Articles of Confederation on the English Monarchy, Essay Example

It is clear that the American colonies were dissatisfied with the English Monarchy. There was the whole Revolutionary War thing. The dissatisfaction felt by the colonies comes through in a few different ways in the Articles of Confederation. A major example is the type of government the authors chose to create. After years of near-anarchy, the Founding Fathers recognized a need for centralized government. However, they were against the idea of a strong government with many powers and so created a very loosely organized and layered body to govern the colonies. The three sub-bodies within a centralized government served to ensure that the power would remain limited by setting up a system of checks and balances whereby the other two sub-bodies would prevent the third from being able to seize power.

The monarchy is considered an ineffectual government because there are no checks and balances on the monarch’s power. It has been said that the loose government established by the Articles of Confederation was also ineffectual, in that it did not really unify the colonies. What is certain, is that insecurity over the establishment of a centralized power was so strong, that the authors of the constitution had many debates among themselves as to just what the role of the Federal Government should be. These debates centered around how much power the federal government should have to make policy and how much power the states would have to disallow those policies. The individual states themselves were reluctant to give up governing power to a centralized government, as evident by the reluctance and, in some cases, outright refusal to ratify the Constitution.