Consider that the American Revolution unfolded during the Age of Absolutism in a political context during which large-scale European countries were predominately organized as monarchies—and usually absolutist monarchies at that. Applying democratic government across a geographic expanse as vast as the United States was a new concept; there is a reason why this period of US history is often referred to as a kind of experiment. To a large degree, that is what it was: a testing ground of sorts, whose practitioners had no guarantee as to whether democracy was viable on such a scale at all.
The Declaration of Independence, the earliest of the three documents, provided a justification for independence from Britain. Its argument is largely derived from Locke: people hold certain natural rights, and governments are created to protect those rights. Therefore, government is based in a contract with the people and retains its legitimacy only so long as that original contract is honored. This vision on the role of government and its relationship with those it governs has been at the center of American political culture ever since.
Beyond this, we come to the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution, which are both attempts at actually creating a functioning government according to those principles. Revolutionary War era discourse tended to focus on the subject of tyranny, but this raised the following question: now that the United States has won independence, what was preventing it from becoming tyrannical in turn? The system of government envisioned by the Articles was one where the individual states wielded the vast preponderance of power, while the federal government was kept weak. In the process, however, it created a system of government which was unable to meet the challenges of the post-Revolutionary War era, and it was replaced by the Constitution as a result. The Constitution increased the power of the Federal Government while applying the theory of checks and balances. This political structure has continued to govern the United States ever since, all the way to the present.
The Declaration of Independence is a different kind of document than the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Where the latter two documents served to establish the framework and structure of a new government, the first, as its title indicates, was intended to declare the independence of the United States from Great Britain.
But the Declaration also promoted a theory of government that was reflected in the other two documents. Stating first that "all men are created equal" with "certain unalienable rights," it proclaimed that the purpose of government was to protect these rights. Because the British government had in fact taken these rights away, it was the right of the Americans to establish a new government that would better protect them. Along with declaring independence, then, the Declaration was a justification for forming a new government, declaring the right of the Americans to "alter or abolish" British rule in favor of a more representative government.
The Articles of Confederation was a plan of government established during the American Revolution (after independence was declared in 1776). It was ratified in 1781 and bears the stamp of the Americans' fears of centralized government under the Crown. It was not a unitary government but a "firm league of friendship" between states. The central government, such as it was, consisted of only a Congress in which each of the thirteen states had a single vote. It had little coercive power over the states, and struggled to raise revenue, as it could not levy mandatory taxes.
The Constitution, written in 1787 at a national convention held in Philadelphia, was a reaction in many ways to the weaknesses of the Articles (as well as the problems stemming from these weaknesses). It created a strong executive, a federal judiciary, and established a Congress with comparatively vast powers. Most important, it contained a supremacy clause that made the federal government supreme in all cases over the states. So it altered the form of government under the Articles by situating power in a central government (while still leaving some powers at the state level).
Each of these documents, as indicated above, should be read as a response to conditions surrounding its creation as well as an attempt to alter the existing form of government. If they contain a common thread, it is a commitment to representative government. Each of them is a statement of popular sovereignty. The Declaration establishes the purpose of government as created by the people, and the Articles and the Constitution established governments founded on this principle and intended to put it into action.
https://guides.loc.gov/articles-of-confederation
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
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