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A large body of people, many of whom were denied the right to vote, were being taxed by a distant government that mostly acted in the interests of a wealthy merchant elite who dominated that government. In response, angry New England farmers armed themselves, shut down the courts that were trying to steal their land and imprison them and their neighbors for being unable to pay tax debts, and marched to war.

Quick, am I talking about 1776 or 1786?

In truth, I could be talking about either. The similarities are downright scary. In 1776, the British government had been attempting to tax Americans for quite a while to pay down the national debt incurred fighting the Seven Years War. However, British colonial policy had been designed around ensuring money couldn't stay in America, being continually shipped out to fund an artificially constructed trade deficit with Great Britain. As a result, very few Americans had the cash to actually pay taxes raised on them.

In the 1780's, the government of Massachusetts was trying to tax Western Bay Staters in order to pay down debts acquired to fund the Revolution. However, many of these men were people who had been away for years and years actually fighting in the Revolution, and they either hadn't been paid period or they were paid in practically worthless state paper money or bonds. What few dollars or bonds they had they were forced to immediately sell or starve. Since they were selling so desperately, they sold them at a steep discount, sometimes as low as a few cents on the dollar. The wealthy speculators they were selling them to then turned around and used their control of the state legislature to raise taxes on these poor ex-soldiers in order to redeem the bonds and make good on the paper money. Since these people were broke, the courts instead started taking their property.

And it doesn't even really stop there. Besides the problem of taxation without representation that was common to both revolts, there was also a problem of demands for more local governments. In this time period about half of the population of Massachusetts actually lived in western Massachusetts, as much as a week's ride from the coast. The state government was, as it is now, located in Boston. One of the major (although mostly un-remembered) events of the 1780's was a convention in Hatfield that listed as one of its conditions to petition the state government with was to move the capital somewhere into the middle of the state closer to the majority of the population.

Similarly, one of the big issues during the Revolution was the opinion shared by many Americans, even loyalists, that they didn't want to be ruled by a parliament in London. Some of the more conservative compromises proposed before the Declaration of Independence involved the creation of an American Parliament.

The real freaky thing, though?

Many of the men closing courts and resisting state authority in the 1780's were the very same exact men who had done so a decade before against the British.

What is the real main difference in 1786 from 1776?

The difference is the People eventually lost in 1786.

I have no specific TL attached to this or even planned for it, but it's just amazing and a bit saddening to think, sometimes, what might have been.
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