Shay's Rebellion

After the revolutionary war, the colonial people of the United States were in severe debt. According to the textbook Enduring Vision by Paul S. Boyer, et al. “The Massachusetts legislature, dominated by commercially minded elites, voted early in 1786 to pay off its revolutionary debt in three years” (Boyer, et al.). Many of the people, unable to pay within this timeframe were asked to pay their debts in “hard currency” (Boyer, et al.). With these high stakes, and with the inability to pay their debts, revolts broke out in protest of the common tax hikes of the period.

One of the most historical revolts was known as the Shays’s rebellion. According to Boyer, “Shaysites had limited objectives, were dispersed with relatively little bloodshed,

Each man wanted to create a stronger country, but some had rather diverse reasoning behind how to go about completing such a task. Today, we title this group of individual thinkers as the Founding Fathers of the United States. The elected leader of the Constitutional Convention was George Washington.

Washington and the Founding Fathers sought out for an improved United States; with free, independent, and protected citizens and shying away of an autocratic or a single leader system. This was not the case of the United States under the laws of the Articles of Confederation. Author Boyer et al. writes, “They had become convinced that unless the national government was freed of control of the state legislatures, the country would disintegrate” (Boyer, et al.). The purpose of meeting for a Constitutional Convention was to begin to place these wishes into writing and avoid this suggested national

Both men came up with ideas to remedy the debate over as Boyer wrote, “the conflicting interests of large and small states” (Boyer, et al.). Madison formed the idea of the Virginia Plan, or a two-house legislature where the people would vote for an amount delegates equal to the population of their state. Larger and more populous liked this but it spurred according to Boyer “immediate opposition” (Boyer, et al.) from small states. Paterson suggested the New Jersey Plan as a “counterproposal” (Boyer, et al.) in place of to the founding of a legislature in which all states regardless of size could be represented equally. With each idea equally incompatible with the mission of the Founding Fathers, the conception of the Great Compromise was developed. Boyer described it as “whereby each state would have an equal vote in the upper house while representation in the lower house would be based on population (Boyer, et al.). On “July 17, 1787” (Boyer, et al.) this two-house compromise concept was agreed upon, and on “September 17, 1787” (Boyer, et al.) a final form of the hand written Constitution of the United States was