Rethinking the Articles of Confederation

Rethinking the Articles of Confederation: "Thus do we see how the period of the Articles of Confederation was not characterized by chaos and increasingly bad economic times, as historians tend to assume. Rather, the Articles proved themselves to be a perfectly viable structure for a free society, encouraging trade and prosperity and adherence to the highest ideals of 1776. The driving forces for the creation of the central government with the Constitution involved economic imbalances and debts leftover from the war with Britain. The federalists, ideologically attached to protectionist and nationalist theories, exploited both real and false fears in the hope of resolving these imbalances, but they ended up by recreating what the founding generation had struggled so hard to overthrow ten years earlier."