Were there any STRENGTHS of the Articles of Confederation?

Question

not weaknesses!

Answer 1

the strength of the A of C was that it gave almost exclusive power to the state governments vs. the federal government. since that didn't help to do anything other than create a sectionalist governemnt, the articles were abadoned in favor of a new governmental document called the constitution.
the constitution was not ratiifed until the bill of rights was added to the document. the b of r is probably the most important part of our working constitution.

Answer 2

miley_fan9, did a nice job of describing the fundamental needs which the Articles of Confederation addressed. However, its primary strength was that it accepted the power of the States. Except for a few powers, all States (through their delegates) had to agree on new directions.

Clearly this made it difficult to accomplish some things such as raising taxes. So the need to create changes in it were addressed at the convention that actually wrote the constitution. While the new agreement strengthened centralized functions through the newly created general government, it did so only through specifically delegated powers, leaving the remainder to the States.

Much was made of the need for a Bill of Rights such as existed in Old English Common Law and in various State Constitutions. A agreement was made that “after” the Constitution was ratified, during the first Congress a Bill of Rights would be written and proposed to the States as Amendments to the Constitution.

This Bill of Rights was quite different as compared to other Bills of Rights. That is, it was intended to be a list of rights. In the ratified Bill of Rights the first 8 are exclusionary in that they exclude the “federal” government from doing specific acts. These first 8 Articles of the Bill of Rights were meant only to be applied to the federal government and not to be applied to the States. The final 2 are declarative statements of basic truths.

The key here is that, as in the Articles of Confederation, the body of the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of rights were intended to continue the position of the States as free, Independent, and sovereign, with exceptions only in the delegated powers of the Constitution.

Answer 3

The AoC created the first government for the "United States". It had two real strengths, 1) it was authorized to enter into treaties/ agreements with other countries for the purpose of wining the war for independence. The King of France wasn't willing to even consider an alliance with the U.S. until a national government was formed and the AoC accomplished this. 2) it created a single authority, the Congress, for the government. It didn't have to worry about a president no approving laws, or a judiciary declaring a law to be unconstitutional.

It had lots of weaknesses. 1) to amend the AoC required the unanimous consent of all the states. This proved to be impossible to obtain. 2) it had no authority to levy taxes on the states or the people. As such it had no way to raise revenue to pay for the cost of the government. 3) it had no real authority to have a military except in time of war, so when peace broke out in 1783 the army was disbanded [this proved to be a problem later when Daniel Shays led a rebellion against unfair taxes in Massachusetts] 4) representation of the states was based on one vote per state; the number of people residing in each state and the geographic size of the state weren't relevant to how much power each state wielded, 5) there was no common currency. The US government and each individual state created their own money, which led to severe economic problems..

Its accomplishments were two. 1) it brought independence to the country and concluded the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that brought recognition of American Independence by the British and acquisition of the land west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River. 2) it brought an end to the squabbling among the states as to control of the newly acquired land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi by declaring US jurisdiction over this land (Land Act of 1785 and NW Ordinance of 1787 and other implementing legislation). This gave the government a source of revenue that solved the problem mentioned above of not having the authority to tax, but by 1786 it was clear to many that the AoC were a failure so James Madison and others began to agitate for a meeting to consider amendments to the AoC. This meeting is known to us now as the Constitutional Convention of 1787.