Under the Articles of Confederation, there was a single legislative Congress, no president, and no judiciary. In this Congress, each state got a single vote and nine of the thirteen states had to agree to approve any legislation. This Congress could not print Federal currency, nor could it collect taxes.

About the only things it could do were handle foreign affairs, enter in to treaties, and declare war.

The first clause of Section 3, Article One of the Constitution, reads "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote." This is the only information on how Senators must be elected, and direct election of Senators by the population of a state was only guaranteed in 1913 by the Seventeenth Amendment.  The second clause divides the Senators into 3 roughly equal groups (classes), and staggers the elections of each class of Senators, providing that one third of the Senate seats will be elected every two years.

The idea of popular sovereignty was extremely important to the fledgling United States. Fearing a return to a monarchic system, the Founding Fathers sought to have the only legitimate source of government power directly derived from the people. The Chief Executive was to be elected by a gathering of electors, who were in turn elected by the people.

Georgia, North Carolina, Delaware, and New Jersey were all members of the original Thirteen Colonies. Vermont remained a sovereign state, governing itself, issuing it's own coinage, and retaining it's own postal service, until 1791, when it was admitted as the 14th state.

The Virginia Company, after a decade and a half of struggles at Jamestown, sought to entice more people to come to North America through a new contract. The new Virginia Contract guaranteed any person who could pay their own way would receive tracts of land and be able to vote for a legislative body to help govern the colony. The House of Burgesses would first meet in 1619, before any other permanent English colonies were established in America, and would continue to help govern the colony of Virginia until the American Revolution.

States’ rights activists, along with smaller states, disfavored the Virginia Plan. The reason for smaller states’ disfavor should be somewhat obvious: given that the Virginia Plan based apportionment (a fancy word that means the number of delegates or representatives each state gets) solely on population, smaller states would be at the complete mercy of the larger states (because of the [possibly] huge population differential).

States’ rights activists, on the other hand, opposed the Virginia Plan for a totally different reason: the sheer amount of power delegated to the central government under the plan. Somewhat more specifically, the Virginia Plan allowed the proposed central government to exercise something called the “universal negative,” which allowed the proposed central government to veto any state law with which it disagreed. Even more disturbingly, from the view of the states’ rights activists, the proposed central government had the ability (under the plan) to enforce its own laws with the full force of its army. Thus, for all of these reasons, the states’ rights activists disfavored the plan.

This should have been a fairly easy question. Remember: one of the major reasons for the eventual proposal and ratification of the Constitution was the weakness of the government under the Articles of Confederation. One of those weaknesses, of course, was the inability to tax, which was not-so-slowly but surely driving the budding country into the ground. 

This was a difficult question. Before getting to the answers, let’s pick apart the question a little bit. The question is asking you to think about some of the abuses practiced by the British during their control of the colonies. After thinking about those, the question asks you to compare whatever abuses you’ve come up with to the protections granted in a particular clause of the 4th Amendment—the searches and seizures clause. Thus, you have to ask yourself what British practice is similar to an unauthorized search and seizure (the ones protected against in the 4th Amendment). The answer is, “writs of assistance.” A writ of assistance allowed an official to conduct a blanket search—that is, a general search without specifics in terms of location OR items sought. During the ratification of the new constitution, anti-federalists were so concerned about a possible repeat, that they demanded protections in the form of the Bill of Rights.

This should have been a fairly easy question. Since the Articles of Confederation allowed for only a legislature, all of the other answers (other than “Unicameral Legislature and Bicameral Legislature”) must be incorrect. Now, the only difficulty is determining which (unicameral or bicameral) is correct. Here, even if you’re not entirely sure of the meaning of uni/bicameral, you can apply basic prefix knowledge and assess that “uni” means one and “bi” means two. Then, you must simply remember that the Articles of Confederation legislature had only one chamber—thus the answer is “Unicameral” (which means one chamber).

This should have been a relatively easy question. The Seven Years War (the French and Indian War was the North American theater of the overall war) nearly bankrupted the British Empire. Wars are expensive to fight, and the French and Indian War was no exception. Moreover, the subjects of the British Empire (the citizens of England, essentially) were already the highest-taxed citizenry in the entire world, so the Brits were aware that, politically speaking, attempting to assess any additional taxes would be disagreeable, to say the least. Thus, the Brits turned their eyes to the colonies—the colonies who, due to smuggling, and lax oversight by the British government, were paying next to nothing in taxes of any kind.