Cash Only
It was after the Revolution, and each state government was responsible for paying the war debt. Each person in the state had to pay the government, which caused discontent throughout Massachusetts. The government would raise the taxes every month or so to speed up the pace. The farmers couldn’t pay in the crops that they harvested, and they found that the paper money they had been paid for fighting in the Revolution was worthless and not universally accepted. They had to pay in cold, hard cash. For some time farmers would exchange their crops to merchants to get the coin they needed to pay their taxes. After a while, merchants couldn’t do that any more since not so many coins had been made yet, so farmers started to go into debt. These were one other of the many of the causes that led to Shays’ Rebellion.
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