Shays, Daniel

SHAYS, DANIEL. (1747–1825). Continental officer, insurrectionist. Massachusetts. Born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, Daniel Shays (the spelling varies) had married and moved to Shutesbury before the Revolution. Shays marched on the Lexington alarm as a sergeant in Captain Reuben Dickinson's company of minutemen in Colonel Benjamin Ruggles Woodbridge's Hampshire Country regiment of minutemen, and he served for eleven days. Shays was promoted to second lieutenant in Dickinson's company of Woodbridge's regiment, now enlisted for eight months of service to besiege Boston, and he behaved well at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He served as a lieutenant in Colonel James M. Varnum's Ninth Continental Regiment (Rhode Island) in the New York and New Jersey campaigns of 1776. He was promoted to captain in Colonel Rufus Putnam's Fifth Massachusetts Regiment on 1 January 1777 and served at Ticonderoga and Saratoga, where he again distinguished himself. He was detached to the corps of light infantry, a temporary unit raised for the campaigning season, in 1779 and again in 1780 He participated in Anthony Wayne's attack at Stony Point on 16 July 1779. In May 1780 the senior light infantry officers each received a sword from the marquis de Lafayette, the new commander; Shays sold this gift, probably because he already owned a serviceable weapon and needed the money. A man of humble origin, he was a brave and efficient officer who was considerate of his subordinates and popular with his men.

He resigned on 14 October 1780 and settled as a farmer in Pelham, where he sat on the local committee of safety in 1781 and 1782. He is remembered for lending his name to Shays's Rebellion of 1786–1787, although others were as active as he was in this popular uprising against what some residents in central and western Massachusetts perceived as oppression by eastern monied interests. Shays fled to Vermont until he was pardoned in June 1788. After the pardon he moved to Schoharie County, New York, and then to Sparta, New York, where he died in September 1825.

SEE ALSO Shays's Rebellion; Stony Point, New York.

                         revised by Harold E. Selesky