having won their independence from Great Britain with the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War Americans were now faced with a new problem and that problem was how they would govern themselves beginning in the 1780s and Lasting through the 1790s the United States entered into what historians have referred to as the critical period of American history critical in the sense that this was really the make or break decades for the Young Nation the nation might not survive these decades or the nation May flourish we were in a critical and a precarious position the way we're going to approach module 3 is we're going to look first at section one entitled strengthening the new nation and in this section we're going to be looking at the Articles of Confederation the Constitutional Convention and the ratification of the U.S Constitution but in this lecture we want to cover the Articles of Confederation and to start we need to talk about this profound sense among most of the leading Americans at the time that the nation's first constitution the Articles of Confederation were going to be a problem for the country for example Alexander Hamilton who famously said After the Revolution was concluded that we have happily concluded the great work of Independence but much remains to be done to reach the fruits of it Hamilton was of course referring to whether or not this country would survive we were an independent nation but the nation had such great potential for uh uh for prosperity's sake that we would run the risk of squandering it if we didn't secure it and even John Adams uh reflecting on this sense of uh anxiety among Americans the union is still to me an object of much anxiety as ever Independence was he says in 1784 now what was the problem exactly well the problem exactly after the war of Independence was a conflict between uh state governments and the national government um and this conflict between the state governments and the national governments would of course last even into our own age but in the make or break Decades of the 1780s 1790s it really was of great cause for concern even George Washington recognized it when he famously wrote that the the disc inclination of the individual states to yield competent powers to Congress for the federal government and their unreasonable jealousy of that body and of one another and the disposition which seems to pervade each of being all wise and all-powerful within itself will if there is not a change in the system be the downfall of our nation and of course what was creating all of these problems between State and national government whereas the United States first constitution the Articles of Confederation which were written of course by the Second Continental Congress they first became law in 1781 having been approved by that governing body and by the individual states and but they did not last long by 1789 the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the current Constitution we have today but it is the Articles of Confederation that was creating the critical situation in this country and the reason for that uh as we'll become more and more clear to you in the next few minutes uh was that this governing document um did not effectively bind the country together instead it was a government that was creating a nation of 13 independent republics that were Loosely affiliated with each other in a Confederation and this meant that the the country was vulnerable to not only external uh threats but the nation was in lack of a better word too Democratic meaning the states were all equals of one another and of course were very jealous of one another and guarded of one another in terms of their own powers within their states and so essentially what happened after the American Revolution after the American War of Independence was we embarked then on about a eight-year period of American History under the article's Confederation that it became clear to everybody these things needed to be replaced and these things were the source of a lot of problems in the country political problems social problems and even economic problems and so the way we're going to approach these Articles of Confederation is we're going to spend a little time talking about the main features of the Articles meaning what type of government did the Articles of Confederation create and once we understand the type of government it created you'll uh you'll be able to see very clearly the weaknesses of this national government and then we'll finish by talking about the loan accomplishment because the Articles of Confederation did have success in one area and so we'll conclude this discussion with the single accomplishment of the Articles of Confederation but let's just go ahead and Dive Right In by talking about the main features of the first constitution in American history the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union first ratified in early February of 1781 the Articles of Confederation created a national government that enshrined the idea of State sovereignty now what is State sovereignty well sovereignty means that you are the end-all be-all authority uh and when applied to the uh to States it means really the idea then of states rights State sovereignty was the idea that the individual states within their borders were the supreme authority and that no other state or a group of states could tell another state or Force another state to do something it didn't want to do um and the Articles of Confederation had essentially taken what had existed during the era of solitary neglect in which the colonial legislatures had all the power within their colonies and enshrined it in this uh Constitution and so State sovereignty was the first main feature now it's important you understand this because with State sovereignty everything else kind of flows from it now it was an Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation that uh enshrined the state sovereignty when it says each state retains its sovereignty its freedom its independence and every Power jurisdiction and right which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States in the Congress assembled this is just a fancy way of saying that any power not given to the national government under the Articles of Confederation was therefore a power reserved for the states now that may sound very familiar to the 10th Amendment of the United States uh Constitution and and there is a direct correlation between this concern over State sovereignty in the 10th Amendment of the U.S Constitution but I want to make something clear here you're about to see here very clearly that the Articles of Confederation gave almost no power uh to the national government and so with the national government without any real power that meant that the states pretty much had all the power uh and that's why we say that one main feature of the Articles of Confederation was this idea of State sovereignty now the second main feature of the Articles Confederation concerns the actual governing body of the of the government there was only a single branch of the national government under the article's Confederation now today we have a three branch system of government we have a legislative branch an executive branch and a judicial branch that's what our U.S Constitution creates but under the Articles of Confederation that Constitution only created a single branch of the national government and it was the legislative branch which was going to make laws the name of this uh uh and so this meant that we had a Congress and then and the legislative branch under the Articles of Confederation is sometimes referred to as the Congress of the Confederation other times you may see it as the Confederation Congress but it existed it said it came into existence in 1781 when it took over for the Second Continental Congress during the American war of independence and only lasted eight years until 1789 when it was replaced by the U.S Constitution and the two house Congress that we have today now the Congress of the Confederation lacked a lot of power as we're going to see here in a little bit it had a little bit of power in some area is but it lacked a lot of basic powers that a national government would have now um this Congress of the Confederation represents then the second main feature of the Articles of Confederation State sovereignty being the first a single branch of government being the second the third main feature of the Articles of Confederation uh is regarding how the individual states were represented in that Congress of the Confederation and there were stipulations on like how many people could represent each state you know you could have as few as four or as many as like nine something like that so there were rules dictating on like how many people could actually go to the Congress of the Confederation and sit in that Congress as a representative of the state but the important feature that I want to focus on here is Article 5 section 4 which says in determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled each state shall have one vote now what this meant is that you could have 12 people sitting in the Congress representing the state of Virginia and four people sitting in the Congress representing the state of Rhode Island but whenever the Congress voted on anything Virginia had one vote and Rhode Island had one vote and so that means that the Third main feature of the Articles of Confederation was equal representation among the states the state's population didn't matter it was based upon equality one state one vote and that makes sense when you go back and think about the first main feature of the Articles of Confederation being State sovereignty you wouldn't have created a government that allowed a more populated state like Virginia to have more influence and power over a lesser populated state like Rhode Island because that would be infringing upon Rhode Island's sovereignty one state one vote they're all equal they're all Sovereign so those are the main features of the Articles of Confederation we've created then a single Branch national government in which the states pretty much retain all the power and the states are equally represented in that government so let's talk for a second about some of the weaknesses then of the Articles of Confederation and by now this has become clear to you there were a lot but let's identify and highlight some specific ones uh that are worth remembering for example the power to tax the national government under the Articles of Confederation lacked the basic power to tax the individual states or to tax the individual citizens of the states themselves now the power to tax uh was of course the controversial power this was one of the reasons we had rebelled against Great Britain but the power to tax was going to be denied to the Articles of Confederation and to the Confederation Congress now there reason for that is that you know they were not going to create a national government that had the ability to start taxing people in States because that was why we had rebelled for the most part so who did the taxing states did States taxed their citizens but the national government couldn't do that now the reason the power to tax is a weakness or the lack of the power to tax is a weakness is many many fold number one it meant we weren't going to have a National military we wouldn't have the money the national government would not have the ability to fund raise and equip and maintain a national Army so we didn't have one now why is that a problem well hopefully it should be obvious to you as a why that's a problem it means that we will not be able to defend their borders we will not be able to deal with internal disturbances perhaps an Insurrection or Rebellion within the United States we won't be able to deal with any of that so who did have a military the states did the state's funded and equipped their own State militias um and as you learned during the American war of independence relying on state militias was never a great idea so the power to tax meant we would have be very weak as a country in terms of being able to instill or uh to uh uh ensure domestic tranquility as well as to protect our borders against foreign enemies uh that's so that's a big weakness another weakness uh that stems from the lack of the power to tax was the ability to pay our debts we talked in a previous lecture about the way the Second Continental Congress and later the Confederation Congress funded the war effort as they sold treasury notes they sold bonds now Bonds were just the Second Continental Congress and later the conf the Confederation Congress um basically giving someone an IOU for whatever they had that they needed to sustain the war effort it could be money it could have been livestock to feed the Army but during the war we funded the war effort through government bonds um and that then then that means that when the war is over we have a lot of public debt in fact we had over 75 million dollars in public debt money that the national government owed either state governments or private individuals and without the ability to tax the Congress of the Confederation is not going to have the ability to pay back any of these ious any of these government bonds this is going to create a lot of instability both economic but also social as well as political instability because people are going to lose faith in their national government a government that can't pay its debts is no government at all another weakness was this Congress didn't have the power to regulate commerce um now Commerce is the trading of goods uh and and there were two types of Commerce of importance here there were interstate commerce that was trade between the states and then there was foreign Commerce trade between the United States and other nations the Confederation Congress didn't have the ability to regulate any of that stuff it was the states that did it because the states were sovereign uh so the states would impose their own tariffs on other states Goods in order to protect their own State's goods from having to compete with them in their borders some states would impose High tariffs on british-made products while other states would impose low tariffs it just it just depended on who Great Britain favored uh in terms of working out a trade deal rather than working at a trade deal with the United States you had foreign powers and working out trade deals with individual states oftentimes at the expense the economic expense of other states it was chaos it was a completely inefficient and it was really dangerous to be quite honest to have foreign powers interfering in our Commerce as much as what was going on during this time period and that was a weakness because the Articles of Confederation lacked this basic power to regulate both interstate commerce and foreign Commerce and the final weakness I think worth mentioning was leadership now this is a picture of Federal Hall this was the United States Congress our nation's first capital was in New York City uh I'm sorry actually the first capital was in uh well yeah New York City it moved later to Philadelphia and then later still uh to Washington DC but the first U.S Congress or and or the the Congress of the Confederation met here at Federal Hall in New York City during this time uh and I mentioned that one of the other weaknesses was leadership since this government didn't have any power nobody really wanted to serve in it uh I mean I don't want to shock anybody but most politicians want to serve where they can actually exercise some power and and some influence and that was not in the Congress of the Confederation um so where were where was all the leadership of the and I mean it I mean the great minds and and political leaders of the country the Washingtons The Jeffersons the Madison's the monroes the John Adams the Ben Franklin's where did they all serve they all served in the state legislatures because working for the Congress of the Confederation especially after the war it was no it was it wasn't prestigious you didn't have any power you weren't gonna get anything done so one other weakness was this lack of leadership here uh so hopefully you're getting the getting my point is that the Articles of Confederation uh had within them a lot of inherent weaknesses and these weaknesses that if they're not fixed if they're not strengthened if they're not buttressed um we're probably not going to last very long as a nation and all those detractors like Hamilton and Adams and Washington to say nothing of the Europeans I mean they were convinced we would fail but the Nations growing chorus of detractors would probably have been proven right if something didn't change because the Articles of Confederation they simply lacked the ability to bind the country together to ensure things like domestic tranquility the to ensure that we could pay our debts provide for the common defense um just basic things that a national government needed to do the Articles of Confederation were incapable of doing now students will oftentimes ask well why did they do this well think about it and put it in context they wrote this constitution during the war if they wrote a constitution that was really really strong right and created a really strong national government it would have run pretty counter to the to the ideals right the spirit of 1776 it would have been very difficult to convince all 13 states to go along with a much stronger national government when you were actually rebelling against a much stronger national government at the time so the one reason they did it is they did it because the the extendencies and the expediences of War right needed to keep the country together in order to win our independence but another reason they did it is that the era of solitary neglect you know we talked about how it had a profound impact on the development of the colonies and it did the rebellion was largely about going back to that and so the Articles Confederation essentially enshrined this the era of solitary neglect so it's kind of what they wanted it was just over time they realized it wasn't going to be enough now there was one loan accomplishment I I don't want you to get the idea that the Articles Confederation were complete rubbish because they weren't there was one area in which the Congress of the Confederation could actually get things done and that was of course governing western territories uh because the territories of the United States don't belong to the individual states they belong to the national government which means then that the Articles of Confederation is the supreme authority within the territories of the United States now uh in 1787 uh the Confederation Congress passed an ordinance that dealt with a portion of the territories in the Northwest and so it Bears the name the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. now Ordnance is just a law that governs land and it was in the governing of these western territories in the Northwest that the Articles of Confederation had a lot of success in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 it did a lot of things but I want to mention two things of great importance that it did this is the uh the ordinance itself um the first thing that the ordinance did in 1787 is it established in the Northwest Territories which is this area in green here uh this was area an area of the West that we won as a result of our war against the British um the Northwest Ordinance dealt with that territory now on this map you can see the present-day State boundaries but imagine those aren't there uh the Northwest Ordinance established within that territory a process for how that territory would become a state now I'm going to walk you through the process real quick you don't really need to remember it but it's an interesting idea and an interesting process unto itself according to the Northwest Ordinance whenever the population of that territory of of white property holding citizens in that territory when the population of it hit 3 000 people uh that territory was now allowed to form a territorial legislature to govern themselves and a governor would be appointed by the Confederation Congress to be kind of the congress's representative there now of course you're not going to get the entire territory being populated by 3 000 people everything Moves In Waves right so they're they're the first group of settlers into this territory are going to be living along the Ohio river and making their way between the Ohio River there and Lake Erie in what is present-day Ohio and once the area of the territory had reached 3 000 people they could have a territorial legislature and be uh appointed a governor uh once the population of the territory reached 30 000 people at that point the territory was allowed to hold a constitutional convention write a State Constitution establish its borders and then apply for Statehood now the only stipulation when these territories wrote their new constitutions to become a state is they had to create a republic right he couldn't create a democracy he couldn't create a monarchy or anything like that you had to create a government they're a representative government a republic right and that again speaks about we talked about how Thomas Jefferson had uh established a uh Republican uh philosophy right philosophy and republicanisms representative government um now the interesting thing about this is that when these states uh wrote their constitutions and applied for Statehood the U.S Congress would then vote to allow them in now once a state was admitted to the union it was it would enter the Union with the same rights and privileges as all the others and that's and that was really interesting especially for the 1780s and the 1790s you know Europe really took a uh took notice of this uh now we did this because it showed our commitment to that we did not want to be an Empire we did not want to treat these territories as colonies like we had been treated by the British it really shows our commitment to these uh um Democratic and these Republican ideals uh as we marched our way through the Northwest Territory um but one thing that the Northwest Ordinance did is uh that's worth remembering is that it established then a process uh for statehood and that process for Statehood as it turns out would be how every single state in this country became a state it went through this process because later on when the Constitution was written the the Northwest Ordinance was adopted into the U.S Constitution and so the process remained right and so as the U.S acquired more and more territories this process would then be applied to those territories and interesting enough this process that I just outlined for you right that a certain number of settlers territorial legislature governor and then later or you're allowed to write a state constitution and apply for Statehood well this process is how every single state in this country went from being a territory to becoming a state with the exception of the original 13 and the other exception was Texas which was an independent republic when it was annexed into the United States this is a great map I think that shows you how uh how we marched across the continent and how the states were admitted into the Union but outside of those original 13 states and outside and and with the exception of Texas uh it was the Northwest Ordinance that established the blueprint that established the process by which a territory went from being a territory to becoming a state now there's one more thing that the Northwest Ordinance did had a profound impact on the political development of the country the Northwest Ordinance also banned slavery north of the Ohio River and the Ohio River was the kind of the demarcation point between uh the United States states at the time and that old Northwest Territory uh on this map it's that squiggly line between this where it says slave states and old Northwest that's the Ohio River and the Northwest Ordinance banned slavery north of that River now the reason this is an important development in the history of the United States is that it means that slavery never goes to this territory it never gets a foothold here it never expands here and the reason that's worth remembering is that that means that the states that are carved out of the Northwest Territory they don't have any history with slavery and when they write their constitutions after being territories they were going to write constitutions that did not allow for slavery because slavery never existed here to begin with and this is going to have a profound impact then on the political development of the country and I'm going to start cycling through some electoral Maps uh from presidential elections uh beginning with 1804 all the way up to 1860 and the reason I'm going to do that is that you're going to see the entrance of these States from the Northwest Territories you're going to see them start to swing the balance of political power in this country in favor of the northern states that did not allow for slavery and this would become a big issue right political power becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of the northern states that did not allow slavery and one of the biggest reasons this was happening was because of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 Banning slavery in that territory and these states that are carved out and become very populated are going to have the effect of throwing the balance of power in this country political power in favor of the free states at the expense of the slave states in the lead up to the American Civil War so you see here's a map from 1804 that shows you we have the entrance of Ohio and at that time Ohio only had two U.S senators and one representative and that meant they had three electoral votes and that's why I'm showing you presidential Maps but you can see that by 1812 more people have now moved to Ohio and by 1812 Ohio has more political power now right it's got two U.S senators it's got five members of the House of Representatives giving it seven electoral votes for the presidency by 1820 Ohio has gone up one more electoral vote and now we've seen the entrance of Indiana right three more electoral votes by 1816. here's the 1820 we now have Illinois uh and a lot of people moved to Illinois very quickly by the way uh and with the opening of the Illinois territory and it becoming a state we now have its entrance it's a free state and nine additional electoral votes two more Senators uh seven more representatives for the northern free states in it by 1820 by 1824 the numbers just keep increasing Ohio is now up to 16 uh electoral votes in the ns5 Illinois has split their votes here uh here we are at 1832 we got 21 electoral votes now for Ohio nine in Indiana five in Illinois so you see how the power is Shifting it's shifting as more and more people are moving into the Northwest Territory uh here we are in 1836 we now have Michigan coming into the union and increasing this control even more here's 1848 we now have Wisconsin we now have 23 electoral votes in Ohio 12 in Indiana nine in Illinois again the balance here is just being shifted to the northern free states and here we are in 1860. all right right before the American Civil War we have 23 electoral votes for Ohio 13 for Indiana 11 for Illinois five for Wisconsin and again five or six for Michigan so what's happened here is just the simple Act of prohibiting slavery north of that Ohio River in 1787 had a profound impact in the development of the Congressional makeup of the country right it has the effect of Shifting the balance of power in this country in the political power in the favor of the free states and this was going to be a major issue in the lead-up to the American Civil War as a lot of these Southern States as you can see the electoral votes their electoral power their political power is not as pronounced not as big as the Northern State uh and so this Northwest Ordinance is it's worth remembering and it's a major accomplishment because it outlines a process for Statehood but also by Banning slavery north of the Ohio River it's going to have the effect of down the road Shifting the balance of political power in this country in favor of the free states and this would be a major concern for the southern states in the lead-up to the American Civil War okay so that'll wrap up our discussion about the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union um by now it should be clear that outside of the Northwest Ordinance these things were pretty much garbage and uh if we didn't do something about them if we didn't find a way to strengthen them if we didn't find a way to perhaps replace them with something stronger we probably weren't going to last very long as a country and that's a reasonable assessment so where we're going to go next is we're going to look at the Constitutional Convention and kind of talk about its Origins uh and then eventually get into a discussion about what happened at that Constitutional Convention that produced the Constitution we have today which replaced the Articles of Confederation