"Wythe Holt jr." <wholt at law.ua.edu> wrote:
Every single state enacted one or more laws attempting to alleviate
the debt burden, largely thanks to newly won democracy and the farmer
majority in most states (farmers being pressed by the debts).
>
> Merchants, large planters, and other members of the elite went to a Constitutional Convention determined to end this state of affairs -- to end, that is, both the reneging on debt, and the control of "their" new nation by farmers and others who were deeply in debt. Their new fundamental document placed many debt- and currency-related restrictions on the states (wcould no longer make laws which "impair[ed] the obligation of contract," for example), and set up a broadly if quite vaguely empowered new judiciary to make sure that creditors had a friendly forum -- as opposed to state courts -- where they could sue for repayment of debts due to them. The judiciary was designed to uphold the creditor-friendly, elite-friendly, anti-democratic new Constitution (look up the word "democracy" in the index to Farrand's Debates, and follow up the citations, to see just how opposed to democracy the Framers were) and the elite-friendly, business- and merchant-friendly government that w!
^^^^^^^ CB: What you say makes sense in that the nation state is a bourgeois form and this is the founding of a nation, with the bourgeois of course ascendent as a ruling class.
The new national (federal) Constitution provided for bankruptcy for debt forgiveness. That and the general Welfare clauses in the Preamble and Powers of Congress section are revolutionary debt relief ideas made law, no ? Debtors prison is abolished and all that.