The independence of the United States after the Revolutionary War began with the establishment of the Articles of Confederation. The Articles were “written in 1777 and stemming from wartime urgency, its progress was slowed by fears of central authority and extensive land claims by states” (History, 2021, para. 1). From these fears, several federal govern emerged, one of which is its inability to control commerce and foreign policy. The other exemplar issue was the lack of judicial authorities. While the first issue imbalanced the national economy, the second one prevented it from solving interstate disputes.
The Constitution that corrected the inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation was created and established in the atmosphere of debate. One of the questions that made the politicians disagree was the scale of representation. It was not clear how much people should be involved in the federal government that presented the interests of each state. Some proposed equal representatives amount, while others highlighted the importance of population in the count (Corbett et al., 2014). The other question concerned the slaves: namely, slaveholders argued that the servants should have been counted in the population for a state to represent more power.
Finally, there was a hot discussion of the democracy place in the Constitution which divided the members of the Congress into Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Federalists believed that the Constitution was a perfect way of establishing a strong federal government that would regulate the nation as a republic; its proponents include John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison (Corbett et al., 2014). In turn, the Anti-Federalists argued that centralization was exceedingly dangerous for the freedom of the states and the citizens, which would lead to inequalities; such opinion was held by Melancton Smith (Corbett et al., 2014). In the end, the Constitution was approved, yet only a little more than half of the Congressmen supported it.
References
Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., & Vickery, P. (2014). U.S. history. OpenStax. Web.
History. (2021). Articles of Confederation. Web.