ABSTRACT
The traditional view of Shays’ Rebellion is that it was a close brush with anarchy that demonstrated the need for a stronger federal government to preserve order and liberty. In the 1770’s and 1780’s, small farmers composed the majority of the American population. Typically, before the Revolutionary War, they had owned their land, grown their own food and had little contact with money. Postwar America was mired in an economic depression as it tried to make the transition from English colony to independent trading partner. The tax structure amounted to a transfer of wealth from the taxpayer-farmers to the bondholder-merchants. The farmers found themselves asking what they had gained by risking their lives to throw off the yoke of English tyranny, only to find themselves in a new yoke of debt, tended by the Boston merchants and the local courts. The framers of the Constitution were lawyers, planters, merchants, land speculators, bondholders, creditors.
