How was power divided between the national government and the states at the founding?

0:05[MUSIC] The Constitution is a pretty small document. When the Constitution was created, it wasn't imagining us answering the same questions that we're answering today. So way back then, the idea of the national government being powerful was a strange idea. These places that really matter, the places that were the most powerful were States. So if you asked someone, where do you affiliate? What are you a citizen of, they'd be more likely to save Virginia and probably than the United States. The federal government early on was so unimportant that at some point, someone was offered to be a Justice on the United States Supreme Court, and he turned it down because he thought it was a far better job to be a state Supreme Court Justice. That's how big the states have loomed. Early on, what the Constitution did was not give you a really detailed description of how state and federal power should be broken down.

1:00The assumption is the states controlled virtually everything, and that they were limited, they're called limited and enumerated. What does that mean? Limited means only a small number of things. The federal government was going to have a number of powers, and enumerated powers, what did that mean? It meant they had to be named. So what you see in the Constitution is a series of things that name what the national government can do, and then basically says at the end, everything else is for the states and the people of our country. That is a really different model than we have now. [MUSIC]