civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting I think now is as good a time as any to admit a bit of a minor confession I sometimes have so much trouble reading primary source documents I've got article 9 in the Articles of Confederation in front of me I think I've read it 10 times I don't know what it means these documents were written a long time ago it can be hard to understand primary sources are difficult to bring to life this is Paul bogus he's a teacher at DAG hammarskjöld middle school a lot of times in a classroom it's very easy to give your standard quiz where the kids will read through the documents still name the different parts and spit it back on a test but I wanted my kids to ingest the documents a little bit differently so how on earth do you convey to someone the challenges of governing under the Articles of Confederation without putting them in a chair and making them read it a hundred times so Hanna imagine you're sitting in the class you're about to do a blah blah boring day and your teacher comes in with this giant sack of blocks and just dumps them on the table heads up no class today we're gonna play a game oh you love games I do so the teacher queues up some more music and they play articles of confederation the class is divided into teams which are States and more students are put in the bigger States so the group of eight represented Virginia the group of six represented Pennsylvania figured before represented to New York the group of two represented Connecticut and finally the one lonely kid by themselves represented Delaware oh poor Delaware but each state got a different amount of blocks and was told to make a big strong fort that is still standing at the end of class and the bigger your state was the more blocks you got so Virginia got a ton of blocks and Delaware got three Delaware's fort is done in like five seconds but every state could do whatever they wanted to help each other out they could trade blocks they could sell blocks they can help build each other's forts and they could change any rules of the game at all as long as they follow two guideline rule number one any state can propose an rule as long as four out of the five groups agreed to it and rule number two each state would only get one vote regardless of their size so they can do anything anything but they need to convince almost all of the other states to agree yeah and Delaware right off the bat proposes a rule that all states should share their blocks equally so everyone gets the same amount and you can probably guess how that went over so Delaware tries another tack Delaware also tried to buy blocks from other states but none of the other states want to sell them they immediately shot Delaware down and so Delaware was stuck with just their three measly little blocks but at that moment me who was playing England stepped in and offered to sell Delaware some of the blocks that we had on hand the other states thought this was immensely unfair and so they tried to stop it but that didn't work because Connecticut also wanted more blocks and bought them from England did they pass any rules at all I spoke with several teachers who played Paul's game and they all said no matter how many times they've played it not one rule got passed and at the end of class the teacher looks at all the forts in the different states and says what if I told you that Delaware's fort is solely responsible for protecting the entire class in every single class that I did this activity the kids that were in the group from Virginia all came to the same conclusion and that was if they weren't so greedy and selfish and if they cared more about the other states during the process that they would still have power when it was all over I'm not 100% certain how this game is related to the Articles of Confederation I think you will be by the end of this episode all right but what did those students learn that day that we basically need government to save us from ourselves not quite in the lauded Canon of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence this document is usually remembered for one thing its weaknesses I'm the kapa DJ and this is civics 101 our founding documents series today we're talking about America's first rule book the Articles of Confederation to start Harvard professor Danielle Allen told me that the Articles of Confederation are even mentioned within the Declaration of Independence that second sentence where they say that it's the job of the people to lay the foundation on principle and to organize the powers of government that those two phrases are their to-do list and that's exactly the committees they set up in June of 1776 they needed a committee to articulate the foundation of principle that was the committee drafting the Declaration of Independence and then they needed a committee to organize the powers of government and that was the committee drafting the Articles of Confederation this was a committee of 13 led by anti independence Congressman John Dickinson of Delaware so they were written even before we declared independence from Britain no because there were 16 months of revisions and then the Continental Congress adopted them in 1777 but they weren't fully ratified by the states until 1781 the American Revolution didn't end until 1783 okay so Articles of Confederation what do they say the first article is just quote the style of this Confederacy shall be the United States of America Confederacy yeah like this South in the Civil War yeah Confederacy is just a style of government with individual sovereign states no big central power running everything the most famous one today is the European Union but why did we want it to be like that here's Linda monk she's a constitutional scholar and the author of the Bill of Rights a user's guide I think it's it's a new government trying to decide okay we didn't like the way the old King did it or the old government did it how are we gonna do it now I mean when you think about it that that the colony of the former colonies were able to unite together to fend off the world's strongest military was astonishing but again as Washington recognized a revolution by itself is commonplace a revolution is an idea and that's a lot easier than a rule book we wanted to make sure we got everything right and when you think about the mindset of the people who wrote this they were coming from a monarchy and they wanted this new system of government to be as opposite as possible to what rule under England was like I've even heard teachers refer to this using a Goldilocks metaphor that monarchy was too hot and the Articles of Confederation were too cold and the Constitution is gonna be just right exactly yeah I asked Joel Collins law professor at South Carolina Honors College about the Goldilocks metaphor one's too hot one's too cold and Constitution is just right well okay [Music] let's talk about the articles so so here we are we've declared our independence we fought for our independence we've won the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown by the way I call it the war of independence not the Revolutionary War we weren't trying to overthrow King George we just want our freedom but the one thing that these newly formed States had in common was a desire to avoid a strong central government they did not want that the articles are referred to in the language of the Articles a firm League of friendship and the articles were designed to be really inefficient how did this purposefully inefficient government work they have one branch of government and that's the legislative branch and they call that the Confederation Congress that's Lindsay Stephens government teacher from Katy Texas it's unicameral so there's only one group and one state gets one vote so that's the structure of it and then they specifically list what powers the national government can have they have the power to coin money the power to make treaties with foreign nations and they also do have the power to request money from the states request money that word requests it's really important the federal government is in taxing States they're just asking the states for money and what if the states say no you just stand on your porch and shake your fist at them and then if you're another state you said we'll look Delaware didn't do it I'm not gonna do it either after the American Revolution ends the states no longer have a common purpose that was what was holding this league of friendship together that they all had a common interest and that was winning the American Revolution and sticking it to the man sticking it to the British government once that common interest is gone the quarrels the fighting begins it's like 13 arguing brothers and sisters that don't want to be equal that's Linda monk again no you take out the garbage no I don't want to take out the garbage you take out the garbage and it particularly came down to this issue of taxation of how are you going to support and a government if the states individually aren't willing to pay taxes to cover the the costs and like I say the can you imagined today if we had an army of unpaid soldiers would we expect that government to long continue no so the the biggest issue was that Congress as it would say the United States and Congress assembled that was actually the name of the government it had some powers but fundamental is the power to tax and until you had some agreement amongst the states that was gonna allow that it was going to be very difficult the articles could be amended right yes so why didn't we just add an amendment saying that the government could tax the states well the amendment process itself was a huge issue it took 13 out of 13 to change the Articles Rhode Island which they call rogue Island would never go along with anything they were always the no vote and as a result of that they couldn't get that 13 out of 13 votes necessary by the way each state had one vote that's the way it worked back then that's where worked the Continental conditional convention he stated one vote it took nine out of thirteen to enact anything they never had the power to create and fund an army or a Navy they never had any right to control interstate commerce and these states were effecting disadvantages on each other by enacting tariffs and and levies of duties and all that and so the trade was just a mess they were menacing Foreign Park powers looking at these rich colonies sitting there you know unorganized and United it had no chief executive no president at all well there was a president of Congress but that's like for Trivial Pursuit not a president with powers like you and I know it there was also no judicial branch no national courts and no official meeting place no like building go back and read about all the various places the articles were Confederate the Confederation Congress met they met in New York Philadelphia Lancaster Pennsylvania one time and in one of the books that I assigned to my students David O Stewart says a peripatetic government can never be expected to be very strong and powerful there were so many problems there was no common currency think about that you couldn't go into some other state and and use your money because it was no good there were exchange rates but they wildly fluctuated and they were not consistent for one thing without liquid currency available people who owed money and who couldn't pay their debts with bartered crops or something like that worrying a heck of a bond Hanna you've got to look up photos of this early American currency it may have been an economic nightmare but it was certainly a beautiful one you got Connecticut shillings Rhode Island Dollars and Virginia pounds sterling I'm seeing the flaws of the Articles of Confederation but were there any strengths to it yeah I asked Lindsey that exact question under the Articles of Confederation the Continental Congress was able to pass one very successful law and that's the Northwest Ordinance the Northwest Ordinance decided what we were gonna do with the land that we had acquired through the Treaty of Paris at the conclusion of the American Revolution this land that we got from Britain at the end of the war was called the Northwest Territory and it includes most of modern-day Ohio Indiana Illinois Michigan and Wisconsin and the question that the delegates had to answer is what are we gonna do with this land are we gonna make it a colony are we gonna make it a territory can it be admitted as a state and they kind of saw the writing on the wall that if they left it as a colony the territory could eventually have another revolution so this is another example of let's not do things the way that England did we don't want another little colony to break off and have a revolution right right so they say these territories can become States part of the United States but there are some requirements they have to have self-government they have to have freedom of speech freedom of the press freedom of religion they're not allowed to have slavery okay stop this ordinance says slavery is not legal in new states yep we're three documents in and we have finally arrived at our first national limitation on the expansion of slavery but states that practice it already are allowed to continue to practice it and therefore become even more rich and powerful yes so this can be viewed as a pro-slavery and anti-slavery ordinance but that aside if a new territory abides by these rules it can apply to become a state they have to have a constitution and they had to be approved by the Congress but once they went through that process they were able to have equal rights and equal representation in the government as the original 13 States and that was really a revolutionary idea of us adding more States to our Union that really didn't happen in the past so there's a little good but it seems like a lot of problems in this weak system of government how does it all come crashing down in the end crashes like this you got this government that can't tax can't collect money and therefore can't pay soldiers and as Linda monk puts it unpaid soldiers after war's over are not a good idea and it leads to something called Shay's rebellion we can think of that term harshly today call it rebellion instead of say revolution but really Daniel Shays had been a captain he was a Revolutionary War veteran these were farmers from Western Massachusetts who had gone off to defend their country while the bankers from Boston were foreclosing on their debts and taking away their homes that didn't sound fair to the people of Western Massachusetts and Shea's and other unpaid veterans so he and these farmers decided to march on the Armory in Springfield Massachusetts and seize the guns and wet weaponry and ammunition and they will go then march down to where the Confederation Congress was meeting and they were going to absolutely a fight fire them up they were gonna take over the government so Massachusetts says we need help and the federal government requests that the states chip in with money and soldiers and cannon but all those states say they've got their own problem so what happens what happens is wealthy private citizens who are losing money due to this uprising pool their resources together and they hire a private military to quell Shay's and the four thousand plus rebels but look at the implication of this you've got private citizens hiring private citizens to go to war with private citizens is that what you want is that what America is is that what this new nation is going to be like and if it happens in Massachusetts who's to say it's not gonna happen in your state Shay's rebellion is a cautionary tale so we're at the beginning of the end as is so often the case it comes down to money all this time the states have been doing whatever they could with their own constitutions and every state had their own constitution by the way just to make things work when it came to interstate commerce dealing with those Rhode Island shillings and those Connecticut dollars so what they had to do was create treaties just to trade with each other like foreign nations and there's a call for a political convention at man's Tavern in Annapolis Maryland to talk about how we should handle trade between the states James Madison was there only five states sent representatives the host state Maryland senton nobody they have been given directives from their states to discuss interstate commerce and to create trade agreements but on new jersey's directive from their state it says and anything else pertinent to the success of our country anything else pertinent to the success of our country anything else New Jersey's like anything any of us you want to chat about while we're all here some sort of big elephant in the room maybe we could talk about fixing this disaster of a government system but they can't do much with just five states so they decide to meet up again next year but not in this bar in Maryland let's do it proper let's do it in Philadelphia I think I know where this is going yeah the point of this episode is not to say the Articles of Confederation were an abject failure and oh how foolish were we they taught us a great deal about ourselves so I want to end with a final thought from Lindsey Stephens some people call the Articles of Confederation a learning to crawl before you walk document taking the first steps of creating a national government some people consider it to be a total mistake I think those people are looking at it with with the insight of what we know today if you think about it though the articles was is really a good first step towards a national government what we learn from the articles is that absence of power doesn't create a limited government it actually creates an ineffective government you know government has a purpose and that is to protect the unalienable rights of its citizens and in order for that to happen we do have to give the government some power we just have to be careful about how we do that and so we developed a system of checks and balances separation of powers in order to make sure that that system stays in place and that the government's power is limited so did we learn from our mistakes can we keep this republic Hannah find out next time on civics 101 today's episode was produced by me NAT Kappa DJ with Hannah McCarthy our staff includes Jackie Hilbert Daniella Vidal Ali and Ben Henry Erika Janik is our executive producer Maureen McMurray is a justice fighter in the firm league of friendship if you want to check out some photos or read more about Paul Bocuse his lesson plan on teaching the articles confederation with blocks head on over to our website civics 101 podcast org music in this episode by jiz our blue dot sessions kevin macleod Azura and cratan civics 101 is a production of NH PR New 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