Us Constitution Dbq

Imagine this, you are living in the 1700’s and you are trying to make a just document that will give equal freedoms to all citizens of a country. You can only rely on three things to frame the entire Constitution. What do you choose? How do you take what you learn from those three things, and turn it into a nearly 8,000-word document that gives citizens the freedom they deserve? It took 116 days to make the Constitution. That is 116 days of deleting drafts, editing, getting rid of everything, while finally coming up with a good document that can almost never be changed again. Once it is done, it is nearly impossible to edit it. So how? How did they do it? It was not easy, and they had many experiences to rely on including, the colonial experience,

government through the ideas of a state constitution, Shays’ Rebellion, and a new national government. The failures of the Articles of Confederation illustrated the idea of having a state constitution because many of their constitutions had features that later showed up in the U.S. Constitution. State constitutions allowed for each state to have their own written document of laws. In the U.S. each state is given their own constitution. A state constitution is the governing document of a U.S. state giving them each more individual rights. The idea of individual rights and checks and balances were shown through state constitutions and in the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Another representation of the failures of the Articles of Confederation was Shays’ Rebellion which was a rebellion led by Daniel Shays who led a group of armed rebellions of farmers to protest economic problems they had against the British Government. After seeing the difficulties of dealing with Shays’ Rebellion, George Washington wrote a letter to the Continental States Secretary of War at the time, Henry Knox, to discuss his concerns with the Articles of Confederation stating, “If government... is unable to enforce its laws; … anarchy and confusion must prevail - and everything will be turned topsy-turvy in that State;” (Document G). The rebellion demonstrated individual rights along with limited government, which can also be shown in the Eighth Amendment. He could not afford to pay the steep taxes they had placed on his farm to pay the state’s massive debts. The idea to have a new national government came from the failures of the Articles of Confederation as well after representatives from the 13 states came together to create a new government that would have the ability to make decisions for the nation as a whole but would leave the states with most of the power to govern. They decided to create