The Articles of Confederation | Period 3: 1754-1800 | AP US History | Khan Academy

Hey, this is Kim, and I'm here with Leah, KH Academy's US government and politics fellow. Welcome, Leah! How's it going?

All right, so we're talking about the Articles of Confederation, which I think many people don't realize was the first Constitution of the United States before the one that we have now since 1789. So could you take us through a little bit of what the Articles of Confederation were and the context in which we first brought them on as a governmental system?

Sure! So I think the most important thing to understand about the Articles of Confederation, and why we would talk about this, is because one of the biggest debates that we have in our history is about the balance of power between the federal government and state governments. When the Articles of Confederation were first created, it was in the middle of the American Revolution. They were created in 1777.

So the question becomes, well, how can we run a government that looks as different from monarchy as possible? Right? So they're trying to run away from the past that they're getting away from in the Revolutionary War and trying to create a separate government that doesn't have any of those abuses that they are rebelling against. If they're running away from a monarchy, what they're running towards is what we would call a limited government.

Okay, so their central government, which is synonymous with a federal government, the central government is actually really, really, really small. They don't have an executive branch; they only have Congress. They don't even have a judicial branch. So Congress is made up of all 13 states; every state had one representative.

In order to change the Articles of Confederation, if they wanted to pass an amendment, they had to get unanimous consent from all 13 states. So they're trying to make sure that all of the states are represented equally, but that also sounds like it would have a lot of hurdles to overcome when it comes to getting consensus.

Yeah, for laws, you had to get nine out of 13 states to actually pass a law. So if you can imagine if you're in a room of 13 people and you all have to agree on one pizza topping for the rest of your lives, it would be almost impossible.

Right! Wow, okay. All right, so it sounds like there are some problems with the Articles of Confederation. But did they do anything good for us in this early period?

Yeah, so the biggest thing is that it unites all 13 colonies, and now who are now States, under one government. This government is able to pass a really favorable treaty with Britain and end the Revolutionary War in 1783—the Treaty of Paris.

Okay, so this is kind of the government that gets us through the Revolutionary War and is with us when we first start in the 1780s.

Yeah, and one other specific law that they pass is the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This Northwest Ordinance kind of tells us how we are going to expand as we move west and what are we going to do with that land. That's a really important idea when we're moving forward with our country.

The only problem is, with the Articles of Confederation, is there are a lot of things that we still have to figure out as we're growing. There's a lot of growing pains.

So what led the early government of the United States to realize that they wanted to abandon these Articles of Confederation in favor of a different Constitution?

So the inciting incident is Shay's Rebellion. It happens in Massachusetts, and it's a group of farmers led by this guy named Daniel Shay. What's happening is that we had just gotten out of the Revolutionary War, and a lot of the people who had fought in the Revolutionary War still hadn't gotten payment for their duty. They also were experiencing really high state taxes.

So, Daniel Shay and these farmers are very upset, obviously, and they're wanting their money. And so they start a rebellion. But the problem is with the way that the central government that was built: first Congress had no ability to levy or collect taxes. If they couldn't tax, they had no ability to actually pay back their farmers.

Along with that, they didn't have any money to create a military. So each state had their own militia, but the United States as a whole, as a country, did not have a military to suppress this rebellion. So on both ends, we are in a really bad situation politically.

Wow! So there's this moment where you find armed rebellion against the United States for lack of money, and the US government finds that it can't raise money and it can't raise an army to put down this rebellion.

Exactly! And so there is this fear immediately. And what we see is a lot of the founding fathers that we know and really respect today, like George Washington, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, they get together and they say this is a problem; we need to change what we have.

And this leads to the Constitutional Convention, in which we draft our second Constitution.

Right, yeah! So in 1787, the leaders of the United States get together and say, all right, the Articles of Confederation aren't working. We're going to need a stronger central government, even though we were trying to get away from the monarchy. Now let's think of something that's going to work a little bit better for us.