Untidy Origins

Hey, I'm Woody Holten. I teach at the University of South Carolina.

My specialty is the American Revolution.

I've written five books on that topic and one of my favourite

aspects of the revolution to talk about is Irish for today,

which is the articles of confederation,

which I like because they raise so many difficult questions.

People talk about the articles of confederation, as you know, that week,

terrible government that we had to get rid of so

that we could have the Constitution in 17 87.

But one of the questions is, Well, if it was so terrible,

why did the United States adopt the articles?

Uh,

many of them say people who wrote the Constitution

also wrote the articles and supported the articles.

So why did they do it? Uh, if it was so terrible.

Another question that we can talk about is if they're so weak,

why was there so much controversy around the articles?

Do you know the articles were initially drafted in 17.

76 but they weren't ratified for another five years in 17 81.

So if they're creating such a weak government,

how could it creates so much controversy and then we

come to the fun questions of Why did we,

our ancestors junk the articles of Confederation

in favour of the Constitution where they're really that bad?

Or maybe they were just bad in the eyes of some people.

So those are some of the questions that I want to explore in five modules today.

The first of those will be

the origins of the articles of Confederation,

and I call that untidy origins.

Uh, and one of the main goals of the Congress,

under the Articles of Confederation was dealing

with Native Americans and taking their land.

So that module number two is called the War for the West.

Uh,

and then there were other issues that the

Congress struggled with under the articles of Confederation.

So Module three will be Confederation or Nation Nation and

the number four I really drill in on the year 17

87 and talk about something that comes up in the

AP on when you talk about the articles of Confederation.

And that's one of their biggest accomplishments,

the Northwest ordinance.

And I'll also talk about Indians role in the decision of white

Americans to switch from the Articles of Confederation over to the Constitution,

and then my final section will be other reasons.

I think the most fundamental reasons why some Americans wanted to get rid of the

articles of confederation and that was the title of my fifth and final module says

an excess of democracy.

Some people thought there was too much democracy

in America under the Articles of Confederation.

So to kind of rein back on the that wild horse democracy,

they wrote the Constitution.

Now you probably remember the battles of Lexington and Concord, April 1917 75.

And then it's another whole 15

months before the Colonies finally declare independence

on July 2nd and then release the press release two days later,

on July 4th.

So why did they finally, after 15 months, decided to decide to go and make the break?

Well,

one of the biggest reasons for the

Declaration of Independence was so that the colonies

could become states and do their articles of confederation.

That is so that they could unite.

They hoped that the declaration independence would

lead immediately to articles of confederation.

But actually it would take five years and we'll see why, uh, in just a second,

the original idea of the articles, uh,

came as so many things do from Benjamin Franklin,

who had drafted them way back in 17 75 long before the Declaration of Independence.

But the person who put the articles of

Confederation on paper was Franklin's fellow Pennsylvania,

John Dickinson, who was heavily influenced by the Quakers.

You know,

that denomination that was anti slavery by that time anti war and

actually wanted women to have a more equitable role in society.

So in the drafted the articles,

Dickinson said that no one should be molested or prejudiced in his

or her person or state for for his or her religious persuasion.

So not only easy for religious freedom, but he's making sure to say his or her, uh,

Franklin had some pretty radical ideas, too.

He wanted a perpetual alliance between the white

citizens of the US and the Native Americans.

But all all that cool stuff from,

uh from Franklin and Dickinson was thrown out of the articles.

And,

uh,

what we got instead was a

deliberately weak government where the federal government

had no power to tax and also had no power to regulate trade.

That wasn't an accident.

that was part of the nature of the rebellion against Britain.

It was a rebellion against parliament, a national government.

And it wasn't rebellion by the U. S. A.

It was rebellion by 13 countries,

because when Thomas Jefferson Jefferson referred to my country,

he met Virginia John Adams when he said my country

meant Massachusetts and they wanted to stay as separate countries.

And so they came together.

It really in modern language, we call it not the United States,

but the United Nations.

And

just as, uh, it's hard for us to imagine ever,

given the United Nations power to tax American citizens and regulate our trade.

Massachusetts people didn't want to give that power.

Virginia people didn't want to give that power to the federal government.

And another indication that the real power was going to

say with the States was that the articles of confederation

wouldn't take effect until all 13 states ratified them. So that's the number.

One reason it took four years to get them ratified was that they set the bar so high.

But there are also major disagreements among the

states that slowed the process of ratification.

One of those was between the slave states

and the free states.

At one point,

they were figuring they would apportion the expenses of the federal government

among the states by population and the free states that well,

you gotta count slaves or else a state like South Carolina,

where half the people are slaves.

If you only count the white people in this apportioning taxes,

they're gonna only pay to have as much taxes as we have to pay

in Massachusetts, a state of about the same side.

So So you gotta you gotta taxes, slaves.

And, of course,

the slaveholders they didn't want their slaves didn't

want to pay taxes on their slaves.

And they said, Why should we pay? Taxes are slaves?

When you guys up north don't have to pay taxes on

your cattle and horses and and sheep your personal property.

And to which Benjamin Franklin said, Well,

I'll tell you the difference is sheep don't

make insurrections that went back and forth.

They ended up apportioning, uh,

the expenses of the union according to property values.

Another big battle over the articles of confederation was whether

they would vote with every state having one vote,

which is how things that happened in the Continental Congress or proportional

representation the way we have in the House of Representatives today,

where where California has a huge delegation and Wyoming

only has one member of the House of Representatives.

They went back and forth on that.

Eventually, the small states won that battle, and every state, no matter how large,

had the same single vote.

Um, in the Confederation Congress,

the biggest controversy that slowed the

ratification of the Articles of Confederation for

four years is so big that I'll save it for module to.

But for now,

let me sum up what I've said in this first module that the articles

of confederation was one of the motivations

for having the declaration of Independence,

that it was deliberately weak because people wanted to

keep the power at the state level and at

considering how weak it was. It aroused some prizing amount of opposition