During the American Revolution, the states and the Continental Congress had borrowed large sums of money from wealthy merchants. After the war, the merchants demanded that they be repaid, but the national government under the Articles of Confederation had no power to raise money. The states had to repay their own debts, and the only way for them to raise the money was to tax their citizens heavily.

Because they could not get help through legal means, a group of farmers decided they had no choice but to rebel. Their leader was Daniel Shays, a former Revolutionary War captain. In the fall of 1786, Shays led armed farmers in marches outside county courthouses in Springfield, Northampton and other towns in western Massachusetts. The purpose was to keep the courts from meeting. If the courts did not meet, bankers and others to whom farmers owed money could not take away their farms.

Shays’ Rebellion did not succeed. For many, the rebellion symbolized a fatal weakness of the national government under the Articles of Confederation. Because Congress had no power to raise money, it could not help the states pay off their war debts, which forced the states to tax their citizens heavily. Moreover, Congress could not raise a national army without unanimous consent of the states, so it was unable to act in time to assist Massachusetts. The realization of this weakness helped spur the events of the summer of 1787, when the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia wrote a constitution that defined a stronger and more capable federal government.