The United States Constitution: The Development Of The US Constitution

The development of the U.S. Constitution was a series of many trials and errors. There were many problems starting from the Articles of Confederation and even the battle to ratify the constitution. Not everyone wanted the same thing for the new government, however they all agreed that they didn’t want the same type of government that they had unde English rule.
The Articles of Confederation was the first constitution in the United States. This constitution was drafted in 1776 and approved in 1781. It didn’t create a very strong form of government. The Articles were essentially a “league of friendship”.The government only had one house of delegates under this constitution. Each state only counted as one vote when laws were made or changed.The

For a law to be passed the majority vote had to be nine of the states, so not many new laws could be passed. There were also many limits on what the government could do. They could only declare war, but couldn’t force men to join the military.The make treaties, but not enforce its rules. They could hardly enforce any of their own laws. The Articles stated that the government could not declare taxes. Because of this the United States was very in debt after the war. The United States had to rely on tariffs, but only the individual states could collect them. This made it very hard states to trade with countries such as England who refused.Because they were in so much debt the Confederation Congress decided to print money called Continentals. As they started to print more money, it started to lose value. Probably the only good thing that came out of the Articles of Confederation was the help with the land policies. The Articles of Confederation helped create the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. These Ordinances

Only six states sent delegates to this meeting, so no changes could be made. A year later delegates met in Philadelphia to revise the Articles, but instead wrote The Constitution that we still use today. Under this new type of government the delegates had decided that there would be Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches. The new government wanted to have a balance between the power of the government and the power of the people. The delegates also had many arguments about how much representation each state would get. The larger states believed the representation should be based on a state’s population. Of course, the smaller states did not agree with this. Out of this came the Great Compromise. It stated that there would be two houses in this government. The houses would be The House of Representatives and a Senate. The House of Representatives based its representation on population and the Senate called for two representatives per state. After these were created there was arguments about who should be counted as population. States that had slaves wanted slaves to count towards their population because they made up most of their population. The Three-fifths Compromise was the law that was created out of this. This stated that slaves only contributed three-fifths to the population. Because the government didn’t want tyranny to be started they created two principles. These