A stronger plan of government

The Articles of Confederation, the young nation's first plan of government, created a deliberately weak central government -- Congress could not tax, maintain an army, or enforce its own laws, and each state acted almost independently. This worked well enough to hold the states together during the war, but proved far too weak afterward. When Massachusetts farmers, unable to pay debts and taxes, rose up in Shays' Rebellion in 1786-1787, the national government could barely respond, alarming leaders across the states. In the summer of 1787, delegates gathered in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, with George Washington presiding and James Madison, often called the "Father of the Constitution," shaping much of its structure; rather than simply revising the Articles, they wrote an entirely new Constitution.

Two major compromises made agreement possible. The Great Compromise resolved a dispute between large and small states by creating a two-house Congress: the House of Representatives, based on population, and the Senate, with two members from every state regardless of size. A second, more troubling compromise addressed enslaved people and representation: Southern states wanted enslaved people counted toward representation in Congress but not taxed as such, and the resulting Three-Fifths Compromise counted three out of every five enslaved people for both purposes -- treating enslaved human beings as a fraction of a person and giving added political power to slaveholding states, a decision many historians consider one of the Constitution's most troubling. The finished Constitution created three branches of government -- legislative (Congress, makes laws), executive (the president, enforces laws), and judicial (courts, interprets laws) -- with checks and balances so that no single branch could grow too powerful, a lesson learned from fearing both a government too weak (the Articles) and a ruler too powerful (the recent king).