Compromise and the Constitutional Convention Answers

Why did Daniel Shays and other farmers start Shays’s Rebellion?

Why did delegates of smaller states support the New Jersey Plan at the Constitutional Convention?

How did the Great Compromise settle the debate over the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan?

Review the image of George Washington presiding over the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

During the first Congress, who proposed the 10 constitutional amendments that became the Bill of Rights?

Read the quotation from Mercy Otis Warren, an American writer who opposed ratifying the Constitution.The origin of all power is in the people, and . . . they have an [incontestable] right to check the creatures of their own creation.–Observations on the New Constitution, Mercy Otis Warren, 1788

Whom did Anti-Federalists most fear would abuse power in the new government?

How did the Federalists convince New York and Virginia to support the new constitution?

Read the excerpt from a letter that Henry Knox, a general in the American Revolution, wrote to George Washington about Shays’s Rebellion.This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England—They start as from a dream, and ask what has been the Cause of our delusion? What is to afford us security against the violence of lawless men? Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property. We imagined that the mildness of our government and the virtue of the people were so correspondent, that we were not as other nations requiring brutal force to support the laws—But we find that we are men, actual men, possessing all the turbulent passions belonging to that animal and that we must have a government proper and adequate to him.—Henry Knox, letter to George Washington, October 23, 1786