Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Frequently Cited Sources
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE NECESSITY OF THE CONSTITUTION
- PART TWO LESS CONVINCING FACTORS
- 8 The Modest and Mercantile Commerce Clause
- 9 Creditors, Territories, and Shaysites
- 10 Hamilton's Constitution
- PART III THE SPLIT AND THE END OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL MOVEMENT
- Concluding Summary
- Index
9 - Creditors, Territories, and Shaysites
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Frequently Cited Sources
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE NECESSITY OF THE CONSTITUTION
- PART TWO LESS CONVINCING FACTORS
- 8 The Modest and Mercantile Commerce Clause
- 9 Creditors, Territories, and Shaysites
- 10 Hamilton's Constitution
- PART III THE SPLIT AND THE END OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL MOVEMENT
- Concluding Summary
- Index
Summary
Various scholars of the Constitution have seriously proposed that the motive for the document was to serve the economic interests of creditors by allowing them to collect against hard-pressed debtors, that the purpose of the Constitution was to settle territory disputes among the states, or that the motive for the Constitution was to suppress popular unrest like that of Shays's Rebellion. All of those explanations, however, seem quite minor on examination as a factor in the switch to the new Constitution.
CREDITORS!
Charles Beard, in his famed Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, argued that the Constitution was originated and carried to adoption by a small group of men who held public securities and private debt and who wanted to get paid. Ratification, in Beard's view, was a battle of creditor proponents of the Constitution against an opposition consisting of agricultural interests and honest debtors. The Constitution had two fundamental parts, Beard argued: One part created the national government, and the other part imposed “[r]estrictions on the state legislatures which had been so vigorous in their attacks on capital.” Professor Gordon Wood has argued, more recently, that although Beard was strictly wrong on part of his thesis, still the Constitution arose more than anything else from a desire to prevent debtor relief legislation in the states.
The Constitution does in fact prohibit the states from issuing paper money and from impairing the obligation of contracts, including contractual debt.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Righteous Anger at the Wicked StatesThe Meaning of the Founders' Constitution, pp. 202 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005