The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution

Paper Summary:

By the late 1780's many Americans had grown dissatisfied with the Confederation. It was unable to deal effectively with economic problems and weak in the face of Shay's Rebellion. A decade earlier, Americans had deliberately avoided creating a strong national government. Now they reconsidered. The paper shows that in 1787, the nation produced a new constitution and a new, much more powerful government with three independent branches. The government the Constitution produced has survived far more than two centuries as one of the most stable and most successful in the world. The paper discusses how the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution resembled each other in some cases and differed from each other greatly in other aspects.

From the Paper:

"There were three important ordinances that were formulated and retained by both the Articles and Constitution. The ordinance of 1784, based on a proposal by Thomas Jefferson, divided the western territory into ten self-governing districts, each of which could petition Congress for statehood when its population equaled the number of free inhabitants of the smallest existing state. The Ordinance of 1785, Congress created a system for surveying and selling the western lands, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 abandoned the ten districts established in 1784 and created a single Northwest Territory out of the lands north of the Ohio; the territory out of the divided subsequently into between three and five territories. It also specified a population of 60,000 as a minimum for statehood, guaranteed freedom of religion and the right to trial by jury to residents of the Northwest, and prohibited slavery throughout the territory. As a matter of fact, this may have been the ordinance's most important feature. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the first attempt to ban slavery and outlaw territory."

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