April 13, 1787
Dear Boston Gazette, To the editors and writers of the Boston Gazette, I have written this letter to press forward with a new plan of government. This thing that Congress is using is not helping anyone. The Articles of Confederation are not useful at all. As we all know rebellion has broken our since the summer of 1786. While all this is going on in the Massachusetts colony Congress can’t intervene because they don’t have the authority. Was it not just these men that fought for their independence from Britain together, now fighting against each other? What has this colony come to? Now I am not just going around saying that this is the only colony with problems but something needs to happen to end all of this rebellion and reunite the colonies. We need to divide the power equally between states and the central government. We need to devise a plan that can work for everyone and have all states agree on. To begin, let’s us discuss Shay’s Rebellion. As we all know, Shays Rebellion started in the summer of 1786. This rebellion was started because of the large amount of farmers who were in debt in Massachusetts. So, the result was that sheriffs seized the farmlands and most of the owners were put in jail. This is what caused so many Massachusetts settlers to start the rebellion. The farmers that had their land taken away from them start to rally up and have special meetings about possible strategies. In fall of 1786, when protestors agreed on a coordinated protest, they aggressively protested around courts and forced them to close. Soon after the rebels came under the leadership of Daniel Shay. Daniel Shay was a former captain in the Continental Army. When these rebels turned to Shay for direction and how to move forward with their rebellion, were politicians around this separated nation not petrified of what could happen? Did it not phase them that if this rebellion was in Massachusetts could influence others different colonies could also break out into rebellion? If so, why not these state representatives gather up and unite together to form a new plan of government? The next reason why we need to unite and form a new plan, is because the Articles of Confederation benefits no one. Under the Articles Congress the national government can’t do anything. They cannot force states to obey its national laws because the Articles gave the states the ability to have their own constitutions. The government did not have the power to force states to pay taxes nor did they have power to enforce laws since they only had legislative branch. They had no executive branch to enforce laws and no judicial branch to settle disputes between states. Then, every state has their own militia and the national government had no national army or navy. Also, the government cannot force states to trade with each other. The last and biggest weakness of the Articles of Confederation was that any changes that the national government wanted to make hade to be unanimous and because states never agree it leads to long delays in implementation. Then there was the fact that every state only had one vote regardless of its size and population. To show that it was unfair let’s just use the example of Pennsylvania and Georgia. 1770 reports show that
