1781 provided information about the numerous injustices and events that had led the American colonists to create the document as well as their desire to become independent from Britain. The contract had declared their new self-ruling and centralized government form, however, problems began to arise soon after its initiation. Under the Articles, each state only had one vote in regardless of their size, the government lacked a national army for protection nor could the national government enforce laws and there was no chief executive in charge of the country at the time due to the fear of monarchy. The Articles also resulted in no power to control interstate trade, which allowed states to put

During the Constitutional Congress in 1787, 55 nationalist delegates discussed all aspects of the Constitution for months in order to mold it to modern American life and satisfy all or most parties. Among all other compromises that were made during the Convention, the Great Compromise was by far the most essential. The Great Compromise was brought about by the country’s need to determine how representation would be determined. Both the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan proposed promising methods of representation, such as a bi or unicameral legislation and population-based or equal representation respectively. To solve this issue of representation, the Great Compromise utilized ideas from both plans and created a bicameral legislature which included a House of Representatives based on state population and a Senate where two members of each state would represent the state's interests. Although the delegates of the Convention agreed upon scraping the Articles and applying a republican form of government with a chief executive in charge, Northern and Southern politicians disagreed on various points. An issue that caused tension between the North and the South was the issue of slaves counting in the population or not, as the number of representatives in the House of Representatives for each state was based on their overall individual population. The North wanted slaves to only count toward taxes, whereas the South wanted slaves to count only toward their population due to their large prominence in Southern states during this time. To solve this issue, the ⅗ Compromise was enacted, which called for slaves to count as ⅗ of a person for both population and taxes. The North didn’t get much out of