Shays's Rebellion

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SHAYS'S REBELLION

The event that became known as Shays's Rebellion stemmed from the widespread belief in western Massachusetts that the new state government was no better than the government of King George III. Thousands of western Massachusetts men had fought in the Revolution. But what had been accomplished? Power, in the judgment of the chief justice of Berkshire County, had just been shifted from one set of "plunderers" to another. Even clergymen who denounced Shays's Rebellion blamed it on the "venality" and unrealistic demands of the legislature.

Since 1782 town leaders had pleaded with the state legislature to address their concerns. Their petitions had been polite, deferential, and at times groveling, but again and again they had raised embarrassing questions. How, for example, were farmers to pay debts and taxes with hard money when no hard money was available? What about the "poor soldiers" who had actually fought the war? Were they to be taxed at outrageous rates to pay off a handful of government favorites who did nothing during the war? And where was the tax money going? To pay off a handful of Boston speculators who had bought up the state's war debt for virtually nothing? Why did honest men have to cope with so many layers in the court system? Was it just so that well-connected lawyers and court officials could collect fees at every step of the way? Why was there was a state senate? Was it created to provide just another bastion of power for the privileged and well-born? And why was the government in Boston anyway? Was it to allow the mercantile elite to pass oppressive laws when distance and bad weather kept the people's representatives from getting to Boston?

Such thoughts had circulated in western Massachusetts for years, and each year the legislature ignored the complaints. So in the summer of 1786, roughly ten years after the Declaration of Independence, the selectmen of Pelham and a handful of other towns called for countywide protest meetings. The largest took place in Hatfield on 22 August 1786. The plan, according to one of the fifty delegates, was to list a set of grievances against the state government, call for a new state constitution, and then seize the county court, the one symbol of state authority, the following week. That they did. A week after the Hatfield meeting adjourned, hundreds of armed men converged on Northampton and stopped the judges from holding court. In the weeks that followed, other armed men prevented the courts from convening in other shire towns.

The participants in these court closings called themselves "Regulators," thus identifying themselves with the backcountry and the Revolutionary tradition that the people had a duty to rebel when their government got out of control. Needless to say, Governor James Bowdoin and the Massachusetts legislature rejected this idea. They deemed the rebellion "horrid and unnatural." At first the governor called on the militia to defend the courts. To his dismay, however, one militia unit after another refused to serve. Finally, in desperation, the governor and 153 Boston merchants hired a mercenary army under General Benjamin Lincoln to put down the uprising. As Lincoln's men marched west, the Regulators tried to seize the federal arsenal at Springfield on 25 January 1787. Had they succeeded, they would have been armed better than the state. But a militia unit under General William Shepard seized the arsenal first and turned its cannons on the insurgents, routing them and leaving four dead on the field. Ten days later General Lincoln caught up with the main rebel army at Petersham, surprised them at daybreak, and forced them to scatter, the leaders fleeing to Vermont, the rank and file returning home. Thus ended what state authorities came to call "Shays's Rebellion."

In calling the uprising Shays's Rebellion, Governor Bowdoin and his followers were clearly attempting to discredit the entire affair. As a rule, they blamed it on the down-and-out, and in many respects Captain Daniel Shays, a Continental Army officer from the small hill town of Pelham, fit the bill. His contingent was the largest, and he was a debtor. But he neither instigated the rebellion nor controlled it. He was just one of many veteran Revolutionary officers who led troops in battles of the uprising. Well over four thousand men later confessed to taking up arms against the state, and it is clear that most of them had been called to arms by someone other than Daniel Shays. Some were "hard-pressed debtors," like Shays, but others were clearly men of considerable wealth. Over half were veterans. Most marched alongside relatives and in-laws.

As for what happened to Shays and other participants who took part in the rebellion, for some, the immediate outcome was dire. The nominal leader, Daniel Shays, fled the state, lost his farm, and eventually settled in western New York. John Bly and Charles Rose, two minor rebels, were hanged, and sixteen others spent months anticipating a hangman's noose before being reprieved. Judge William Whiting, the chief justice of the Berkshire County court, had his judgeship taken away from him for blaming the rebellion on the state's leadership. Similiarly, State Representative Moses Harvey was kicked out of the legislature and forced to stand an hour at the Northampton gallows with a rope around his neck for blaming the rebellion on his fellow legislators. Hundreds of others had to cope with indictments filed by the state, or damage suits filed by neighbors, and some four thousand temporarily lost their right to vote, sit on juries, hold office, and work as teachers and tavernkeepers. Within a matter of months, however, most of these Regulators regained their former positions within their communities. Indeed, from their standpoint, they emerged victorious, as the new 1787 state legislature passed a moratorium on debts and cut direct taxes 'to a bone.'

The Massachusetts uprising had far-reaching effects. In Massachusetts, it ended the effort to pay off the state debt at the expense of backcountry farmers. For George Washington and other conservatives, it symbolized the unruliness of the backcountry in general. One of his key advisors blamed it on the "licentiousness spirit" prevailing among the people; another on the "leveling principle" that had captured the hearts of the poor and desperate. Were all men of property thus in danger? Was the Republic in peril? Nationalists seized upon such fears, pointed out the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, and convinced Washington to attend the Philadelphia convention in May 1787 that dispensed with the Articles and wrote the Constitution. They also used the specter of Daniel Shays to get the Constitution ratified by the states. Shays's Rebellion and the Constitution have been thus linked ever since.