Constitutional Times COMPROMISES AT THE CONVENTION By Mr. Woolsey By 1786, ten years after the Declaration of Independence, many Americans were in a difficult financial situation. Businesses failed, trade suffered, and many people were in debt. Soldiers who had fought in the Revolution still had not been paid. Congress could not control the country and people worried about what would happen. Farmers in Massachusetts had serious economic problems. Farm prices were low and when farmers could not pay their debts, many lost their farms and homes. Some were even put in prison. Many people claimed that new state taxes had put them in debt. As a result, they felt that the state was not protecting their interests. Farmers began to close down local courts to keep the state from taking their farms. Veterans of the Continental army were also upset because they had been treated poorly on discharge (they were given certificates for future redemption instead of immediate cash!) and began to organize the farmers into squads and companies. At courthouses in Worcester and Athol, famers with guns prevented the courts from meeting to take away their property. In Concord, a fifty-year-old veteran of two wars, Job Shattuck, led a caravan of carts, wagons, horses, and oxen onto the town square, while a message was sent to the judges: “The voice of the People of this country is such that the court shall not enter this courthouse until such time as the People shall have all of the unfairness they labor under at the present made right.” Daniel Shays entered the scene in western Massachusetts. A poor farm hand when the Revolution broke out, he joined the Continental army, fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, and was wounded in action. In 1780, he resigned from the army when he was not paid. He went home and soon found himself in court for nonpayment of debts. He also saw what was happening to others: a sick woman, unable to pay taxes, had her bed taken from under her. Shays was brought fully into the situation on September 19 when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts met in Worcester and indicted (charged) eleven leaders of the rebellion, including three of his friends, with being “disorderly, riotous” people who encouraged people to oppose the government and who “unlawfully and by force of arms” prevented the “execution of justice and the laws of the commonwealth.” The Supreme judicial court planned to meet again in Springfield a week later and there was talk of Luke Day, a leader of the dissenters, being indicted. Shays organized seven hundred armed farmers, most of them veterans of the war, and led them to Springfield to close down the court. Shays and his men moved through the square outside the court house, drums banging and fifes blowing. As they marched, their numbers grew. Some of the militia joined, and reinforcements began coming in from the countryside. The judges first postponed hearings for a day, and then suspended the court indefinitely.

George Washington Presiding over the Convention Picture from http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/stearns/

Page 3 Letter to the Editor: Biographical Spotlight: Thomas Jefferson Dear Editor, You recently printed an article about the Boston Tea Party. As someone who participated in the events, I can clarify what exactly happened and why we did it. It was not a mere act of vandalism! On the night of December 16, 1773 my fellow patriots and I dressed as Indians and snuck through Boston Harbor. Three ships carrying tea from the East India Company were in the harbor. Although the Sons of Liberty had demanded they leave, the captains refused to pay the harbor’s duty (tax) in order to leave, so they sat in the water. We snuck onto the three ships under the cover of darkness and dumped their cargoes of 340 tea chests into the harbor. As we ran away the streets echoed with shouts of “Boston harbor is a teapot tonight!” So, why did my patriot friends and I commit this act which people have been calling the Boston Tea Party? We did this because Britain is treating the colonies unfairly. First they forced the Townshend Acts on us. They soon repealed them, but kept their tax on the tea! This tea tax resulted in high tea prices for merchants and encouraged the smuggling of British tea. When Britain passed the Tea Act earlier this year, they allowed the East India Company to sell their tea directly to us colonists for cheaper than our merchants could sell tea. This injustice threatens to put our colonial merchants out of business. The British are trying to take our money and ruin our businesses! We do not even have a say in the taxes they force on us. This is unfair. We dumped those chests of tea in the harbor in protest of what the British are doing to the colonies. We need to stand up to these injustices! Signed, A Devoted Patriot Thomas Jefferson was a powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello. Freckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause. As the "silent member" of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786.