In the early years of the American republic, many Founders believed that only white male property owners were qualified to vote. Blacks were considered slaves and denied the right to vote. Women were not given the right to vote until the 1920s.

At the Constitutional Convention the structure of Congress was contentious. Smaller states argued for equal representation among states while larger, more populous states, argued for representation based on population. The Great Compromise was the decision to create two houses of congress, the House, based on state population, and the Senate, each state gets two representatives.

At the Convention, the delegates were deeply divided over the best method of structuring and according representation in the newly-created Congress. Delegates from small states (such as New Jersey or Rhode Island) advocated for the New Jersey Plan, which would have given each state an equal number of Congressional representatives, regardless of population. Quite naturally, larger states objected to this plan; they urged adoption of the Virginia Plan instead, which based representation on each individual state’s population. In the end, the Convention settled on the so-called Connecticut Compromise, combining elements from both the New Jersey and Virginia Plans. Under the Connecticut Compromise, Congress was comprised of two sections, each based on different methods of representation: the membership of the House of Representatives was determined by each state’s population, while each state, regardless of size, would each be granted two Senators. However, the issue of how to count enslaved individuals, who were concentrated in the larger Southern states, soon arose. This matter was decided by the Three-Fifths Compromise, which stated that representation and taxation both were determined by each state’s free residents, as well as three-fifths of the state’s total enslaved population. The Three-Fifths Compromise did not directly make mention of slaves – to avoid conflict among the delegates, the Compromise instead referred to slaves as “other persons,” but the true meaning of this phrase was glaringly obvious.

The Founders, including such prominent men as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Monroe, believed that in order for any governmental system to be legitimate, it absolutely needed one essential quality: the consent of the governed. Political power, as Jefferson and John Adams both wrote, is dangerous and requires careful handling, so that it may both respect and uphold the natural rights of its citizenry without claiming any of the poisonous controls of divine right or hereditary might that were espoused by many monarchs. To this end, the people who live under a government must first consent to the operation of that government, agreeing to allow leaders and institutions to function. If such consent was not secured, or if it was first received but then abused, the Founders held that it was perfectly justifiable for the people to withdraw their consent and to dismantle their governmental structure – “to throw off such tyranny,” as the Declaration of Independence so beautifully states.

While the Articles of Confederation were undeniably and hopelessly flawed, they did at least allow the national government to properly provide for the administration of the new country’s vast federal lands out West (although many historians argue that this is hardly just compensation). In 1787, the national government passed the Northwest Ordinance, an act that helped foster new exploration and settlement of the lands immediately adjacent to the thirteen colonies (these lands were seen as being “out West,” aka farther West than the Eastern shore). These lands were rich in resources, including timber, fresh water, fertile farming lands, wild animals, and minerals. However, despite this salient administration of federal lands, the Articles were overwhelmingly a failure, almost from the very beginning. Under the Articles, the national government was so weak that it was essentially entirely dependent on the states’ governments; for example, Congress was unable to pass any taxes and had to obtain any funds from the states, which were not at all compelled to provide any money. Additionally, Congress could not control domestic or foreign trade, the national government was cut off from engaging with the citizens, the states were not obligated to send delegates to the government on a regular basis, and Congress was unable to maintain its army and navy. The states were permitted to govern themselves unchecked, without any deference or synchronicity with the national government.

The delegates at Philadelphia’s Constitutional Convention shared several core beliefs that helped inspire and guide their activities together. One such belief was that human nature is innately selfish, so that all humans have a tendency to act in their own self-interest; therefore, government needed to make sure to account for such aspirations by controlling power and limiting corruption. The best mechanism for such control, they believed, was limited government – a system of checks and balances in which power was spread amongst various branches of government, so that no one individual or branch possessed all control. The delegates also felt quite keenly that this government must protect and respect individual private property rights (such as land and money). Money, or more accurately, the unequal distribution of money, is the ultimate root of all political conflict, second only to religion and loyalty to individual leaders. Perhaps more than anything else, the Convention delegates feared the rise of factions (political parties or interest groups), which they knew political conflicts were sure to engender. They viewed factions as deeply threatening to government, as impediments to proper governmental functioning and as incitement towards instability, corruption, and violence. The delegates recognized that it is impossible to altogether prevent the existence of factions, as people naturally disagree and form associations based on these disagreements and/or on shared commonalities, so they focused their energies on controlling these groups, making sure that no one faction (no matter how popular) would be able to dominate the government and thus become tyrannical.

The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution states that the United States Constitution is the supreme and ultimate law of the country and that no other law may be made which supersedes it. This might seem irrelevant to us now, but it is important to note that when the Constitutional Framers were drawing up the Constitution, there was no guarantee it would be universally or permanently respected.

All of these answer choices were problems that the Federal government faced under the Articles of Confederation. The important thing to remember about the Articles of Confederation is that the Federal government had almost no power to do just about anything we contemporarily associate with a national government. It was almost completely beholden to the states, and it did not take long before the early political figures of America realized that such a system could not function in a large democratic society, like the United States.

Shays’ Rebellion is generally considered to be the primary turning point that finally demonstrated the inefficacy of the Articles of Confederation. Under the Article's the inability of the United States Government to fund a response to the rebellion was cause for great concern among the majority of the Constitutional Framers. Many historians consider that the timing of Shays’ Rebellion was crucial for ensuring that the government created by the Constitution would be both stronger and more centralized than that of the Articles of Confederation.

Federalist No. 10 is an article, written by James Madison as part of the collection of essays arguing in favor of ratifying the Constitution, collectively called The Federalist Papers. In Federalist No. 10, Madison warns against the rise of political factions, advising common citizens and politicians on how to guard against the rise of factions. As part of his support for the Constitution, Madison notes that a larger republic would be less likely to be dominated by factionalism than would a smaller republic: (so, the states would have more trouble guarding against factionalism alone than they would as a collective national government).