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U.S. CONSTITUTION & AMENDMENTS     DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE     ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION     FOUNDING FATHERS     SUPREME COURT  

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Articles of Confederation

America’s First Constitution

The first constitution in our nation’s history was the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles of Confederation we took “baby steps” as a nation. The government conducted the affairs of the country during the last two years of the Revolutionary War, helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and produced two monumental pieces of legislation in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

While the Articles of Confederation was a plan of government based upon the principles fought for in the American Revolutionary War, it contained crucial flaws. It had no power of national taxation, no power to control trade, and it provided for a comparatively weak executive. Therefore, it could not enforce legislation. It was a “league of friendship” which was opposed to any type of national authority. The Articles of Confederation’s greatest weakness, however, was that it had no direct origin in the people themselves–it knew only state sovereignty. Each state, therefore, had the power to collect its own taxes, issue currency, and provide for its own militia. The government could not govern efficiently because of a general lack of power to compel states to honor national obligations. The government’s main activity was to control foreign policy and conclude treaties. Economic credibility was a major problem because the government owed $42 million (more than $40 billion today) after the Revolutionary War, and the debt was mainly owed to American patriots. This financial obligation was not paid off until the early part of the 1800’s.

It would have been very difficult for our country to have created a stronger second constitution without learning from the mistakes of the first. The Articles of Confederation served as a “transition” between the Revolutionary War and the Constitution.





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“This pocket-sized volume is a perfect jewel for all citizens from grade school on up. I stumbled across it after I lost the first pocket-sized Constitution I was given in high school. Although less than 100 pages from cover to cover, this book contains so much valuable information on the founding of the country, including facts on many of those who guided the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The book also contains the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and key dates and Supreme Court cases that have shaped this country and the Constitution's interpretation.

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J. Markowitz


"How many people realize that the first president of the United States was not George Washington but a man named John Hanson?

How many know that the state of Pennsylvania was misspelled as "Pensylvania" on the U.S. Constitution? And who knew that in 1876 an amendment to the Constitution was introduced that would have abolished the U.S. Senate? Or that another amendment, proposed in 1893, would have renamed the country the United States of the Earth?

All of these fun and little-known facts can be found in a pocket size guide to the constitution entitled "The U.S. Constitution and Fascinating Facts About It."

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Roger Williams (San Diego, CA)