"From the labours of others": The war bonds controversy and the origins of the constitution in New England

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 271-316

  Holton, Woody ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33645651172     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491787     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Cf. Roger H. Brown, Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution (Baltimore, 1993), 115. Some historians' conviction that farmers resisted free markets and capitalism has led them to exaggerate the importance of private debt as opposed to taxes in the political conflicts of the 1780s
2. For instance, Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 46-47, interprets a July 1786 Massachusetts law and a complaint issued by the Greenwich town meeting later that year as having to do with private debt. Actually, the July 1786 law was aimed at enforcing the collection of taxes, not private debts. And, when the people of Greenwich said "a great debt is justly brought upon us by the war," they were talking about money owed by the government, not by individuals. Studies that ascribe Shays's Rebellion primarily ro taxation are listed below
3. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913)
4. Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution" (Princeton, N.J., 1956)
5. Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958)
6. George Richards Minot, The History of the Insurrections, in Massachusetts, in the Year MDCCLXXXVI, and the Rebellion Consequent Thereon (Worcester, Mass., 1788), 12-15
7. Richard B. Morris, The Forging of the Union, 1781-1789 (New York, 1987), 135-144
8. To Jeremiah Wadsworth, May 27, 1786, Jeremiah Wadsworth Correspondence, Connecticut Historical Society (CHS), Hartford
9. The titles of eighteenth-century newspapers, which tended to vary from year to year, especially when the papers changed hands, have been standardized. For full titles, see Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820, 2 vols. (Worcester, Mass., 1947)
10. Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961)
11. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961), 225. The face value of the 1785 tax, passed in compliance with that year's congressional requisition, was twenty thousand pounds, but Rhode Islanders were permitted to pay two-thirds of it using "indents" (certificates paid out as interest to holders of federal bonds) that had depreciated to 33 percent of their face value, so its real cost was about eleven thousand pounds
12. Prewar Rhode Island taxation: John P. Kaminski, Paper Politics: The Northern State Loan-Offices during the Confederation, 1783-1790 (New York, 1989), 169
13. Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700-1815 (Columbus Ohio, 1994), 180, calculated that, if Massachusetts citizens had paid all of the tax that the assembly levied in 1786, the tax would have consumed 8 to 11 percent of their income. He contrasted that to colonial-era Massachusetts taxes, which seldom rose above 2 percent of income. Unfavorable comparisons to the prewar period were also made at the time. In the midst of Shays's Rebellion, the town of Greenwich, Mass., recalled that, during the struggle against Parliament, "our Grievances Ware Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now." "Answer of the Town of Greenwich to the Circular Letter from Boston," Worcester Magazine, II (November 1786), 422
14. "A Friend to the Rights of Mankind," who defended New Hampshire bond-holders, estimated that they received 92 percent of tax revenue. New Hampshire Gazette, June 3, 1785
15. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 245-249, provides the best evidence available that bondholders were the primary beneficiaries of the high taxes that provoked Shays's Rebellion and were perceived as such. Historians have had comparatively little to say about the political consequences of antibondholder sentiment in states other than Massachusetts
16. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New-Hampshire ..., II (Boston, 1791), 461-462
17. "Justice," Middlesex Gazette, Mar. 6 (quotation), 27, 1786
18. "A Friend to the Public," Newport Mercury, Jan. 30, 1786
19. "Jonas, Junior," Hamp. Herald, May 17, 1785
20. Kaminski, Paper Politics, 194
21. Leonard L. Richards, Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (Philadelphia, 2002), 75-80, 157. Federal bonds were also concentrated in a few hands
22. Main, Political Parties before the Constitution, 51
23. In Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Correspondence and Journals of Samuel Blachley Webb, 3 vols. (New York, 1893-1894), III, 59
24. Richards, Shays's Rebellion, 78
25. [Benjamin Thurston], Address to the Public, Containing Some Remarks on the Present Political State of the American Republicks, etc. (Exeter, N.H., [1786]), 26-27
26. Minot, History of the Insurrections, 18
27. Richard H. Kohn, "The Inside History of the Newburgh Conspiracy: America and the Coup d'Etat," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXVII (1970), 195-196, 212-213
28. Compare Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion
29. Michael Merril, "The Anticapitalist Origins of the United States," Fernand Braudel Center, Review, XIII (1990). 465-497
30. Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism
31. "Publick Faith," Hamp. Herald, Jan. 31, 1786
32. "Objections against Reducing the Publick Debt Examined," Mass. Centinel, Mar. 1, 1786
33. Whitney K. Bates, "The State Finances of Massachusetts, 1780-1789" (master's thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1948), 92-93
34. Van Beck Hall, Politics without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780-1791 ([Pittsburgh, 1972]), 104-110. The Connecticut impost, adopted in 1784, could be paid with the interest indents that were issued to Connecticut holders of federal securities. A combination of direct taxes and an excise paid the interest on the state bonds
35. Rhode Island impost: Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 250
36. On the English Real Whig attitude toward public debt, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 48-51
37. John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789 (Boston, 1888), 162-177
38. Lynn Warren Turner, The Ninth State: New Hampshire's Formative Years (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983), 49
39. Carol Sue Humphrey, "This Popular Engine": New England Newspapers during the American Revolution, 1775-1789 (Newark, Del., 1992), 117-118
40. Elaine K. Swift, The Making of an American Senate: Reconstitutive Change in Congress, 1787-1841 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 18
41. and Francis D. Cogliano, Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History (London, 2000), 107
42. James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: Colonial Years (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 316, 322
43. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 86-96
44. Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence, R.I., 1954), 131; Caleb Strong to Theodore Sedgwick, Mar. 13, 1786, Sedgwick Papers I, Masachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston
45. "Proceedings of the General Court," Boston Magazine, III (March 1786), 139
46. Bates, "State Finances of Massachusetts," 77
47. Hall, Politics without Parties, 120-121
48. Buel, "Public Creditor Interest," in Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays, 53
49. "Probus," Mass. Centinel, May 5, 1787
50. Bates, "State Finances of Massachusetts," 128
51. «A Tradesman," New Hampshire Spy, Nov. 14, 1786
52. See "Timoleon" [James Tilton], The Biographical History of Dionysius, Tyrant of Delaware, Addressed to the People of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1788), 60-61
53. Christopher Collier, Roger Sherman's Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution (Middletown, Conn., 1971), 224
54. Webster, Pennsylvania Gaz., May 9, 1787
55. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York, 1986)
56. Jeffrey Alan Davis, "The Democratic-Republican Societies of Pennsylvania, 1793-1796" (Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 1996)
57. Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
58. Numerous works tackle this question. See, esp., Cecelia M. Kenyon, "Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government," WMQ, 3d Ser., XII (1955), 3-43
59. Richard D. Brown, "Shays's Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts," in Beeman, Botein, and Carter, eds., Beyond Confederation, 113-127
60. Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999)
61. and Bouton, "Tying Up the Revolution."