In the aftermath of Shays' Rebellion, everybody had to decide the next move, as eyes turned to that May 1787 meeting in Philadelphia.

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Foreign hello and welcome to the political history of the United States.

Only three of the states were represented, including none from New England and Virginia, being the only southern state present.

With the convention lasting only two days, it was quickly decided that reforming interstate commerce was not possible without more thoroughly addressing the deeper issue present in the Confederation.

Thus, the lasting legacy of the Annapolis Convention was the recommendation for another convention to consider broader reform.

This convention was to begin in May in Philadelphia.

The question that we are going to take up this week is exactly how we get from 12 guys and three states to the Constitutional Convention that would end up agreeing to blow up the Confederation and start this entire thing over again.

We have spent the first eight episodes of this season discussing just how broken the system was.

By this point, the country was bankrupt.

It was at risk of dissolving under the mounting sectional strife.

It had no ability to meaningfully govern much of its own territory, and as the wheels were falling off, it was plagued with chronic absenteeism.

Saying that the Confederation was dying feels like an understatement, as it implies that the system was still alive at all.

The traditional way that this is all taught, and admittedly the way that I learned it as well, is that following the events in Annapolis, Shay's Rebellion came along and pretty much seals the deal.

This week we are going to look at Shay's Rebellion and fit it and its legacy into the greater overall context of the time and look at what influence it did have on moving everybody towards the upcoming convention.

To fully understand the path from Shays Rebellion to the Constitutional Convention some months later, we need to take some time and understand exactly what the rebellion was and how it was interpreted by its contemporaries.

Among the biggest questions that has been asked and continues to be asked by historians are over what exactly Shays Rebellion was about.

Now, at a basic level, I think it is a pretty easy thing to understand that the rebellion was in response to worsening economic conditions that had stretched everybody to the breaking point.

The question though, is what was the economic pressure that was causing everybody to be stretched so thinly?

Shays Rebellion was an uprising that garnered a lot of sympathy in Massachusetts outside of those who actively participated.

As historian George Van Cleef points out, this question has forced scholars to question why there was so much support.

He explains that at the time, most people believed that the rebellion was a bunch of angry debtors who were being buried under their mounting debt burden.

Under this argument, it was additional debt that was taken on following the end of the war on foreign imports that so significantly increased the amount of individual debt.

The lack of hard specie made repaying those debts difficult, if not outright impossible, and the lack of debt relief being given by the government left the regulators with few options.

However, another school of thought points to the rebellion being a form of tax rebellion.

Taxes in Massachusetts following the war's end were indeed at high, largely unsustainable levels.

The government had taken on a very aggressive debt repayment program that stretched the system beyond its breaking point and pushed the western farmers into revolt.

Regardless of which one of these was the ultimate cause, it seems that both issues probably did play some role.

Likewise, the state had a government largely run by the creditors, who proved reluctant to shoot themselves in the foot for the greater good.

Massachusetts was very aggressive when it came to debt collection.

Luckily for the western farmers, the solution to cover either back taxes or unpaid debts was the same and came from the seizure of property.

This made their lives that much easier because both of these things had the same solution.

Shut down the courts and you stop the foreclosures.

Part of the reason why these questions become so critical is because as the confederation was forced to examine what had gone wrong in Massachusetts, they had to figure out if this was a problem that existed because of circumstances specific to western Massachusetts, or rather, if it pointed to a more systemic problem that ran throughout the confederation as a whole.

If the rebellion had been caused by something that was fundamentally wrong with the confederation, that meant that every other state was subject to the same upheavals, that it was just a matter of time before this happened again.

If, on the other hand, this was the result of a failed state government, well, that is a Massachusetts problem and is not indicative of something more fundamentally flawed with the Confederation.

I will say before we go any further that this topic of what exactly the nature and causes of Shays rebellion is remains a very hotly contested question.

There is still a great deal of debate over the question of whether or not this was unique for Massachusetts versus the greater overall confederation.

There is, in fact, so many questions surrounding this one point that I could probably get away with making this entire episode focus solely on those arguments.

Now we are going to go into some of that discussion here today, so far as it matters to our story.

However, be aware that we are going to be focusing on the question in more broad terms, and while I do plan on sharing some of the different conclusions with you, just know that there is a whole lot of information behind the scenes that is being used to reach these conclusions.

Of course, if you are interested in learning more about this, you can check out the bibliography on the website and see the sources that I've used here today.

I believe that the most important thing to understand about what happened was not entirely unique to western Massachusetts.

We have talked at some length before about the various actions by debtors in the other states to disrupt court proceedings and interfere with foreclosure and seizure actions.

Governor John Patterson called out the militia, who quickly chased away the rabble while making a few dozen arrests in the process.

George Washington, who was at Mount Vernon at the time, worried that the rebellion in Massachusetts would spread throughout the country, arguing that the conditions existed within all of the states for just such an uprising.

The fact that the insurgents referred to themselves as regulators is a clue into just how they saw themselves.

The term regulator comes out of the English Civil Wars.

The regulators, as historian Robert Gross puts it, were those Republicans who stood up or regulated the abuses brought on under the reign of the tyrannical Charles I.

Indeed, the term regulator was nothing abnormal to be used during this era.

This is not even the first time that the term has appeared on this show previously having been used by our North Carolina backcountry farmer friends and our old rabble rouser Herman Husband.

If you were to therefore ask any of the men taking place in Shay's Rebellion, they would have absolutely told you that they were fighting for their sacred rights that were being obstructed by a tyrannical government.

For the creditor class, however, they were not really seeing the regulators as being some protectors of good republican order.

Men like Samuel Adams, who had certainly been on the radical edge of things back during the Imperial Crisis, now saw those being led by Daniel Shays as being a threat to good order in his mind, and indeed in the minds of many.

They did not see this as being a contradiction at all.

They really did think that the revolution had changed the game in profound ways that made such violent uprising and disturbances far more akin to treason than the defense of any sacred rights.

At a surface level, selling the rebellion as one against unjust and excessive taxation made sense.

Did the entire country not just fight a war over excessive taxation, however, amongst the more wealthy creditor class, they saw this uprising as a way that these so called regulators could weasel out of their legitimate debts.

We have already talked about the effect of accepting that virtually worthless paper currency is legal tender acting as a backdoor version of debt relief.

Clearly, the Massachusetts regulators were aware of such actions as the issuance of paper currency was right at the very top of their list of demands.

For those creditors, however, they feared the issuance of such paper currency as being a method whereby some backcountry rabble could undermine the credit that they had extended.

No less was at stake here than the entire social order.

The leadership inside of Massachusetts certainly believed that the rebellion had been something taken on exclusively by debtors.

If that was the case, it meant that none of this had had to do with government policies, but rather was a function of an entire class of people being bad with money.

Unsurprisingly, when forced with a moment of self reflection to consider what was happening, it was a far easier pill to swallow for the Massachusetts government to blame the woes of the western farmers on their own actions and not on the government.

Now, to be sure, not everybody within Massachusetts was so blind to the government's role in everything that had happened.

Although the government was denying that they had any responsibility for the uprising, they did make some overtures to try to calm the situation down.

As we discussed last time, these all fell well short of actually bringing the uprising to a close.

Yet despite this, through the course of the rebellion, there were meaningful signs that faith in the government was faltering.

Ironically, for many of the more conservative members of the public, it was that the government was willing to come to any accommodations whatsoever that so convinced them that the current government was not up to the task.

Abigail Adams wrote of her own personal frustrations with the government that they had not done more to bring the uprising to an end, commenting that they seemed to be afraid to use the powers that they had.

The rebellion had convinced many within the state that a strong federal government was necessary.

It is not a coincidence that as Shays rebellion dragged on, support for the Philadelphia Convention grew.

Men who had long been staunch supporters of the Confederacy had their faith in human nature itself shaken by the uprising.

If they had expected a virtuous, hard working people dedicated to the republic well, they had been sorely disappointed.

This had so shaken the faith in the confederation that for many, they determined that the only option available to them was a strong Central government.

The question became one of whether or not events inside of Massachusetts or specific to that state, or if rather, they were indicative of a more systemic problem.

There was at least something to the idea that conditions in western Massachusetts were unique as compared to the rest of the country at large.

The state's government had proved to be especially reluctant when it came to addressing the grievances of the farmers.

As we have discussed, the state was pursuing an especially aggressive policy of repaying the money that they owed to Congress.

So high taxes were a staple.

On top of those high taxes and heavy debt loads, the economy of western Massachusetts appears to have been at least somewhat more depressed than elsewhere in the country.

Therefore, at a basic level, it makes sense that western Massachusetts would play host to such deep animosity.

Making matters worse, the Massachusetts government was controlled by creditors who proved more reluctant towards the idea of debt relief than was the case in any other state.

At a bare minimum, the ingredients for a wider uprising were present, if not more poignant, than in other states.

Nowhere else in New England had there been such a significant outbreak of violence.

In both Connecticut and New Hampshire, there were some smaller disturbances, but in both cases, the state government was able to move quickly and quell any greater uprising.

In the case of both Connecticut and Rhode island, there had been overtures towards the farmers that helped take some of the energy out of the potential protests.

In Connecticut, that meant keeping taxes lower and thus more manageable by ignoring congressional requisitions.

In Rhode island, the state government went further and approved the use of paper currency.

New Hampshire did have a smaller movement, however, that was successfully put down by the militia.

Unlike in Massachusetts, they did not instantly defect over to the side of the insurgents.

The middle states, likewise, were spared much of the upheavals because they too had gotten on board with a plan of more widescale debt relief.

That is not to say that there were no attempts by farmers to shut down courthouses.

That was a feature throughout pretty much the entire country.

Rather, the debt relief efforts taken by the middle states proved adequate to keep those states from launching into a more extensive uprising.

Indeed, the debt relief, often undertaken simply by issuing paper currency that we talked about back in episode 5.3, did keep many of those middle states and southern states from falling into a deeper crisis.

Virginia, a state that was already on board with plans for the Pennsylvania Convention, was, was one place that did suffer a more serious outbreak of violence.

Not long after, in New Kent county, it was the clerk's office and the jail that burned.

Note that in the case of these uprisings, they were coming after the convention in Philadelphia had already begun.

This means that although these uprisings in Virginia cannot necessarily explain the decision of the Old Dominion to send delegates to the Convention, it does provide a potent reminder to those in Philadelphia of exactly why they were meeting.

This brings us around to one of the critical questions of the moment.

Did Shays Rebellion help push the needle and convince the other states that the situation in the country had become untenable?

Was the rebellion in western Massachusetts alone enough to explain why so many of the more conservative factions throughout the country decided that they were in favor of significant reform to the Confederation?

All throughout the states during the rebellion, discussions were held over the question of if this was a tax rebellion or an uprising of the debtors.

A debtors rebellion could easily be explained away by pointing the finger at the insurgents and saying that their anger is a consequence of their own poor choices.

A tax rebellion, on the other hand, is something that carried with it more significant weight, as that could indicate a more systemic problem with the government itself.

Unsurprisingly, the states were happy to try to force the insurgents into that former category and exonerate themselves from any responsibility.

Although realistically much of the impetus for the uprisings throughout the country were indeed a result of poor economic conditions exacerbated by policies that all but ensured turmoil in the economy.

As I've already mentioned, even today amongst historians, the nature of Shays Rebellion remains a point of hot debate.

However, putting this question aside for a moment, we find that there remains an elephant in the room that helps explain why an uprising in western Massachusetts convinced many conservative supporters of the Confederation to move towards reluctant support for the Philadelphia Convention.

The thing was, the states could choose exactly where to place the Blain Brucha's rebellion.

The government in Massachusetts, for example, blamed the rebellion on the debtors, who were just trying to weasel out of their otherwise lawful debts.

Other states argued that what happened in Massachusetts was the result of conditions specific to that state.

Well, these things could be, and indeed were argued ad nauseam, There was one thing that nobody anywhere could deny.

The federal government had completely failed in their response.

And really, that is not even a fair way to put it.

To say that the federal government's response was a failure gives the idea that their response was either inadequate or somehow problematic.

In this situation, the response was non existent.

Henry Knox, the Secretary of War for the Confederation, was keenly aware of what was happening in Massachusetts and by all accounts would have loved to do something about it.

He was able to convince Congress that raising an army was necessary, if for no other reason than to protect the Springfield arsenal.

And they of course agreed with him.

It was necessary.

The problem was that Congress was still totally broke.

Congress could support crushing the rebellion all they wanted, but they lacked the money to actually do anything about it.

Knowing that they did not have the funds to pay for an army, and knowing that literally nobody ever actually paid those requisitions, they attempted to secure a loan from the states backed by Western land sales.

Sure enough, only Virginia ponied up any of the money and nobody was about to make a loan to the Confederation.

Jackson found plenty of people chomping at the bit to be an officer, but nobody actually wanted to be the privates that were going to do the fighting.

His fundraising efforts found similar success, as suddenly nobody could find their wallets to help pay for putting down the rebellion.

If one of the stated goals of the Confederation was the protection of the Springfield Arsenal, here again they failed.

Sure, the regulators did not manage to take the arsenal.

However, the army that the Massachusetts elite had foot the bill for did.

Now, this is not to say that Knox was going to complain too much about this.

William Shepard was aware of this.

Yet nobody missed the fact that the federal arsenal ended up being used by a force other than the Continental Army.

A situation that was at least concerning.

By the end of Shays Rebellion, the Confederation appeared to be all but completely dead.

The government was insolvent.

We talked about the failure of the Confederation to project power into their own backyard in episode 5.6 in relation to those western lands and the threats from both Spain and Great Britain.

Now, however, they showed that they did not even have the ability to project power inside of their own house.

Massachusetts was not some distant frontier and the government had proven incapable of doing anything to stop the ongoing uprising or to even protect their own arsenal in Springfield.

Congress was not exactly voting for its own destruction here, but rather they were hoping that reform and not outright destruction would prove to be the order of the day.

I'm going to quote a paragraph from that letter which I think does a pretty good job of laying out how many felt at the time.

Knox wrote.

Our political machine, constituted of 13 independent sovereignties have been constantly operating against each other and against the federal head ever since the peace.

The powers of Congress are utterly inadequate to preserve the balance between the respective states and oblige them to to do those things which are essential to their own welfare and for the general good.

The human mind in local legislatures seems to be exerted to prevent the federal Constitution from having any beneficial effects.

The machine works inversely to the public good in all its parts.

Not only is state against state and all against the federal head, but the states within themselves possess the name only without having the essential concomitant of government, the power of preserving the peace, the protection of liberty and property of the citizens.

I don't believe it is difficult to parse out what Knox believed needed to be done.

He clearly recognized that the Confederation was an abject failure.

This means that as of this point, the Springfield arsenal had not been seized.

Nor had Jackson found it so completely impossible to find men willing to fight or people willing to give money to the cause.

It is hard to think that these developments did much to inspire confidence in Henry Knox.

As a brief aside, in the same letter, Knox comments about his sadness over the death of his close friend, General Greene.

Nathaniel Greene had died back in June at the age of just 43 from heatstroke during the war.

Greene had been in the inner part of the inner circle around Washington.

Per Green biographer Terry Golway, Some speculated that Greene was Washington's hand chosen successor in the event of a catastrophe.

Although we will never know, it seems possible, if not likely, that had Greene survived, he would have found a spot on Washington's cabinet waiting for him.

The fact that Knox was writing to Washington about his dismay over the Confederation prior to the most significant events in Shays Rebellion is strongly indicative that Knox was already in favor of a stronger central government when Shay's Rebellion broke out.

Indeed, men like Knox, Hamilton, Madison, and yes, George Washington would have supported a far stronger national government even if western Massachusetts had remained harmonious.

Although for Washington the events did convince him that it was time to re enter the public sphere and more vocally endorse nationalist views for a strong central government.

Washington understood the weight that his presence carried and, despite some reservations for what it might mean for his legacy, agreed to attend the convention in Philadelphia.

Others, though, still remained reluctant.

Patrick Henry, for instance, continued to deny that the Confederation needed any reform whatsoever.

Thomas Jefferson, who was serving in Paris as the US Minister to France, would famously quip that a little rebellion now and then was a good thing, letting James Madison know that he was not terribly worried about the Massachusetts farmers and what it meant, although he was deeply concerned over the question of navigation of the Mississippi, Historian George Van Cleave writes that the true importance of Shays Rebellion is that it managed to convince some of those most ardent supporters of the status quo that they were at real risk of mob violence and that adjustments were needed in that delicate balance between liberty and the order that exists within a republic.

At the same time, the rebellion offered further proof to the nationalist leadership of just how moribund the Confederation was and that reform was necessary for the nation's survival.

Even amongst those most opposed to the idea of significant constitutional reform, there was an acknowledgment that the requisition system was broken beyond repair.

It never had actually worked, as Congress had no enforcement mechanism, with the states often unwilling to pay anything at all, it did nothing but reinforce how useless of a system it was, thus encouraging other states to hold back their payments as well.

However, by this point the Congress was so sparsely attended that the body lacked the ability to do anything with the recommendations.

Although Shay's Rebellion would provide a much needed shove for some, it would be an overreach to attribute the existence of the Constitutional Convention exclusively to a western Massachusetts uprising.

Historian John Fairling, in his book A Leap in the Dark, explains that the Constitutional Convention would have happened regardless of Shays Rebellion, but that the rebellion changed the environment for that meeting.

In Virginia, for example, Shays rebellion appears to have had little impact on their decision to join the Constitutional convention.

We know this because the Virginia legislature had rejected both debt relief and the issuance of paper currency at roughly the same time that it approved the state's participation in the convention.

In fact, what moved the needle in Virginia to a position of support was concern over the ability of the national government to protect the state's western interests and the overall financial stability of the union.

There was real concern in the Kentucky territory, which was then part of Virginia, over the continued existence of those British forts in the western territories.

These forts provided a potential base of operation for Indian warfare on the frontiers, and therefore were an existential risk to the western settlers.

The inability of the confederation to evict the British from these forts Was a real problem.

Furthermore, the insolvency of the confederation was getting in the way of paying those debts owed to the British from before the war, which was being used as the primary justification for maintaining those western forts.

Ironically, just as Virginia was granting wide ranging authority for negotiations at the Philadelphia convention, Some in the state decided to play a different game altogether.

Patrick Henry was staunchly opposed to the convention, which makes it seemingly strange that when the time came, he offered no opposition to the convention taking place.

Rather, what Patrick Henry and others did was decline an opportunity to serve as delegates.

This left these men free to criticize the convention to their heart's content.

Massachusetts had been another place where there was little interest in a stronger national government.

Following Shay's rebellion, it did indeed help move a good number of people into the camp of recognizing the limitations of the confederation.

After all, these men just had to crowdsource an army to put down Daniel Shays and his followers.

However, even now, after men like Rufus King, who had been previously opposed to any such reform, had come around, Others remained far less interested.

Samuel Adams, for instance, had zero love for the convention and did what he could to hopefully prevent the state from sending delegates, or failing that, to so severely limit their authority as to have the same effect.

When in February, it became clear that the convention was going to take place in light of states like Virginia sending delegations, Adams and company shifted to the latter prospect of limiting the Massachusetts delegation to addressing only issues of trade and commerce.

After weeks of back and forth action, Massachusetts did end up removing all limits from their delegation.

This decision appears to have come in the wake of the Congress itself approving the convention.

The about faced by Massachusetts in their decision to remove all those restrictions is surprising.

Unfortunately, the exact reason behind that change of heart is largely lost to history.

However, the evidence that we do have suggests that it was far from being a unanimous decision.

As historian George Van Cleef points out, the decision of the legislature to not only reverse course, but to forgo publication of the original orders which had those restrictions, indicates that there was likely a very hefty amount of internal squabbling and infighting.

New York was another state that was less than enthusiastic when it came to the national convention.

New York had been a problem for years in the confederation, Having been one of the holdouts preventing Congress from passing the imposter.

This defeat spurred Alexander Hamilton to indicate his support for the national convention, much to the chagrin of New York governor George Clinton.

What Hamilton put forth was a proposal saying that if the Congress approved the meeting in Philadelphia, then New York should go ahead and send a delegation.

Note that this came on February 17th.

So that's two days after the failure to pass the impost, but four days before Congress would grant their approval for the convention.

After a contentious few days, the state senate passed the proposal by a single vote on February 20, one day before Congress signed on to the convention.

Following Congress's reluctant approval of the convention, Clinton made a final effort to limit the New York delegation to a point where they would effectively be dead on arrival.

The limitation being proposed would have prohibited any action that would have granted the power of taxation to the central government.

Prohibiting new York from passing this would have been devastating to the convention as a whole, as the very core to all of the problems was that Congress lacked the power to independently raise revenue.

The fact that the proposed limitations would have essentially killed any proposal at the convention was exactly what Clinton wanted.

This proposed limitation on the delegation came very close to passing.

The legislature deadlocked on the issue, leaving the deciding vote to the Lieutenant governor, Pierre Van Cortland, who voted against the proposal.

Although the New York delegation was not going to be bound by the restrictions that would have not only handicapped them, but indeed the entire convention.

It does not mark the end of political infighting regarding the Constitution when it comes to New York, as we are going to see down the road.

What remained a wild card was what the extent of those meetings was going to be.

Substantial sectional differences between the states remained, and within the states themselves, infighting remained a threat to the potential of major reforms to the confederation.

Next time.

Although there were plenty of those in the United States who viewed the coming convention with apprehension, there were others who were strolling in with a very clear vision of exactly what they were pushing for.

Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you back here next time as everybody prepares.

Meet.