After carefully going through all of the materials from the Module, post your Historical Analysis Essay (HAE) and reply to at least two of your classmates. You will be evaluated according to the Discu

HIST 1301 Module 7

Topic: Confederation to Constitution

Student Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this lesson, students will be able to:

Describe the Structure of the Articles of Confederation and explain why they were adopted by the United States.

Analyze the various provisions of the Northwest Ordinance and its immediate and long-term significance.

Analyze the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation and the subsequent movement to create a national constitution.

Describe the structure of the Constitution.

Analyze the debate between federalists and anti-federalists over the ratification of the Constitution including the inclusion of the Bill of Rights.

Introductory Essay by Downs

The Articles of Confederation

The structure of government that the United States operated under from 1781-1788 was known as the Articles of Confederation. The United States was a loose confederation of independent and sovereign states. This is how the name of the country came about because these thirteen independent and sovereign states united to form the United States of America. When Americans use the term state, we often are referring to places like Texas or California, but most of the rest of the world would not consider these places states and that is because they are not states. They are more accurately provinces. The term state implies that there is no higher authority, but in fact states are subordinate to the national or federal government. Yet, at the creation of the United States the national government did not have authority over the states. And this was by design. The Articles of Confederation gave immense powers to the states and very little to the national government. The Articles of Confederation intentionally created a decentralized government. The thinking of the time was, “Why create a government similar to England, which we just had a war to get rid of?” or “What is the difference between one tyrant (King George) a thousand miles away and one thousand tyrants (a powerful national government) one mile away?” So the Articles were intentionally weak to avoid recreating a government we had just overthrown. There was no president. There was no supreme court. There was only a national congress with each state having one representative. Whatever decisions and laws they made, the states could ignore as they were independent and sovereign.

The Northwest Ordinance

The Congress passed a series of pieces of legislation in the mid-1780s that only applied to the Northwest Territory, a large piece of unorganized land between the northern states and the Mississippi river. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress governed the territories. This same authority would carry over into the Constitution, as well. Congress banned slavery in the Northwest Territory as a statement of values or principles which declared that slavery should eventually go away. Did the national congress have the authority to do this? Absolutely, but the Northwest Ordinance also established that each new state was to be equal to all of the existing states. Each state had the right to determine the slavery question for its self. Why, then, ban slavery in the Northwest Territory? After the American Revolutionary war, northern states slowly began abolishing slavery. By the early nineteenth century, a balance between slave and free states was established. This balance of power, this compromise with slave-holders would endure until 1860 and the election of Abraham Lincoln. What makes compromise no longer possible is the slavery issue in the territories. What everyone began to realize after the Northwest Ordinance was this: if slavery is not in a territory from its beginning, then it is very unlikely to every come there, but if slavery is present at a territory’s beginning, then it will never go away. Therefore, the compromise between slave and free states is challenged every time the United States expands west and adds more lands in which the slavery/free issue must be resolved.

The Constitution

The Articles of Confederation proved to be quite ineffective when it came to creating a powerful nation. The Massachusetts’s government struggled to put down an internal debtors revolt which was threatening personal property known as Shays’s Rebellion. The national government struggled to deal with Spanish incursions into acknowledged U.S. territory in the southwest. Why? Because every time the congress voted to raise taxes and an army, the states that were not directly affected by the crisis would simply refuse to send tax money or soldiers because they were independent and sovereign. Men like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison believed that the potential of the United States was being wasted under the Articles of Confederation. Men like these thought nationally. Those people who supported the Articles, which was the majority of the population, thought in terms of their local community and they wanted to maintain their independence from a centralized and distant government. The Constitution would create a national government which had sovereignty over the states. The individual states, if the Constitution was ratified, would no longer be able to go against the national government, particularly when it came to raising taxes and troops. If the majority of the population was in favor of the Articles of Confederation, why did the Constitution get ratified by the states?

The Debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists

The Constitution created a federal system of government. If you supported the ratification of the Constitution then you were a federalist. Historians applied the name of Anti-federalists to those people who opposed the constitution. No one at the time referred to themselves as an Anti-Federalist. The debate was really about the anti-federalist’s fears of losing their personal liberty through the creation of a large centralized and bureaucratic government. To address these fears, Madison, Hamilton and John jay wrote a series of essays entitled, ‘the Federalist papers” of which Madison’s Federalist Paper No 10 is usually the one historians consider to be the most important because Madison argued that a large diverse government was actually a better guarantee of individual liberty. If this was true, argued the Anti-federalist, then perhaps we should write done exactly what our liberties are. This became known as the Bill of Rights, which are the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Chapter Outline

7.1 Common Sense: From Monarchy to an American Republic

7.2 How Much Revolutionary Change?

7.3 Debating Democracy

7.4 The Constitutional Convention and Federal Constitution

After the Revolutionary War, the ideology that “all men are created equal” failed to match up with reality, as the revolutionary generation could not solve the contradictions of freedom and slavery in the new United States. Trumbull’s 1780 painting of George Washington (Figure 7.1) hints at some of these contradictions. What attitude do you think Trumbull was trying to convey? Why did Trumbull include Billy Lee, a person whom Washington enslaved, and what does Lee represent in this painting?

During the 1770s and 1780s, Americans took bold steps to define American equality. Each state held constitutional conventions and crafted state constitutions that defined how government would operate and who could participate in political life. Many elite revolutionaries recoiled in horror from the idea of majority rule—the basic principle of democracy—fearing that it would effectively create a “mob rule” that would bring about the ruin of the hard-fought struggle for independence. Statesmen everywhere believed that a republic should replace the British monarchy: a government where the important affairs would be entrusted only to representative men of learning and refinement.