In 1789, the Constitution of the United States had been ratified. The first U.S. Congress was settling into its temporary home in New York City and confirmed Alexander Hamilton’s appointment to the executive branch.

Alexander Hamilton, working up his finance plan, had exciting new powers to work with. The U.S. Constitution, Article One, section eight, clause one, gave the federal government a right to collect every kind of tax from the whole people of the United States. Congress created and deployed a cadre of federal officers to collect the impost, and the officers’ power, which included search and seizure, were unhampered by state lines or state laws. The nation was being unified by tax officers. Furthermore, sections fifteen and sixteen empowered the federal government to call out the state militias to enforce federal laws, to organize and control those militias when so engaged, and to prescribe militias’ training at all times.

Section ten, clause one, prohibited states from printing paper money, issuing bonds, and making anything but gold and silver a legal tender for paying public or private debts.

District judges were no longer elected in the counties they served but were appointed by the executive in the capital.

The power that the people had been given in 1776 was taken away.

The war was effectively won in late 1782. The past seven years had been a slog through cold, starvation, at time near-nakedness, along with the daily horrors of slaughter. Neither officers nor men had been paid in years. Tight cash forced choices between paying soldiers and paying creditors. Creditors came first: Morris officially suspended army pay. Washington himself was near bankruptcy. Mutiny was what Washington feared most. He blamed Congress. Uncertainty about pay was haunting – and uniting – a large, angry force, 550 officers and around 10,000 enlisted men, who might refuse to be sent home impoverished and in debt.

When officers met with Congress, they mentioned mutiny as the probable outcome of demands not being met. Hamilton was now determined to build the situation into a genuine crisis. That the crisis really might end in coup and military government was a risk they had to take. They even considered the potential benefits to their national agenda of the success of such a coup. But their main idea was merely to frighten the states with the threat of military takeover. The officer class was armed. Morris advised the officers to refuse to lay down their arms unless the states agreed to federal taxes.

In Philadelphia, Morris met with officers and hailed them as fellow creditors. The only solution was to demand federal taxes to pay not just officers but all creditors. Hamilton addressed Congress to rule out compromises. He opposed a motion to levy the impost only for paying officers: all bondholders must be included. Congress did just that. All army obligations thus passed easily to the federal government, adding to the debt. The officers agreed to take the interest-bearing bonds, to be funded after final settlement of states’ accounts with Congress.

Washington believed creditors had been manipulating his much abused army and risking a national disaster just to get payments for bondholders. When Washington seemed to chide Hamilton, calling an army a dangerous thing to play with, Hamilton wrote a passionate justification, admitting that he and Morris had indeed blended creditor and officer interest, swearing he’d always had the army’s interest at heart.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

The debt to American investors, which lay at the heart of the drama, took the form of interest-bearing notes issued chaotically by the Congress and various state legislatures to raise cash for the war. Those creditors kept reminding Congress that their investment in the war had been patriotic and should be rewarded as such. The Congress, representing sovereign states, had no power to tax anyone. Every state was therefore supposed to levy taxes to retire a proportionate amount of Continental paper. 

The colonies had been suffering a thirty-year economic slide, which was now a full-on depression. People in the countryside were desperate. States couldn’t collect taxes and were already failing to make agreed-upon requisitions of funds to Congress. So Congress printed more and more of its poorly supported paper. As early as 1776, everybody knew Continental paper would depreciate deeply, and by 1780 the Congress had to stop printing it. The bills soon traded at a rate of $125 in paper to $1 in coin. After passing out of circulation, they sold to long-shot gamblers at five hundred to one.

Creditors wondered how Congress could reliably fund such bills. Robert Morris showed them how. He was fat; his financial presence was fatter. He owned ships and warehouses and ran his own networking of trading partners, connecting Philadelphia to New Orleans, Europe, and the West Indies; soon he’d be investing in the China trade. He hadn’t favored American independence, but given a fait accompli, Morris would find opportunities. Exploiting the potential of a war economy, he hoped to unleash high finance, turn America into a commercial empire, and make the merchant class fabulously rich.

In Morris’s view, Congress wasn’t collecting the necessary taxes from the mass of ordinary people. He therefore became intent on imposing on all people, throughout the states, direct federal taxes, payable by the people to Congress – in coin. These taxes would be collected not by weak state governments but by a powerful cadre of federal officers. Once people were inured to direct federal taxation, Morris told Hamilton, cash poll taxes, cash land taxes, and cash excise taxes would soon follow. To ensure payment to the creditors, Morris intended to open, as he put it, the purses of the people. That those purses were almost always empty of the metal he wanted did not faze him.

Another part of the Morris plan, critical to enabling Hamilton’s later projects, was to swell the federal debt to massive proportions. A sufficiently huge debt, Morris believed, would force the Congress to pass federal taxes. So Morris began defining the purpose of the war as sustaining the war debt. Only extending the military conflict, he said, could hold the country together long enough for the government to grow strong and the people resigned to paying national taxes.

Morris enlisted young Hamilton to get the war effort focused on what Morris saw as its main purpose: paying interest to the bondholding class. Here was the origin of Hamilton’s whiskey tax of 1791. Here too was the origin of a resistance movement – typified by the tar and feathering – that would treat the whisky tax as the last, intolerable stroke in a long flogging. The conflict that Alexander Hamilton was taking up in the confederation Congress, and which he would pursue with increasing intensity to its climax in the 1790s, was really a conflict between creditors and debtors.

The Whiskey Rebellion Series

Recently liberated by the revolution, the people’s movement had strong opinions about democracy and economic fairness.  In America, the people’s movement drew energy from the Great Awakening, whose spiritual radicalism had gripped the colonies in the 1730s and ‘40s. By the 1770s, the movement wanted laws to dictate fair and equal distribution of wealth and credit. It wanted to limit the profits that a few moneyed men could reap from what it saw as the suffering and degradation of entire communities. To achieve those goals, it wanted democratic access to the political process.

During the Colonial period, gold and silver were rarely seen by ordinary people. But still, ordinary people, paralyzed and reduced to barter, had to borrow. When high payments and retiring debt was out of sight, creditors came in effect to own debtors’ labor and property. Farmers over-worked their soil in hopes of success and only failed more rapidly. When they couldn’t pay, their farms and businesses were seized. Families were sent in droves from their farms and shops to prisons and poorhouses, their land, livestock, and furniture auctioned off, sometimes to the very creditors who had foreclosed and were now picking up, at bargain prices, the debtors’ lands, mills and tools.

Many of the river industries were no longer owned and operated by the settlers themselves. Men labored more and more often in the mills and yards of rich entrepreneurs and merchants. An ironworks could employ dozens of men while its owner bought up thousands of foreclosed acres recently owned by his laborers. Even many who engaged in farm work no longer owned their own land; they’d become tenants of large landowners and hired hands of commercial farmers.

The people’s movement wanted that cycle stopped by law and had often used rowdy and sadistic tactics to frighten legislatures into providing relief. The people’s movement had long employed tactics that were extralegal, often illegal. The People’s Movement had shifted westward after the war and the radicals had involved themselves in two incidents in the 1780s that inadvertently enabled Hamilton to impose the whiskey tax of 1791. One was traditional in being criminal and violent. The other, even more disconcerting to creditors, was lawful and political.

Shay’s Rebellion

 

The Massachusetts assembly had taken an aggressive approach to consolidating and paying its war debts, benefiting the few who held interest-bearing state notes. Further taxes were levied on the people. Though some were payable in various kind of paper, they were simply not payable at all by many; mass foreclosures ensued. Protest took the form of petitions and meeting, demanding a revaluation of the debt along realistic lines. In 1786 the debtors staged a classic court riot in Northampton. In January of 1787 they tried to seize the federal arsenal in Springfield, where they were put down by the state militia and ringleaders were arrested.

 

After suppressing the Shays’ Rebellion, the Massachusetts legislature repealed the crushing tax laws. To nationalists like Hamilton, it was the old story; legislatures reacted to the people’s violence by passing laws that robbed investors.

 

 

Pennsylvania

 

In Pennsylvania, the radical state constitution allowed ordinary people an unusual degree of access to the government. The Pennsylvania assembly became a tense place. Throughout the eighties, power lurched back and forth from the party of creditors and merchants. The thing that truly dismayed the Morris circle was the Pennsylvania property requirement for voting: virtually none. Nor was there one for holding office. The poor could not only vote in Pennsylvania but also hold office.

 

Morris and other creditors had picked up depreciated Pennsylvania bonds, at a fraction of face value, from people in urgent need of cash. Having bought at a deep discount, creditors now hoped to get the state not merely to pay interest on but to actually pay off the debt, at face value, for an overnight creditor bonanza.

 

The radicals proposed instead to depreciate the bonds, by law, to real market value, about one-quarter face value, and make those depreciated certificates a legal tender for paying taxes, state mortgages, public fees of kinds, requiring creditors to accept that paper for payments on loans – never indeed redeeming them in gold and silver. Morris and other creditors, forced to accept these depreciated bills, castigated paper as the legalized pillage of the rich.

 

 

 

During the 1780s, mob in New Jersey, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia all protested debtor courts and attacked tax collectors. Anarchy threatened to undermine the fledgling nation everywhere. The confrontation at the Springfield arsenal in January 1787 was the high point in a series of yeoman protests and Regulator conflicts that became known to history as Shays’ Rebellion.

After Shays’ Rebellion, state governments became even more convinced that the national government needed to be stronger in order to prevent further insurrections. Alexander Hamilton was one of the political leaders who pusher for a stronger federal government in the wake of Shays’ Rebellion. He had long argued that the Articles of Confederation was inadequate and needed to be revised to give more power to the federal government.

By the summer of 1788, the Constitution had been ratified by nine states and was officially adopted as the new governing document for the United States. Shays’ Rebellions had played a vital role in the creation of the United States Constitution.  The fear the rebellion had evoked helped the Federalists in their crusade for a stronger government. The memory of Shays’ Rebellion and fear of other possible rebellions pushed many people who might otherwise have rejected a stronger national government to accept one.

Daniel Shay

In 1820, Shays applied for a military pension based on his service during the Revolutionary War. He received it. After his pension came, he bought a small farm and built a house and barn, living out his days as a farmer. Daniel Shays died in Sparta, New York, on September 29, 1825, at the age of seventy-eight.

The Anti-Federalists by Jackson Main, 1961, Edited Excerpts

All this excitement and all these fears, real or imaginary, worked a shift of opinion. Massachusetts men of property drew together, and many who had once doubted the value of a strong government, now hailed the prospect, and applauded the Society of Cincinnati which might help to obtain it.

In 1780, in order to forestall a mass resignation of military officers, Congress promised half-pay pensions for life to those who would remain in service for the war’s duration. However, Congress lacked funds to honor this commitment. Antifederalists feared the army’s political power and opposed military pensions or any other measure which would differentiate the army from the general body of the population and contribute to the formation of a military caste.

Veteran army officers formed the Society of Cincinnati, a hereditary, secret organization. The Cincinnati was widely suspected of a design to create permanent nobility and exert political influence. It was known that in 1783 some of the officers of the army had conspired with members of Congress in an attempt to force the states to grant federal taxes.

Antifederalists were later to accuse the Society of deliberately fomenting Shay’s Rebellion as part of a deep plot to overturn the government. The officers were accused of attempting to profit at the expense of the people, who had contributed as much as they had to the war and were suffering equally from the depression.

The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hodgeland, 2006, Edited Excerpts

The officers formed the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization with a chapter in each state. Every officer of the Continental Army was a member, and each officer’s eldest male descendant, in every future generation, would be a member too. The society unified the families of those who would become the country’s most influential men, creating a hereditary interstate lobby with roots in fear of coup. The society’s president was General Washington.

Regulators Pursued

On January 30, 1787, General Lincoln sent a letter to Daniel Shays, asking for his surrender. Shays and his men did not want to surrender unless they were guaranteed a pardon from the state. Lincoln marched the army 30 miles in deep snowdrifts and surprised the Regulators. Shays and his men fled in all directions. Having broken up Shay’s ranks, General Lincoln and his men marched back to western Massachusetts to eliminate any remaining bands of rebels there.

By March 1787, most of the Regulators had fled Massachusetts. As many as two thousand went to Vermont and New York. Captain Daniel Shays, along with many other Regulator leaders sought refuge in Vermont.

Reforms Passed

Immediately following the uprisings of 1787, the Massachusetts legislature, at long last, responded to some of the demands of yeoman farmers. The tender law was extended, and debtors were allowed to leave debtor’s prison if they swore an oath saying that they had no property to pay their debts or sustain themselves while they were in prison. Taxes were lower in 1788 than they had been in eight years.

Most rebels were pardoned, provided that they agreed to sign an oath of allegiance to the state. Those who surrendered were barred from voting or holding elected office for three years. To prevent them from encouraging another rebellion, they were also disqualified from teaching school or running taverns.

Governor Bowdoin Raises an Army

Governor Bowdoin could not rely on the country militias to put down Regulator uprisings. He now called on all of his friends and associates to contribute money to create and supply an army capable of opposing the western rebels and restoring order in Massachusetts. Many prominent merchants and wholesalers donated money to put this plan into action.

The army Governor Bowdoin raised consisted of volunteers from the merchant elite of the east coast, servants who had been sent to serve in their employers’ places, and prominent professional and commercial men from inland market towns. The new government troops formed five divisions, including two artillery regiments, and were furnished with muskets, bayonets, cartridge boxes, and thirty rounds of ammunition each.

On January 22, 1787, these government troops arrived in Worcester. Governor Bowdoin had issued warrants for the arrest of sixteen Hampshire County Regulators, including Captain Daniel Shays.

Regulators Move on Springfield Arsenal

The Regulators had to improve the quality of their weapons in order to resist capture. They had never been well armed. In fact, some of the Regulators had only wooden clubs for protection. The Regulators were also short of supplies, and they did not always have enough to eat when they marched to distant courthouses. These problems had to be resolved.

The Regulators wanted to launch an attack on the federal arsenal at Springfield. There they could seize the weapons and ammunition they needed. At the end of January, the Regulators acted on the first half of their plan. They began to approach Springfield from all directions.

Meanwhile, General William Shepard and the remains of the Hampshire militia, numbering about one thousand men, were camped inside the Springfield arsenal, preparing to defend it against attack.

When Shay’s regiment got within one hundred fifty yards of the arsenal, Shepard had his men fire the cannon twice over the rebels’ heads. When they continued to march forward, they fired a third shot into their center as the column approached, killing four and wounding one. Shay’s men scattered and some even deserted in the confusion that followed the cannon fire.

Shays’ Rebellion Series

The day after the standoff at the courthouse, the Massachusetts legislature met in Boston. First, it suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the requirement that a law enforcement officer have evidence against a suspect in order to imprison him or her. Without habeas corpus, anyone the governor considered dangerous to the state could be arrested.

Next the legislature passed the Riot Act to prevent the regulators from organizing. This law, designed by former revolutionary and patriot leader Samuel Adams, authorized sheriffs and justices of the peace to order an armed crowd to disperse.

Under the Riot Act, the failure of an armed crowd to disperse would result in arrest, imprisonment, and seizure of personal property. Mobs had been useful in resisting the British prior to the revolution, and people who were upset with the new government tried to use these same methods now.

The legislature also passed the Militia Act during its fall 1786 session. The Militia Act declared that “any officer or soldier who shall begin, excite, cause, or join in any mutiny sedition” will be subject to “such punishment as by a court martial shall be inflicted.”

People suspected of being regulators could now be arrested and detained without bail on the grounds that they put the safety of Massachusetts in danger. They could be held in jail with any evidence.

Shays’ Rebellion Series

On February 26, 1782, a mob of three hundred yeomen tried to obstruct the proceedings of the Court of Common Pleas in Pittsfield. In 1783, tax collectors were attacked by angry yeomen as they passed through Worcester County.

The people who became involved in rebellious activity against Massachusetts in the 1780s were mainly yeoman farmers, craftsmen, and laborers from the central and western counties and the inland rural areas of Massachusetts. All had suffered from high taxes and hard times. Quite a few were veterans.

Taverns provided a means of communication. They had played a vital role in the organization of the American Revolution, and they continued to be one of the few places where people could gather and socialize. In Pelham, where Daniel Shays lived, Conkey Tavern provided a comfortable place for men to meet, get information, and discuss their problems.

Alarmed by the widespread obstruction of justice, Governor Bowdoin of Massachusetts tried to get the local militias to put down these mobs. But too many of the western militiamen sided with the rebels. They refused to act against them. All across Massachusetts, militiamen deserted the militia rather than act against their countrymen. In fact, many militiamen deserted their posts to join the rapidly growing rebel movement, which was becoming a militia itself.

In 1784, Daniel Shays, a farmer, was taken to court over a twelve-pound debt. Shays had become a member of a fraternal order know as the Freemasons while serving in the Revolutionary War in New York. His bravery so impressed the Marquis de Lafayette, a French general who had joined the American fight against England that the general later presented Shays with a ceremonial sword.

Shays helped lead the Regulators in their occupation of the Springfield courthouse in September 1786. A group of eleven hundred Regulators banded together in Springfield to obstruct the Supreme Judicial Court. Some of the Regulators had armed themselves with clubs.

Debt Burden

American merchants owed money to English creditors; however, American merchants had trouble selling their wares, but still had to satisfy their creditors. To raise money to pay their British creditors, American merchants tried to collect all the money that was owed to them.

Farmers were accustomed to paying their debts seasonally with crops or labor. Using agriculture goods to pay debts was a common practice. Most did not have cash. However, merchants wanted to be paid in cash [gold and silver], not goods.

The barter system fell apart. This created a chain reaction between creditors and debtors at all levels of the economy. When merchants were unable to collect the money owed to them, they took legal action against debtors. As a result, the 1780s say a dramatic increase in the number of debt suits.

Debt Collection

An estimated one out of every four Massachusetts men had a debt suit brought against him between 1784 and 1786. Courts were clogged with cases against debtors. Citizens in other states had severe debt problems as well. Courthouses in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont were full of debtor cases.

In the early American legal system, the debtor had to pay court costs and lawyer’s fees, so being taken to debtor’s court was an expensive experience. Yeomen who were unable to pay back their debt faced prosecution and had their land and goods taken from them by the courts.

Debtors lived in fear that their land and livelihoods might be taken from them by lawyers. The seizure of their land was a horrifying prospect to yeoman farmers, for whom ownership of land was their only means of earning a living. Their land was one of the things for which they had fought during the revolution.

Debtors came to hate lawyers. Perhaps unfairly, yeomen blamed the explosion of debt cases in the courts on lawyers, who profited by prosecuting the ever-growing number of debtors from the western counties. Lawyers were so hated in country areas that they became the butt of many jokes.

Debtor’s Prison

The also feared another fate: being thrown in to debtor’s prison. Debtor’s prisons were overcrowded and unclean places. Cells were damp and often lacked proper light and ventilation. These conditions bred sickness and all kinds of problems.

A man sitting in debtor’s prison could not earn any money to pay his way out. But creditors often insisted that someone who owed them money remain in jail, in the hopes that his friends or family would pay his debt in order to have him released. Sometimes this ploy worked. Other times, people remained in debtor’s prison for their entire term with no way to pay their debt. The majority of people in debtor’s prison were yeoman farmers, rural laborers, and craftsman.

Tax Burden

In addition to the chain of debt, taxes had been increasing in Massachusetts since 1776, and after the revolution they increased dramatically as Massachusetts tried to pay off its war debt. Worse, these taxes now had to be paid in gold and silver, not paper money or goods.

This was an especially terrible blow to yeoman, who preferred to pay their taxes with labor rather than with cash. Previously, yeomen worked out their highway taxes by fixing and improving the roads, rather than paying cash. People now had to come up with gold or silver, not paper money or goods, to pay their taxes.

Shays’ Rebellion Series

Eighteenth-century farmers in central and western Massachusetts were primarily yeomen who grew only what they needed to make themselves comfortable. In contrast, commercial farmers grew large quantities of marketable crops like hemp or flax [which were used to make rope and sailcloth] and then sold them for a profit. Yeomen outnumbered commercial farmers, making up 70 percent of the agrarian population in rural New England. Rural craftsmen were also considered yeomen.

On the coast of New England and in inland market towns, merchants had a different way of life. The wealthiest and largest merchant firms were located in commercial centers along the eastern seaboard such as Boston, Massachusetts, and Providence and Newport, Rhode Island. As members of commercial society, merchants had more personal wealth than most other citizens. They tended to live an affluent lifestyle.

The merchant class enjoyed a more refined and modern lifestyle and looked down upon yeoman farmers as simple people. Yeoman farmers were similarly prejudiced against merchants. Yeoman thought merchants lacked virtue and honesty and did not know the value of hard work.

As the American economy faltered after the Revolutionary War, merchants and yeomen began to distrust each other even more. The traditional agrarian way of life clashed with the developing commercial culture. Financial crisis soon brought them into conflict.

As economic stress increases, the relationship between landlord and tenant also becomes stressed and evidenced.

Landlord dead, 94-year-old tenant in custody after Oakland standoff

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/02/BAU710FQDD.DTL

May 2, 2008

Frank Spillman, 94, complained for years about how his landlord was harassing him, neighbors say. With a few choice curse words, Spillman railed about how Kulbushan Gupta would demand that he clean the yard, rake the leaves and keep the Oakland property neat. Gupta had served as president of the Rental Housing Association of Northern Alameda County, a landlords group.

Gupta staggered from the two-story house at 4108 East 12th St. and into the street. Spillman went down the stairs after him, firing several more shots, police said. Gupta collapsed in an adjacent store parking lot and died three hours later at Highland Hospital in Oakland.

Alleged nightmare landlords are the real victims, lawyers say

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/02/BAR210FTJJ.DTL

May 2, 2008

Prosecutors say the Macys ordered workers at 744-746 Clementina St. to cut the joists under the living room of one tenant who fought eviction and also cut holes in his floor. Nicole Macy broke into the apartment of two other tenants who refused to move and poured ammonia on their belongings, authorities said. Several times after buying the building in 2005, the couple allegedly cut off power, gas and water to their tenants.

After the Revolutionary War, Great Britain barred American merchants for selling their goods in the British West Indies. This was England’s way of punishing Americans for breaking away. The loss of the lucrative West Indies trade hurt Americans shipping and fishing industries, making life difficult for everyone, from wholesalers to retailers to farmers.

Victory had come at a price. The war had been a long and expensive undertaking, and the whole country faced serious war debt. Unable to pay Revolutionary War veterans, the Continental Congress had issued the veterans paper notes known as Continental Securities. The states promised to redeem these notes in the future.

Because veterans needed cash to pay their taxes and debts, they were forced to sell their notes to others for much less than they were worth. “Not worth a Continental,” a phrase referring to the devaluation of paper currency, became a popular saying of the day. The Continental was no longer worth its face value. In 1780, it took forty paper dollars to purchase one silver dollar. Speculators, including Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin, bought continental securities from veterans, paying only a fraction of their price. They hoped the state would eventually pay these notes at face value in specie [gold and silver], not in paper.

American soldiers who had survived the Revolutionary War returned to find their homes and land in disarray, their fields overgrown, their families suffering from lack of food, and their debts and taxes had gone unpaid. Creditors harassed debtors, paper currency had decreased in value, and gold and silver, or specie, was scarce.

This was the climate of confusion and poverty to which soldiers returned home. Massachusetts yeomen had believed that their lives would improve after the revolution, which they had fought at the expense of their own lives. Now that the war had been won, they were worse off than ever before, facing debt, high taxes, and the potential loss of their land.

Constitution Series

The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 articles advocating the ratification of the United States Constitution. Published between October 1787 and August 1788, the articles were written by Alexander Hamilton , James Madison and John Jay . Madison is generally credited as the father of the Constitution and became the fourth President of the United States. Hamilton was an active delegate at the Constitutional Convention, and became the first Secretary of the Treasury. John Jay became the first Chief Justice of the United States. George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States April 1789.

Yes, I actually read the Federalist Papers, an exercise of self-flagellation. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay produced voluminous articles that must have kept an army of typesetters employed. The intended audience would be peers of wealth and education, not the Shays Rebellious types. No doubt these three men were deep thinkers, writing and writing and writing, till the ink ran dry. And buried in this abundance of enlightenment are key economic doctrines which I have painfully excerpted and highlighted for your perusal.

Federalist Papers -- Shays' Rebellion

Federalist Papers -- Coinage

Federalist Papers -- Debt and Taxes

Federalist Papers – Western Territories

Federalist Papers – Military

Federalist Papers -- Slaves