The society of the United States has gone a long way from being a British colony to becoming a powerful democratic country. This way was filled with serious issues and mistakes; the society of the US was undergoing all kinds of influences for decades. Big changes had to happen for it to reach the level it is on right now. As the country was large and its leaders were motivated by imperialistic moods, its sizes grew quickly. New lands were annexed, new states were added to the union, the population has expanded. Besides, the people living on the territory of the United States have always been diverse, with multiple various needs, views and interests. Keeping such huge and diverse country under control takes a lot of effort. The first laws created by the leaders of the United States were adopted in 1781 and called the Articles of Confederation. It has to be mentioned that by the time when the Articles of Confederation appeared slavery on the territory of the United States was very popular and the majority of the most outstanding politicians such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slave owners. Slavery was judged by them and many other political leaders, yet the number of slaves in the Southern states was huge and counted at least forty per cent of the population. The income of Southern colonists was based on slave labor.
This is why the Articles of Confederation were designed to ignore the issues of slavery completely. According to the Articles of Confederation, each of the States of America had power and permission to deal with their issues individually, this way the national government of the US had very little rights and strengths. This was done as a safety measure, because a powerful central government did not have much trust after the colonial period. Yet, the government without any significant powers was simply ineffective and it did not even manage to handle the tax system or the distribution of any proper laws. This is why the representatives of the states decided to gather in Philadelphia in 1787 in order to introduce corrections to the Articles of Confederation, which later resulted as a new Constitution. The arguments about the shape of the new government and the Constitution itself went on for months. The representatives of the states were just a group of politicians that can be viewed as a smaller and concentrated version of the society of the whole country with all the diverse requirements. Bigger states wanted more powers; they were ready to pay bigger taxes for the larger population in order to have more representatives in the governmental branches and more electoral votes during the elections of the president. The new Constitution was able to solve multiple political and legal issues in the society of the United States, but the representatives of the states, who gathered in Philadelphia to work on the new governmental structure for the country did not know how to handle the problem of slavery and other aspects related to it such as slave trade or how the states’ population should be counted to measure the sizes of federal taxes the states would pay and representation in the government.
Big compromises were worked out to reach agreements in these areas. For example, the politicians decided to count a slave as only three-fifth of a person to achieve some balance in the number of representatives of slave states in the House of Representatives. The slave trade that was outlawed by the majority of the states caused a lot of debates and was allowed to be cancelled, but not until 1800. All of these compromises became sources of dissatisfactions in the masses, because despite the three-fifth law the slave states still had a big advantage, which allowed their candidate to win the elections. The law about catching fugitive slaves created southern intrusions on the territory of Free states, which often resulted as mass disorders. Industrial North and agricultural South participated in many political, economic, cultural and even religious confrontations. The politicians, who wrote the new Constitution were trapped between two absolutely different sets of views and ideologies, which could not find any points of agreement, the contradiction was too big and confusing, so the political leaders decided to simply try to avoid direct statements in order to escape the open confrontations. As a result, the confrontation was only postponed and soon ruptured and led to the Civil War.