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What Were The Effects Of Shays Rebellion

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Shays Rebellion Shays’ Rebellion was the final nail in the coffin for the Articles of Confederation. It managed to serve as the catalyst for the Founding Fathers to recognize the necessity for change to a stronger and more centralized government. The rebellion highlighted several of the documents’ failings that ultimately were due to the weak and decentralized government that the Articles of Confederation established. Although the Articles of Confederation was America’s first federal constitution, its weak federal government did not work out well for the United States. Because the federal government was so weak relative to the states, federal laws could not be properly enforced. The only real power that the national government had was the …show more content…

The federal government couldn’t even collect taxes, so they were unable to gather any money to repay their debts from the Revolutionary War. The states’ power allowed them to tax, and they ended up seeming as though they were independent countries. This is foreshadows the results what the French and Indian War caused for Britain. The French and Indian War, also commonly known as the Seven Years’ War, set Britain in debt. In order for Britain to pay off their this debt, Parliament passed many acts which taxed the thirteen colonies as much as ten times the amount of what they taxed the actual citizens of Britain; although each colony had a different amount. George Grenville became Prime Minister and believed that the colonists needed to pay their share for the French and Indian War, so he proposed the Intolerable Acts which just made the colonist mad. Charles …show more content…

Because of this, Congress approved a plan to hold a convention in order to revise the Articles of Confederation, but since the Articles of Confederation stated that there needed to be an unanimous consent to amend the first United States Constitution, they eventually decided to create an all new national document, and stop using the Articles of Confederation as a national document. However, during the Philadelphia Convention, their main priority was putting an end to the states’ power, so when they created the US Constitution, they established a stronger federal

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