- [Instructor] Hey, this is Kim and I'm here with Leah,
Khan Academy's US Government and Politics Fellow.
Welcome Leah.
- [Leah] How's it going?
- [Kim] Alright, 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
what the Articles of Confederation were
and the context in which we first brought them on
as a governmental system?
- [Leah] 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, and so the question becomes,
well, how can we run a government
that looks as different from monarchy as possible?
- [Kim] 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.
- [Leah] If they're running away from a monarchy,
what they're running towards
is what we would call limited government.
- [Kim] OK.
- [Leah] So their central government,
which is synonymous with a federal government,
the central government is actually
really, really, really small.
- [Kim] OK.
- [Leah] 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.
- [Kim] OK.
- [Leah] 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.
- [Kim] OK, 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.
- [Leah] 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. (Kim laughs)
It would be almost impossible, right?
- [Kim] Wow, OK, alright, 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?
- [Leah] Yeah, so the biggest thing
is that it unites all 13 colonies who are now states
under one government.
- [Kim] OK.
- [Leah] This government is able to pass
a really favorable treaty with Britain
and end the Revolutionary War in 1783, the Treaty of Paris.
- [Kim] OK, 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.
- [Leah] Yeah, and one another specific law that they pass
is the Northwest Ordinance of 1787
and this Northwest Ordinance kinda tells us
how we are going to expand as we move west
and what are we going to do with that land,
and 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 is a lot of things that we still have to figure out
as we're growing, there's a lot of growing pains.
- [Kim] 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?
- [Leah] So the inciting incident is Shays' Rebellion.
It happens in Massachusets, and it's a group of farmers
led by this guy named Daniel Shays.
What's happening is that we had just gotten out of
the Revolutionary War, and a lot of 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 Shays and these farmers are very upset, obviously,
in their wanting their money and so they started rebelling,
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 collect taxes,
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.
- [Kim] Wow, so, there's this moment
where you find armed rebellion against the United States
for a 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.
- [Leah] 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
and Ben Franklin and 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.
- [Kim] Right, yeah, so in 1787,
the leaders of the United States get together and say,
alright, the Articles of Confederation aren't working.
We're gonna need a stronger central government,
even though we were trying to get away from the monarchy
and now let's think of something
that's going to work a little bit better for us.