Khan Academy's US Government and Politics Fellow.

Welcome Leah.

- [Leah] How's it going?

- [Kim] Alright, so we're talking about

the Articles of Confederation,

which I think many people don't realize

was the first constitution of the United States

before the one that we have now since 1789.

So could you take us through a little bit

what the Articles of Confederation were

and the context in which we first brought them on

as a governmental system?

- [Leah] Sure, so I think the most important thing

to understand about the Articles of Confederation

and why we would talk about this

is because one of the biggest debates that we have

in our history is about the balance of power

between the federal government and state governments.

When the Articles of Confederation were first created,

it was in the middle of the American Revolution.

They were created in 1777, and so the question becomes,

well, how can we run a government

that looks as different from monarchy as possible?

- [Kim] Right, so they're trying to run away from the past

that they're getting away from in the Revolutionary War

and trying to create a separate government

that doesn't have any of those abuses

that they are rebelling against.

- [Leah] If they're running away from a monarchy,

what they're running towards

is what we would call limited government.

- [Kim] OK.

- [Leah] So their central government,

which is synonymous with a federal government,

the central government is actually

really, really, really small.

- [Kim] OK.

- [Leah] They don't have an executive branch.

They only have Congress.

They don't even have a judicial branch.

So Congress is made up of all 13 states.

Every state had one representative.

- [Kim] OK.

- [Leah] In order to change the Articles of Confederation,

if they wanted to pass an amendment,

they had to get unanimous consent from all 13 states.

- [Kim] OK, so they're trying to make sure

that all of the states are represented equally,

but that also sounds like it would have a lot of hurdles

to overcome when it comes to getting consensus.

- [Leah] Yeah, for laws, you had to get nine

out of 13 states to actually pass a law.

So if you can imagine, if you're in a room of 13 people

and you all have to agree on one pizza topping

for the rest of your lives. (Kim laughs)

It would be almost impossible, right?

- [Kim] Wow, OK, alright, so it sounds like

there are some problems with the Articles of Confederation,

but did they do anything good for us in this early period?

- [Leah] Yeah, so the biggest thing

is that it unites all 13 colonies who are now states

under one government.

- [Kim] OK.

- [Leah] This government is able to pass

a really favorable treaty with Britain

and end the Revolutionary War in 1783, the Treaty of Paris.

- [Kim] OK, so this is kind of the government

that gets us through the revolutionary war

and is with us when we first start in the 1780s.

- [Leah] Yeah, and one another specific law that they pass

is the Northwest Ordinance of 1787

and this Northwest Ordinance kinda tells us

how we are going to expand as we move west

and what are we going to do with that land,

and that's a really important idea

when we're moving forward with our country.

The only problem is with the Articles of Confederation

is there is a lot of things that we still have to figure out

as we're growing, there's a lot of growing pains.

- [Kim] So what led the early government

of the United States to realize

that they wanted to abandon these Articles of Confederation

in favor of a different constitution?

- [Leah] So the inciting incident is Shays' Rebellion.

It happens in Massachusets, and it's a group of farmers

led by this guy named Daniel Shays.

What's happening is that we had just gotten out of

the Revolutionary War, and a lot of of the people

who had fought in the Revolutionary War

still hadn't gotten payment for their duty.

They also were experiencing really high state taxes,

so Daniel Shays and these farmers are very upset, obviously,

in their wanting their money and so they started rebelling,

but the problem is, with the way that the central government

that was built, first, Congress had no ability

to levy or collect taxes.

If they couldn't collect taxes,

they had no ability to actually pay back their farmers.

Along with that, they didn't have any money

to create a military, so each state had their own militia,

but the United States as a whole as a country

did not have a military to suppress this rebellion.

So on both ends, we are in

a really bad situation politically.

- [Kim] Wow, so, there's this moment

where you find armed rebellion against the United States

for a lack of money and the US government

finds that it can't raise money

and it can't raise an army to put down this rebellion.

- [Leah] Exactly, and so there is this fear immediately.

And what we see is a lot of the founding fathers

that we know and really respect today like George Washington

and Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton and James Madison,

they get together and they say this is a problem,

we need to change what we have,

and this leads to the Constitutional Convention

in which we draft our second constitution.

- [Kim] Right, yeah, so in 1787,

the leaders of the United States get together and say,

alright, the Articles of Confederation aren't working.

We're gonna need a stronger central government,

even though we were trying to get away from the monarchy

and now let's think of something

that's going to work a little bit better for us.