Within less than a decade, this situation had changed completely. Late in 1796, Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott could remark that it "is known that the State taxes have generally been very inconsiderable." The previous year, the president had told Congress that the tax burden on the citizens was now "so light as scarcely to be perceived." The administration was well aware that this situation contrasted sharply with that before the adoption of the Constitution in 1787–1788. In 1795, Alexander Hamilton, Wolcott's predecessor, had written that state taxation in the 1780s had "embraced every object and was carried as far [as] it could be done without absolutely oppressing individuals." Although Hamilton was referring to conditions in Connecticut, his description held true also for other states. Indeed, in some of them things had been even worse. Thus, in Massachusetts taxation "was carried still farther even to a degree too burthernsome [sic] for the comfortable condition of the Citizens." Partly, this oppressive tax burden was caused by administrative mistakes—"that unskilfulness which was the common attribute of the State administration of Finance"—yet it was "still more owing to the real weight of the Taxes." Like so many of his contemporaries, Hamilton believed that Shays's Rebellion "was in great degree the offspring of this pressure
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