hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit 1 of the ap government curriculum and in this video it's time to talk about the piping hot mess that was the articles of confederation so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked then let's get to it so in this video here's what we're aiming to do explain the relationship between key provisions of the articles of confederation and the debate over granting the federal government greater power formally reserved to the states okay so first what was the articles of confederation well it's one of your required documents in this course so that means i have a whole video exploring its contents in more detail but for now let me just give you the basics first of all let's talk about where it came from if you go back to july of 1776 when american colonists declared their independence from britain you'll see a situation in which now that they had no government these 13 states needed to create one and so each state drafted a constitution for itself and they varied quite a bit ranging from more participatory democratic systems to more elite democratic systems and as i've said before this confederated system of government meant that in the early days of the united states it was more like we had 13 separate governments but they quickly realized that in order to do business on the international stage in terms of treaties and trade and several other concerns there needed to be a central government that bound them all together in order to handle those tasks so that's how you get the articles of confederation it was the first constitution of the united states that bound those 13 states together and you know it's debated whether or not it was by definition an actual constitution or it was more like a mutually beneficial treaty but whatever we're calling it a constitution and since america just broke up with britain we had kind of a monarchy hangover and that means the articles established a governing system that was about as far from monarchy as you could get under this system of government states held most of the power and the central government was very weak and look that was the best thing that the articles had going for it this government certainly avoided the tyranny of a powerful central government but here's where i tell you that that one strength notwithstanding the articles had plenty of weak saw slathered all over it the weaknesses included the fact that under the articles the federal government had only one branch which is to say a congress like there was no executive branch and there was no judicial branch another weakness is that in order to change or amend the articles it required that all 13 states agreed to the change and that to put it mildly was a difficult i'm looking at you rhode island another weakness was that congress had no power to raise tax revenue like if the federal government wanted tax money they just had to ask the states nicely and you could imagine how that went lisa could i have some more [Music] that's really cute y'all see that i mean it got to the point where congress genuinely couldn't pay their bills maybe most significant of those bills was their debt to revolutionary war soldiers and veterans which is going to become a problem but we'll talk more about that in a second but how about we keep talking about how broke the federal congress was for a minute so in order to remedy this problem congress proposed a resolution in 1782 which would grant congress the power to raise funds through a five percent tariff fair enough now eleven states said yes to the proposal but virginia was waffling a little bit but then guess who came along and pronounced an unequivocal no this is why we can't have nice things another weakness under the articles was that there was no national currency so georgia had different money than new york which had different money from virginia that created a mess and finally the last weakness i'll mention is that congress had no power to raise a national army and that became a pretty massive problem in an event known as shay's rebellion now the economy during this period was to use a technical term kind of a dumpster fire and because congress had no money they weren't paying their revolutionary war soldiers what they were due this was a problem for a lot of people but especially the farmers many of whom had gone into debt while they were off fighting the war and when they returned many of them had an awful lot of trouble paying back those debts because of inflation and new taxes being imposed upon them and so what did they do well those farmers petitioned for relief from state and federal governments and of course the government was like hey we support the troops and we wouldn't even have a country if it weren't for you guys and you wouldn't even be in debt if we had paid you what we owed you so you have all the relief you need uh no that is emphatically not what they say instead the government's offered no relief and demanded that these farmers pay their taxes and pay their debts and that not surprisingly got some farmers angry and as it happens one of those farmers was a guy from massachusetts by the name of daniel shays who decided that these policies were a bunch of bull honky so he raised a militia of about a thousand other angry farmers they headed down to the town arsenal which they summarily raided and armed their cells for a proper rebellion now the resulting fight wasn't much of a fight the massachusetts authorities gathered their own militia and pretty much crushed the rebellion so why am i even talking about this because remember we're talking about the weaknesses of the articles of confederation so when shays and his militia started shooting the governor of massachusetts texted the president of the united states and was like hey boo what you doing right now how about you send the national army to help us put down this rebellion lol well a well nervous emoji and what did the president say oh wait this is the articles of confederation so there is no president there is no national army that can come to help so even though the massachusetts militia won the conflict state leaders started reflecting on this situation the economy was bad everywhere and that probably meant that there were a thousand other daniel chases throughout the nation who would rise up in rebellion and what if next time they weren't so easily put down so all of this shine a bright light on the weaknesses of the articles of confederation and will lead the nation to begin thinking about the possibility of a new constitution and that is where we're headed in the next video all right that was unit one topic four of the ap government curriculum if you want help getting an a in your class and a five on your exam may then click right here and grab few packet and if you were helped by this video and you want me to keep making them well you can subscribe and that'll let me know that you want me to keep going heimler out