In the year of 1787, delegates met in Philadelphia to write the Constitution. Tyranny, a type of government with an absolute ruler was a fear. They were currently under the ARticles of COnfederation. There was a problem with this though. In the background essay, it states that “there was no chief executive, there was no court system, there was not even a way for a central government to force a state to pay taxes.”. They were in much need of a new Constitution if they were going to be an independent nation. The hard part was making the new government tyranny free. Eventually in 1787 the new Constitution is created.…
Before we knew it as the United States Constitution, we all knew it as the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation was just too weak as in: each state had one vote in Congress, there was no executive branch to enforce laws passed by Congress, there was no national court system, and etc… Before it could be ratified there was great concern between the delegates that were present at the convention. The main concern they had was the type of legislature. The representatives of larger states wanted the seats in the legislature to be determined by the size of the state. The representatives from the smaller states wanted to have equal representation in Congress. They negotiated on this situation by allowing a bicameral legislature,…
Every other founding father's story gets told, every other founding father gets to grow old yet Alexander Hamilton doesn’t get enough credit for all the credit he gave our nation. Alexander Hamilton deserves the legacy he always longed for.Hamilton had a difficult childhood in the Caribbean, his father left when he was only ten. This left Hamilton and his mother in destitution.Two years later Hamilton and his mother fell ill and tragically his mother passed away leaving him an orphan. Alexander knew he had to educate himself and rise up or else he would live a transient life in despair. To escape the impecunious conditions he wrote a book collection and with the income he garnered he purchased a ticket for a ship that was headed to New…
In 1787, the Constitutional Convention started in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, PA. The purpose of the convention was to make changes to the Articles of Confederation. The Great Compromise - It was decide that the House of Representatives was to be based on population and Senate would have two members. The three-fifths compromise - each slave was counted as 3/5 of a person in the state’s population. The Commerce and Trade Compromise promised that Congress would not tax exports and could regulate trade. It also was decided that there was a need for separation of power and a system was set up for checks and balances.…
The Connecticut Compromise: The Connecticut Compromise played a huge part in the adoption of the Constitution. The Virginia Plan had already establishedthat there were three branches of government, but the Connecticut Copromise made the Legislative branch bicameral. It now consisted of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The problem was that the smaller states thought their interests and concerns would not be recognized and the lager states wanted to dominate. So, the decision was made to make two seperate representative governments. The House of Representatives, which had the representatives based on population, and the Senate, which had each state represented equally. The New Jersey Plan was the plan that decided that instead of only one representative from each state in the Senate, there should be two.…
Continental Congress: The First Continental Congress was made up of delegates from the colonies and met during 1774. In 1775, the Second Continental Congress began meeting right after the Revolutionary War. It declared that America was independent from Britain and in 1781, ratified the first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Constitutional Convention: The Constitutional Convention took place from May 14 to September 17, 1787 in Philadelphia. The task before the Constitutional Convention was to decide how America was to be governed.…
After many long and hard years of constant fighting, turmoil, and endless bloodshed, the thirteen colonies finally separated itself from England. The country of America now had a new problem at hand, setting up an effective government that would be much better than the oppressive rule of the British. The first step, of course, is setting up a constitution. The Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, was the first constitution of America. The Articles of Confederation was strong in that it gave the central government the powers to conduct foreign affairs, regulate western lands, and set up departments. This constitution was weak in that the central government was unable to impose taxes, control international trade, or enforce laws, and it was difficult to pass any law. Even though the Articles of Confederation had its strengths and weaknesses, its weaknesses outweighed its strengths rendering the document useless in governing the new country.…
When the Revolutionary War was over and the Americans had won their independence, the revolutionists and republicans leading the new country were quite convinced that their government should differ from that of Britain and have a limited amount of power. Clearly, these men took these ideals more seriously than they should have. They created a constitution for the 13 states known as the Articles of Confederation, which put the majority of power in the hands of these individual states. They were adopted in 1777 after the war and enacted in 1781. The Articles of Confederation were quite a success pertaining to western lands, but proved unbeneficial for the economy of our new country.…
The Virginia Plan, New Jersey Plan, and the Great Compromise was a big part of America’s future. The Virginia Plan was for a legislative branch. It placed the broad outlines of what became the U.S. Constitution. The New Jersey Plan was a Small State Plan. It was a structure for the United States. The Great Compromise saved the Constitutional Convention. This had to do with the House and the Senate. All of these plans have played a big role in the way that America is today.…
The fundamental principles behind our Founding Fathers’ choice to rebel against the tyranny of the British Empire are that people have their innate rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the government’s function is to defend its citizens from being deprived of these natural rights by foreign or domestic enemies. When the government fails to do this by “amassing too much power and becoming tyrannical,” the people have no choice but to exercise their original right of self-defense – to fight the government. One Founder Alexander Hamilton explicitly asserted this claim, and he entrusted us with his legacy, the Constitution. It is now up to us fight for our rights from our encroaching government.…
Although the Articles of Confederation successfully steered fledgling America through the Revolutionary War, in peacetime society its flaws in unifying the country became increasingly clear. Largely thanks to the insistence of Alexander Hamilton, a delegation came together in May of 1787 to either revise the Articles or create a new government. With George Washington as president of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates drafted the Constitution by September, leaving the states with the responsibility of ratifying. Although Virginia had been heavily influential in the formation of the Constitution, with delegates such as James Madison actually proposing a full plan for the new American government, many of Virginia’s prominent statesmen…
Although I was eighty-one years old and in generally poor health, I participated as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia with George Washington presiding. Many of the delegates had widely different ideas about how the country should be organized and run. For instance, I believed that executive power was too great to be placed in the hands of one person and that a committee was a much better option. Alexander Hamilton, on the other end of the argument, wanted a single executive, appointed for life. The convention chose a single executive with a limited term.…
As a new generation take into place, new outcomes need to be face and the world need to be prepare with new rules, but this change depends upon you, the society, to become possible. The Constitutional Convention was created to fix the problems that was facing the Articles of Confederation were the thirteen states became a confederation with a weak central government that gave some of their powers to the national government. Delegates, people who represented what the society wants, decided to not only helped with the Articles of Confederation, but also propose a new American government. During the Constitutional Convention, delegates also discussed how much power should be giving to the people, national versus state government, big states versus…
The Great Compromise was the solution to struggle of representation in the Legislative Branch during the U.S Constitutional Convention in 1787. The states with bigger populations like Virginia favored the Virginia Plan. The Virginia Plan called for representation based on the amount of people living in each state. Larger states favored this plan because they would have more power in making laws. On the other hand, smaller states like Delaware favored the New Jersey Plan, under which each state would send the same amount of representatives to Congress. Smaller states favored this because it meant equal power for everyone. This problem was solved by Roger Sherman. He proposed a bicameral legislature. Each state, as suggested by Sherman, would send an equal amount of Representatives to the House of Senate, and one representative for every 30,000 citizens to the House of Representatives. Today, the variable number of members of the House of Representatives is based on the State’s population as reported in the most recent decennial census. The process of determining the number of members of the House from each state is known as apportionment. Apportionment is the process of allocating the 435 House seats among the states according to each state’s population.…
The Constitution of the United States was written in 1787, yet there was a struggle for its ratification that went on until 1790. Members of Congress believed that the Articles of Confederation, the first government of the United States, needed to be altered while others did not want change. After the Revolutionary War, there was a need for strong state centered governments, rather than a strong central government based on their experience as a colony. However, an investigation of the historical record reveals that the Articles of Confederation were not meeting the needs of Americans, and the need for a new Constitution was desired. This desired Constitution created a huge dispute and argument between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists.…