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The Articles of Confederation Was an Effective Tool for Governing the States

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The Articles of Confederation Was an Effective Tool for Governing the States
The Articles of Confederation was an effective tool for governing the states after the revolutionary war and effectively addressed some of the problems facing the nations; however, they were not completely effective in solving all the problems after the war. The four main issues after the Revolutionary war that the Articles of Confederation dealt with were economic problems, western territory issues, foreign nation issues, and violence issues. The Articles of Confederation was not very effective at solving economic issues. The economic problems were caused completely by the cost of the Revolutionary War. They tried to pass laws to tax the citizens in order to raise the money needed to pay for the war, but since there was no power to tax in the constitution, this was not very successful. Alexander Hamilton and Roger Morris attempted to rewrite the Articles of Confederation so that they could have the power to tax the states to pay for the war. They are almost successful in changing the constitution, but New York vetoed the changes. Since the Articles of Confederation was not rewritten and they still could not tax the states, they passed the debt on to the states. Then the states were on their own to pay the debt, so they passed new taxes. These taxes that the states passed were much higher than Parliament had ever tried to pass. America went into a depression in 1784 because of all the taxes that the people were required to pay. In order to deal with Western Territories, the Articles of Confederation had complete control of the Western Territories from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Parliament passed two laws in order to deal with the Western Territories: The Land Ordinance of 1785 and The Northwest Ordinance of 1787. These laws set up how these Western Territories were going to be governed. The Land Ordinance of 1785 gave the Federal Government complete control of the western land; it divided the land into territories.
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