Fire Beneath Our Feet: Shays’ Rebellion and Its Constitutional Impact

To make sense of the U.S. Constitution, it is crucial to understand exactly how it came into being. Far from being a divine gift, as is often depicted, the nation’s fundamental law was a last-ditch effort to prevent the collapse of the Confederation of States that had been born out of revolution a dozen years earlier. Federalists made use of peaceful protests by unpaid revolutionary soldiers - Shays’ Rebellion - to raise unwarranted fears of a levelers’ (i.e., communistic) uprising and thereby goad the thirteen states into ceding some power to the central government. In effect, it was the first Red Scare that brought the Constitution into being, thanks largely to one indispensable American, George Washington, but that achievement came with compromises, including the legal protection of slavery, whose shadows we still cope with today.