hey this is Kim and I'm here with Leah KH Academy's US government and politics fellow welcome Leah how's it going all right 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 sure so I think the most important thing to understand about the Arles Confederation and why we would talk about this is because one of the biggest um 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 uh they were created in 1777 MH and so the question becomes well how can we run a government that looks as different from monarchy as possible right so they're trying to run away from the the past that they're getting away from in in the Revolutionary War and trying to create a separate government that doesn't have any of those abuses that they are rebelling against if they're running away from a monarchy what they're running towards is what we would call a limited government okay so their central government which is synonymous with a federal government the central government is actually really really really small um they don't have an executive branch they only have Congress they don't even have a judicial branch um so Congress is made up of all 13 states every state had one representative okay in order to change the Artic articles Confederation if they wanted to pass an amendment they had to get unanimous consent from all 13 states okay 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 yeah for laws he had to get nine out of 13 states 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 it would be almost impossible right wow okay all right 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 yeah so the biggest thing is that it unites all 13 colonies and now who are now States uh under one government this government is able to pass a really favorable treaty with Britain and end the Revolutionary War in 1783 the Treaty of Paris okay 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 yeah and one other specific law that they pass is the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 um and this Northwest Ordinance kind of 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 conf 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 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 so the inciting incident is Shay's Rebellion it happens in Massachusetts and it's a group of farmers led by this guy named Daniel Shay what's happening is that we had just gotten out of the Revolutionary War and a lot 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 Shay and these farmers are very upset obviously and they're wanting their money and so they start a rebellion 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 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 wow so there's this moment where you find armed Rebellion against the United States for 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 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 right yeah so in 1787 the the lead leaders of the United States get together and say all right the Articles of Confederation aren't working we're going to 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