The United States had won its independence.
The British Army had left.
The war was over.

The republic had a flag, a Congress, and international recognition.
Yet beneath the celebration lay a simple and dangerous fact:

the new government had almost no money

Today Americans often debate whether the federal government is too powerful.
In the 1780s, the problem was the opposite.

The federal government was so weak that it struggled to perform the most basic functions of a state.
Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress could declare war.
It could negotiate treaties.
It could represent the nation abroad.
But it could not directly collect taxes from the people.
Instead, Congress had to ask the states for money.
And the states could simply refuse.

The arrangement had seemed reasonable during the Revolution.
Many Americans feared centralized power.
They had just fought a war against a distant government that taxed them without representation.
Few wished to create another strong authority.

But peace exposed the weakness of the system.
The debts of the Revolution remained.
Soldiers expected payment.
Foreign creditors expected payment.
Government officials expected payment.
Congress agreed that these obligations should be met.
It simply lacked the means to meet them.
The situation became increasingly embarrassing.

The United States had won a war against one of the world’s greatest empires.
Yet its government often lacked the funds to pay ordinary expenses.
Foreign observers began to wonder whether the new republic could survive.
Some Americans wondered the same thing.
The crisis reached a turning point in Massachusetts.

In 1786, economic hardship and debt produced growing unrest among farmers.
Many believed the government was ignoring their difficulties.
Courts were closing farms and seizing property.
Resistance spread.
Soon armed groups began preventing courts from operating.
The uprising became known as Shays’ Rebellion.
The rebellion itself was not large.
Its significance lay elsewhere.
It revealed how little power the national government possessed.

Congress could not easily raise troops.
It could not easily raise money.
It could not easily restore order.

Massachusetts ultimately dealt with the crisis largely through its own efforts.
For many leading Americans, the lesson was alarming.
The republic existed.
But could it govern?

George Washington watched the events with growing concern from Mount Vernon.
James Madison drew similar conclusions.
Alexander Hamilton did as well.
If the Union could not maintain stability in peacetime, how would it survive a larger crisis?

The answer many of them reached was increasingly clear.
The problem was not independence.
The problem was the system created after independence.
Only a stronger federal government could preserve the republic they had fought to create.
These concerns helped lead to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
The Constitution that emerged gave the federal government powers it had never possessed before.
Among them was the authority to raise revenue directly.
The change was not merely financial.
It was political.

A government that could not fund itself could not truly govern.

The United States had won the Revolution.
The next challenge was learning how to survive it.