Despite the division in Massachusetts, the Constitution needed to be ratified in Massachusetts. Many of the other states looked at Massachusetts as a “what if” state.  Massachusetts at the time was one of the most populated states, and a key state in the American Revolution.  What would that mean for the rest of the states if all states did not vote for the Constitution? Would Massachusetts lead among them as an example to deny a more centralized government?

 

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States,  painted in 31 December 1939, Wikimedia Commons.

What did the Pro-Federalists want? The Federalists sought to pass the Constitution, Shays’ Rebellion only further demonstrated in their eyes the need for a more centralized government. There were two huge reasons the rebellion pushed the Federalists; first the insurgency killed tax collection in Massachusetts, it was so bad that between the 1786 and the spring of 1787 tax collect had stopped.  Second, the Rebellion itself had made many politicians afraid that the state government could not alone protect the people, or their property. [1] Henry Knox, a Boston supporter of the Federalist told Washington that he thought the Rebellion had made him and many believe that without a centralized government “there is no hope for liberty and property.” [2] Further, Lawyer Theodore Sedgwick addressed an Annapolis convention led by Alexander Hamilton, he warned them of the rebellion and the failure of inaction by stating “If we do not control events we shall be miserably controlled by them.” [3]

The Federalists worried they would be unable to control society if another rebellion were to break out, they worried about tax collection in another event of this type. They wanted a more centralized government to protect the people, their property and social order.

So, what did the Anti-Federalists fear?

As historian Leonard Richards points out the Federalists spoke for a document that reads “we the people” but it was not about the people that wanted the new government. Everything in the Constitution went under a magnifying glass, and the Anti-Federalists in Massachusetts were worried the rich aristocrats were repressing the poor rural people. One of the biggest problems for the Anti-Federalists in the Constitution was a direct tax clause in the Constitution and the Three-Fifths Compromise. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a racist, literal compromise, the northern states gave to the southern states in the Constitution. The compromise counted black slaves as three-fifths a person when determining things like seats in the house. However, the poorer population of Massachusetts, ironically in a way, found this policy in conjunction with the tax clause to be discriminatory on them. They saw it as a poor New England farmer would pay the same in taxes for three infant children as a rich southern farmer would for five farm working slaves. [4]

This emphasizes the overall feel the Anti-Federalists in Massachusetts felt, the Constitution was a way for rich land owners to take more away from the poorer people. In many ways, the resentment of Shays’ Rebellion remand. Next ->

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[1] Sean Condon, Shays’s Rebellion (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015), 122.

[2]Ibid, 123.

[3] David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 122.

[4] Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 147.