Ping.
One problem was the threat of government bankruptcy. The nation owed $160 million in war debts and the Congress had no power to tax and the states rarely sent in more than half of Congress's requisitions. The national currency was worthless. To help pay the government's debt, several members of Congress proposed the imposition of a five percent duty on imports. But because the Articles of Confederation required unanimous approval of legislation, a single state, Rhode Island, was able to block the measure.
The country also faced grave foreign policy problems. Spain closed the Mississippi River to American commerce in 1784 and secretly conspired with Westerners (including the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone) to acquire the area that would eventually become Kentucky and Tennessee. Britain retained military posts in the Northwest, in violation of the peace treaty ending the Revolution, and tried to persuade Vermont to become a Canadian province.
The economy also posed serious problems. The Revolution had a disruptive impact especially on the South's economy. Planters lost about 60,000 slaves (including about 25,000 slaves in South Carolina and 5,000 in Georgia). New British trade regulations--the Orders in Council of 1783--prohibited the sale of many American agricultural products in the British West Indians, one of the country's leading markets, and required commodities to be shipped on British vessels. Massachusetts shipbuilders, who had constructed about 125 ships a year before the war, built only 25 ships a year after the war. Merchants, who had purchased large quantities of British goods after the war, found it difficult to sell these commodities to hard-pressed Americans. States protected local interests by imposing tariffs on interstate commerce.
...
That's a fuller and fairer view of things than Trask's. He sees the importance of navigation laws, but leaves out the reason why they were regarded as important. Britain had already imposed crippling restrictions on US shipping. Here's what this Trask writes about the motivation for new federal navigation laws: In 1784, northern legislatures began penalizing British shipping by laying additional duties upon goods imported in British bottoms. That's it. Nothing about the prior British measures that had led to real economic hardship in the Northeastern states. You can see his basic distortion -- abuse Americans who wanted greater unity as statists while ignoring the real threats and dangers that they were responding too. That's just not honest. Someone who writes that way forfeits all credibility.
Trask's writing about the tariff twists things as well: There is ample evidence that northern manufactures supported the federal Constitution because they hoped through uniform national tariffs to capture the southern market. It would be nice if he showed us the evidence. If the products of the whole country could be excluded by other powers, it was natural to abolish internal trade restrictions and respond in kind against foreign goods. But industry was at a relatively rudimentary stage in the 1780s. Handicrafts and home production were the norm, not modern industry. Even if production were more advanced in one part of the country, it wasn't like the North had any crushing advantage that couldn't be overcome.
In the 1790s New Englanders did like Hamilton's Federalist Party which followed a protectionist policy, but when Madison got protective tariffs in the 1810s Southerners supported him, and New Englanders were opposed for fear that protection would hurt their shipping interests. Trask attributes later conditions to the 1780s. There was some desire to protect domestic production, but it wasn't a matter of large scale industry and it wasn't more dominant in any particular region of the country. The great cotton boom hadn't yet distorted regional development, so a Virginian like Washington had no problem favoring protection for American industry in anticipation that his own region would benefit.
Nor was the desire for federal tariffs one of the most important factors leading to the Constitution. I don't see any footnotes here, but Trask's references to Sumner may be to a polemical set of lectures on the history of the tariff. If Sumner was looking at the Constitution through the narrow window of protectionism, he would naturally choose to view the making of the Constitution as a function of tariff history. It's the same way that these guys look at the Civil War -- they cut passages out of books on protectionism and economic history and paste them together, and ignore other sources and issues. Real scholars are bound to look at things differently.
Obviously, the nationalists wanted to scare the country into supporting a more vigorous government. George Washington was terrified. "We are fast verging toward anarchy and confusion," he wrote. His nationalist friends did their best to heighten his terror.
This is why I hate these guys. They decide the answers beforehand and then assume those who disagree are liars and manipulators. That there might have been legitimate cause for concern in the 1780s is simply dismissed out of hand. If Shay's Rebellion was limited in its ends and means, the next uprising might not be. The country had just seen a massive upheaval a decade before and even those who'd led the last revolution doubted whether it could survive another one. If you put yourself in the shoes of Washington and others the fears aren't so exaggerated.
Years ago I might have gotten taken in by a hack like Trask. But the same Internet that makes it possible for all of us to read his article at the same time provides plenty of sources that we can use to verify his claims. So far as I can tell, they don't hold up.