Shays's Rebellion

Shays's Rebellion, political label attached to the rural protest movement of 1786–1787 against the government of Massachusetts. The protest was neither directed by Captain Daniel Shays, the Continental Army veteran from Pelham, Massachusetts, on whom it was blamed, nor was it unmistakably a rebellion. Dubbed “the Regulation” by participants, the movement was triggered by economic distress in the aftermath of independence. Determined to redeem its Revolutionary War debts, Massachusetts imposed heavy taxes, payable in hard money, in the midst of a severe depression in transatlantic trade. With cash scarce, lawsuits for debts mounting, and taxes due, many farmers feared foreclosure and jail and pressed the state for relief. Their program called for paper money and tender laws to ease payment of debts, court reforms and lower salaries for officials to reduce public expenses, and changes in political institutions to bring government closer to the people. From 1784 to 1786, the state legislature, dominated by commercial interests and intent on upholding credit, rejected all these proposals.

The result was an angry protest movement in western Massachusetts that revived the methods and rhetoric that had been used a decade earlier to resist British rule. The movement started with petitions from town meetings, a traditional means of seeking redress; expanded into extralegal county conventions; and escalated into crowd actions, involving hundreds of armed men, that prevented courts from meeting in several counties during the fall and winter of 1786. When Governor James Bowdoin dispatched an army to defend the courts, events reached a climax. On 25 January 1787, Shays led some twelve hundred men in a march on the federal arsenal at Springfield. A burst of cannon fire from defending militia routed the insurgents, leaving four dead on the field; ten days later, General Benjamin Lincoln crushed the remnants of resistance at Petersham. Thus ended what the Massachusetts General Court proclaimed “a horrid and unnatural rebellion.”

The Massachusetts uprising dramatized rural unrest throughout the new republic, and though only a minority of dissidents took up arms, it symbolized for conservatives a republic in peril. In their view, ambitious demagogues like Shays, exploiting an unruly people, jeopardized the liberty gained in the Revolution. Nationalists seized upon the specter of Shays to underscore the weakness of the Articles of Confederation government and to urge support for the Constitution produced by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Shays's Rebellion and the Constitution have been linked ever since. The crisis in the countryside illuminates the difficult passage of the new nation to a republican political order.
See also Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Taxation.

Bibliography

David P. Szatmary , Shays’ Rebellion, 1980.
Robert A. Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays, 1993.

Robert A. Gross