Articles of Confederation : an Ineffective Government
Articles of Confederation : An Ineffective Government Whoever said that the Articles of Confederation provided the United States with an effective government was completely incorrect. The United States were not united under this government. The United States could not stand up for itself against other countries. Also, the United States were not stable economically under the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation did not provide a good government for America. Under the Articles of Confederation, the United States were not united at all. The Articles of Confederation created a central government that was not strong at all. The government established a tax quota for each of the states and asked them please to contribute their share on a voluntary basis. They were lucky if the states paid one-fourth of the requested amount. America had just gotten away from England and all of its taxes, so there was no reason to let their own government do the same. In John Jay’s letter to George Washington in 1786, he says that he is more worried about impending crisis caused by the Articles of Confederation than he was about the Revolutionary War. He was thinking that some people were not in agreement with the government and wanted it to be completely gone. He was worried for a good reason because three years earlier there was an attempt by a group of farmers from Pennsylvania to run the government out of Philadelphia. Also, the states acted like their own countries and only looked out for themselves. Rhode Island is a good example of this because they rejected a request by Congress to put a tax on imported goods. They ignored the fact that America was in a massive amount of debt to the Spanish, French and Dutch. They chose to better themselves rather than to better the country. They said that the tax would be hard on their state and would go against the constitution of their state. Rhode Island denied a tax that was suggested by the country’s central government