Why did the Northern states oppose the Southern states’ plan for determining population?
Why did Daniel Shays and other farmers start Shays’s Rebellion?
The debate surrounding slavery at the Constitutional Convention continued to grow after the Three-Fifths Compromise.
Review the image of George Washington presiding over the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

How did the Great Compromise settle the debate over the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan?
Which debate came close to ending the Constitutional Convention before any progress was made?
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
Why did Anti-Federalists insist that a bill of rights be included in the Constitution?
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
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