The Constitution, the Articles, and Federalism: Crash Course US History #8

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course U.S. History, and today we’re going to talk about the United States Constitution.

And, in doing so, we’re going to explore how the American style of government became the envy of the entire world, so much so that everyone else copied us.

What’s that, Stan?

We’re not gonna talk about other countries stealing our form of government?

Because no other country stole our form of government?

That – that doesn’t seem possible, Stan.

[Patriotic Rock Music]

No, Stan, not the Libertage, cue the intro!

[Theme Music]

So, today we’re going to learn why the green areas of not-America didn’t copy us.

All right, so as Americans may dimly remember from history classes, the Constitutional system we’ve been living under since 1788, the year of the first Presidential election, was not the original American government.

The first government set up by the Continental Congress was called the Articles of Confederation and it was, in a word: Bad.

In two words, it was not good, which is why it only lasted 10 years.

The problem with the confederation is that it wasn’t so much a framework for a national government as it was a “firm league of friendship,”

which unfortunately only sounds like a team of Care Bear Superheroes.

The Articles set up a “government” that consisted of a one-house body of delegates, with each state having a single vote, who, acting collectively, could make decisions on certain issues that affected all the states.

There was no president and no judiciary.

You can try to tell me that John Hanson, the president of the congress, was the first American president, but it’s just not true.

Any decision required 9 of the 13 congressional votes, which pretty much guaranteed that no decisions would ever be made.

Ahh, super majorities: Always so efficient.

But besides the 2/3rds requirement, the Congress was very limited in what it could actually do.

The government could declare war, conduct foreign affairs and make treaties – basically, the stuff you need to do to go to war with England.

It could coin money, but it couldn’t collect taxes; that was left to the states.

So if you needed money to, say, go to war with Britain, you had to ask the states politely.

The articles could be amended, but that required a unanimous vote, so zero amendments were ever passed.

The government was deliberately weak, which followed logically from Americans’ fear of tyrannical governments taxing them and quartering soldiers in their houses and so on.

But here’s the thing, weak government is like nonalcoholic beer: It’s useless.

That said, the Articles government did accomplish a couple things.

First, it won the war, so, yay – unless you were a slave or a Native American, in which case, you know, probable boo.

Second, the government developed rules for dealing with one of the most persistent problems facing the new nation: Ohio.

Which was called the northwest, presumably because it is north and west of Virginia.

Getting control of the land meant taking it from the Indians who were living there, and the Articles government was empowered to make treaties, which it did.