Exhibit: Debt, Rebellion and a New Plan
1Artifact 1: A Continental dollar, 1776. The Continental Congress printed paper money to pay for the Revolutionary War, but under the Articles of Confederation, in force from 1781, Congress had no power to tax. It could only ask the states for money, and many states paid little. As Congress printed more bills, they lost value; by 1780 it took about 40 paper dollars to buy what one silver dollar bought.
2Artifact 2: A tax notice sent to a farmer in Pelham, Massachusetts, 1786 (reproduction). To pay its own war debts, Massachusetts raised taxes and demanded payment in gold or silver coin, which few farmers had. Courts took the land and animals of farmers who could not pay, and some debtors went to jail. In the fall of 1786, armed farmers, many of them army veterans, shut down courts in western Massachusetts to stop the land seizures.
3Artifact 3: A musket ball found near the federal arsenal at Springfield. In January 1787, about 1,500 farmers led by Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, marched toward the arsenal to seize its weapons. Congress had no money to send an army. Massachusetts militia defended the arsenal, and an army paid for largely by Boston merchants then broke up the uprising.
4Artifact 4: Under glass, a copy of the Articles of Confederation. The label lists its rules: each state had one vote in Congress, no matter its size. Nine of the thirteen states had to agree to pass important laws, and all thirteen had to agree to change the Articles. There was no national president to carry out laws and no national court system. Congress could not control trade between the states, so states taxed one another's goods.
5Artifact 5: A letter from George Washington to James Madison, November 5, 1786. In it Washington warned: "Thirteen sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head, will soon bring ruin on the whole."
6Artifact 6: A model of the chair George Washington sat in as president of the Constitutional Convention, which met in Philadelphia from May to September 1787. Fifty-five delegates came from twelve states; Rhode Island sent no one. On the last day, Benjamin Franklin said he had often wondered whether the half-sun carved on the chair was rising or setting, and now he was happy to know it was a rising sun. Thirty-nine delegates signed the Constitution on September 17, 1787.