Right after the war, the US had a system of the government called the Articles of Confederation which had many weakness. The new national government was highly decentralized and had almost no power. It could not tax or control the economic activity of the individual states (or individual people). This was a very serious problem because the US had a huge debt from the war. The government could not even draft soldiers to put together a national army which endangered the very existence of the new country because the US was still threatened by European countries as well as by Native Americans The individual states were allowed to retain their sovereignty and governed themselves much the same way they had as colonies before the war. They all had their own elected governments and passed their own laws regulating trade and commerce. The Articles reflected a lack of unity among the people in that they did not yet view themselves as belonging to an America Nation.