From 1781 EssayFrom 1781 to 1789, the most critical era in the nations development. Rebelling against royal authority, the collection of American colonies, now become a group of American states, had to develop a new government. This government was the Articles of Confederation, a basic constitution, which was ratified by all the states in 1781 before the Revolutionary War ended. The Articles were totally inadequate, providing the U.S. with an ineffective government.
In basic structure, the Articles of Confederation were relatively simple. Since US statesmen had little trust in the unfair judges and monarchs of Britain, the Articles provided for no judiciary or executive branch. The body of government was the Congress, comprising delegates from the thirteen states. Congress was a weak body, again reflecting the USs fear of monarchs as well as the independent heritage possessed by the separate colonies. Amendments could be made only by unanimous consent of all thirteen states and even national laws required a two-thirds majority. From 1781 to 1789 the U.S. had a very weak control government with individual states finding it easy to block legislation.
The Declaration of Independence provided that the states of the world should “be made subject unto the dictates of conscience, that they be regulated by law” and that all citizens were to be equal. This provided no clear, unified, governing force, not even in the words of a political philosopher known as John Locke. The Declaration’s first words had a clear message: “The rights of every being to life and liberty are absolute and inviolable; they are never violated by the state.” To quote, “…that is our law and our religion.”
In 1789 New York Governor John Adams issued his state-by-state constitutional amendment banning citizens from state owned corporations. Adams later proposed a number of amendments to the constitutions of several other major states.
The Federalist Papers, though a major work in the literature, provides very little detail and there is little for any scholar to do about America’s legal history.
The English Civil War was largely dominated by anti-Republican legislation, with laws banning a range of government functions including the executive functions, the police, military and judicial. There were small protests and public demonstrations among some of these lawmakers. By the end of that war, one of the main Republican representatives was Benjamin Franklin. The US government did intervene militarily in North Carolina in response to Union government efforts and to restore order in the state. In 1791, a large army was sent to take control of South Carolina. The US government continued to intervene militarily, though ultimately there were no direct direct casualties on the US side from North Carolina’s actions.
US President John Adams, in 1789, signed an act to create a national commission to oversee the civil administration and other government activities. John Adams led a national revolt against the war and sent a commission to Baltimore to document government policies. This was one of the first major social revolutions in American history. In 1792, James Madison led a convention that ruled the state. The Constitutional Convention was also considered an important precedent in US politics, with a significant number of dissenting citizens including William H. Seward and George Washington (the latter being a staunch republican), Thomas Jefferson (whose party had been split and opposed to the war of 1812), James Madison, and Jefferson’s brother, Hamilton.
The American Revolution, if not a major part of the history of the United States, was not the first revolutionary act of American history. It was the third time the US had faced a country split between Union and government.
History of the Civil War
The Great War gave rise to the great divide between the states. While the United States, with its small central government during the war, was divided between government and states, the Confederacy was represented by James Madison. In addition, there were other political rivals
The foreign and domestic policy of the Articles, one sees their total inadequacy as a constitution. Since individual states held their own interest above that of the new nation, they sought to block much legislation that did not favor them directly. Only in one area did the Congress try to convince a unified policy from the states, the area of land reform. The major landholding states like Virginia, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, did surrender their western lands to the Congress.The letter from the Rhode Island Assembly to Congress Nov. 30, 1782 shows one major problem of the Confederation government that it could not institute a uniform tariff. Because no tariff would be favorable to 2/3 of the states, this was opposed by Rhode Island and probably the other state of commerce, it was impossible to make a national tariff. The Rhode Island letter also reveals a distrust in the appointed officers of Congress to surrender any power to Congress.This explains why a Congressional legislation was never made.
Congress did not have the power to tax the individual states, as indicated in the letter from Virginia man Joseph Jones to George Washington Feb. 27, 1783. Congress could ask for but not demand money.This weakness had many consequences.