By the time of the Massachusetts ratifying convention in January 1788, five of the nine required states had already ratified the federal Constitution. But the debates in Massachusetts were fierce, with the memory of Shays’s Rebellion still fresh in the delegates’ minds. Amos Singletary, a farmer and a convention delegate, claimed to represent the “little folk” when he addressed the convention. He sided with the Antifederalists and framed the debate about the Constitution in class terms and in the context of the pre-Revolutionary struggle between Britain and the colonists.
We contended with Great Britain—some said for a threepenny duty on tea; but it was not that—it was because they claimed a right to tax us and bind us in all cases whatever. And does not this constitution do the same? Does it not take away all we have—all our property? Does it not lay all taxes, duties, imposts, and excises? And what more have we to give? . . . These lawyers, and men of learning, and monied men, that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks, like the great Leviathan, Mr. President; yes, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah.
Source: Albert Bushell Hart, ed., American Patriots and Statesmen from Washington to Lincoln, vol. 2, 1775–1789 (New York: P. F. Collier and Sons, 1916), 335–36.
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