“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
Not only that, but in their quest to make a central government that was as purposefully weak as possible so as never to come to dominate in the way their former government did over them, they had gone too far, creating a government in the Articles of Confederation, or the so-called “league of friendship,” that had, as George Washington so famously put “no money” and no real way to get any outside of printing some that was worthless. This was a rather glaring issue for countless reasons, right down to the then complete inability for the government to pay its debts or its soldiers or for anything at all really.
The central government also had very little power it could exert over its states, or make anything happen in many cases unless all the states agreed on it, which was an extreme rarity. This was a major immediate problem when considering, for example, the aforementioned Treaty of Paris between Britain and the U.S. that ended the war and gave incredibly favorable terms to the new country. The issue was, many of the states saw little need to adhere to the treaty, and, indeed were not, and there was very little the federal government could do about it. This could have potentially blown up in the young nations’ face had Britain decided to also renege on the deal, potentially plunging the nation right back into war it couldn’t afford against a still very superior adversary.
In short, Congress had no real power to govern anything, the states knew it, and at a certain point it even mostly ceased trying. All of this had been done very intentionally given the political minds among the colonists knew well most such attempts at similar governments in the past had ultimately devolved into some form of tyranny, whether tyranny of the majority or by those placed in power, regardless of what any laws put in place said. Not just in governments far afield or in the past, but this was something they themselves had seen with some of the then state legislatures abusing their positions in the colonies.
