By: Elijah Buck
In 1787, when the thirteen colonies were what made up the United States of America, just over a decade after the Declaration of Independence came onto the scene, the Constitution was written and came into today’s political system. In 1786, the first system meant to fill the role of today’s constitution was signed. This system, which came into place a year before the Constitution, was called the Articles of Confederation.
The Articles of Confederation lasted around a year and obviously due to that has a lot of issues that closed it down- coming from reasons such as the document was hard to amend, states had their own money policies, states had to conduct their own foreign policies, Congress needed nine out of thirteen states to pass any laws and others that will eventually be talked about- including Shay’s rebellion.
The Articles of Confederation failed and there is no doubt about that. There are many reasons why it failed. One reason is that Congress had no power to tax. This is the first major issue, as without the power to tax the government had no solid way to power their funds- unless they wanted to say that they were above the law and didn’t have the need to spend money and purchase the services that they wanted.
Another reason that adds on to this is that the states had their own money systems. This was a bad idea, just because of the risk and fewer trade opportunities this caused. The last reason that was stated, though was indirectly affected, was Shay’s rebellion. Shay’s rebellion was an uprising that took place in Western Massachusetts. It was staged to be opposition against the debt crisis caused by the Articles of Confederation. For these reasons above, the Articles of Confederation failed, leading us to our current Constitution.