Shays' Rebellion

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Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts from 1786 to 1787. The rebels, led by Daniel Shays and known as Shaysites (Regulators), were mostly small farmers angered by crushing debt and taxes. Failure to repay such debts often resulted in imprisonment in debtor's prisons or the claiming of property by the state.

The rebellion started on August 29, 1786. A militia that had been raised as a private army defeated an attack on the federal Springfield Armory by the main Shaysite force on February 3, 1787. There was a lack of an institutional response to the uprising, which energized calls to reevaluate the Articles of Confederation and gave strong impetus to the Constitutional Convention which began in May 1787.

Contents 1 Origins 2 Armed conflict 3 Legacy 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

[edit] Origins

The rebellion's first stirring of angry farmers may have happened as early as 1783, when salvos occurred in an Uxbridge, Massachusetts riot, consequently catching the attention of Governor Hancock, who ordered the disturbance quelled.^[1] The rebellion leader was Daniel Shays, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. The war's debt ultimately trickled down to individuals via a capitation tax, with a heavy burden of it falling to small farmers with large families. This tax burden only helped to further polarize the existing dichotomy in 18th century Massachusetts between the rural, agrarian barter economy of the inland areas vis-à-vis the cosmopolitan, maritime monetary economy of the coast. Complicating the east–west dichotomy was the fact that certain mature western and central Massachusetts towns such as Northampton or Hadley possessed more developed monetary economies, whereas other towns such as Amherst or Pelham subsisted on barter. As a result, many small farmers were forced to sell their land to speculators in Eastern Massachusetts, often at less than one-third of fair market price, in order to meet their tax liabilities. Loss of such property could reduce families to extreme poverty and often meant those landholders faced the loss of their right to vote, as suffrage was often tied to property ownership.

Furthermore, Massachusetts rewrote credit schemes at the time to be administered by elected rather than appointed officials. These efforts were resisted and obstructed by wealthy and influential parties, led by men like Governor James Bowdoin. Governor Bowdoin had strong control of the government. Because of the property eligibility requirements for office at the time, when Bowdoin was elected governor many of the people in western Massachusetts were outraged by what they perceived as injustice.

As Scott Tras has written,

[T]he nationalists took advantage of a propitious rebellion, that of Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army officer. Shays and other local leaders led an uprising of distressed farmers from western Massachusetts groaning under the load of heavy taxes assessed to pay the interest and principal (at face value in specie) of the state's wartime debt. During an economic depression, with farm prices low and foreign markets closed, the state government was taxing the farmers (payable in hard money only) to pay wealthy eastern creditors who had lent depreciated paper (accepted at full face value) to the state government for bonds during the war.

The farmers either could not or would not pay, and when they failed to do so, state judges were quick to confiscate their farms. The farmers organized into a militia and marched on the courts, which they closed. Seeing an opportunity, the nationalist leaders were quick to misrepresent the grievances and aims of the insurgents. They claimed that the Shaysites, and similar groups in other states, were radicals, inflationists, and levelers out to defraud their creditors and redistribute property, instead of being, what in truth they were, property-owning, anti-tax rebels who wanted to keep their farms.

Obviously, the nationalists wanted to scare the country into supporting a more vigorous government. George Washington was terrified. "We are fast verging toward anarchy and confusion," he wrote. His nationalist friends did their best to heighten his terror. Henry Knox wrote Washington of the Shaysites that "their creed is that the property of the United States" having been freed from British exactions "by the joint exertions of all, ought to be the common property of all." This was utterly false, but it did the trick. Washington agreed to be the presiding officer at the constitutional convention. Later, [James] Madison in Federalist No. 10 warned that without the strong arm of a vigorous central government, the states would be vulnerable to movements motivated by "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property" and for other "improper or wicked project[s]." The Massachusetts historian Mercy Otis Warren, a contemporary of these events, warned of "discontents artificially wrought up, by men who wished for a more strong and splendid government.^[2]

[edit] Armed conflict

After several years of irregular "conventions" sending petitions to the Massachusetts General Court (the state legislature) for tax and debt relief, and mobs shutting down local courts (to prevent judges from enforcing debt collection), a lack of relief prompted even more radical action.^[3]

In 1786 or 1787, two Revolutionary War veterans, Daniel Shays of Pelham, Massachusetts and Luke Day of West Springfield, Massachusetts, led semi-armed mobs in military-style drills on the West Springfield town common, and threatened the legislature and local courts. Governor James Bowdoin ordered the local militia of 600 men under the command of General William Shepherd to protect the Springfield court.

Shays sent a message to Day proposing an attack on January 25, 1787, before General Benjamin Lincoln's 4,000-man combined Boston and Springfield militia could arrive. Day's response that his forces would not be ready until the 26th was never received (thus providing a real-world example of the Two Generals' Problem). Shays attacked the Armory not knowing he would not have reinforcements.

General Shepherd's forces were unpaid and without food or arms. Shepherd had requested permission to use the weaponry in the Springfield Armory, but Secretary of War Henry Knox had denied the request on the grounds that it required Congressional approval, and that Congress was out of session.

When Shays and his forces attacked, Shepherd ordered a warning shot, followed by a single round into the oncoming mob. Two or three of the Shaysites were killed, and the rest fled north. On the opposite side of the river, Day's forces also fled north. The militia captured many of the rebels on 4 February 1787 in Petersham, Massachusetts; by March there was no more armed resistance.

General Shepherd reported to his superiors that he had made use of the armory without authorization, and returned the weapons in good condition after the crisis had ended.

Several of the rebels were fined, imprisoned, and sentenced to death (but not actually executed), but in 1788 a general amnesty was granted. Although most of the condemned men were either pardoned or had their death sentences commuted, two of the condemned men, John Bly and Charles Rose were hanged on December 6, 1787. (See Leonard L. Richards, Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 41.)

[edit] Legacy

The rebellion was closely watched by the nation's leaders, who were alarmed at what they saw as an effort to "level" the inequalities the new nation was experiencing in the aftermath of the Revolution. George Washington, for example, exchanged dozens of letters through the fall and early winter of 1786–87, and it can be argued that the alarm he felt at the rebellion in Massachusetts was a strong motivation to bring him from retirement and work for a stronger central government.^[4] Most alarming for Washington and other early American elitists such as Samuel Adams and former general Henry Knox was the very real helplessness that the Confederation government had in the face of a rebellion that had nearly seized one of the few federal arsenals the country had. Adams was so disturbed by the rebellion that the former great advocate of revolution called for death to the men rebelling against ostensibly similar oppression, saying, in monarchy, the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of republic ought to suffer death — however, not all founding fathers thought the rebellion was bad. On 13 November 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote to New York senator William S. Smith saying,

A little rebellion now and then is a good thing . . . . God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty . . . . and what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned, from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. ^[5]

As a response to these views, in a letter exchanged between Jefferson and Abigail Adams, the future First Lady applauded the action of the state militia that captured the rebellion's leaders, saying,

Ignorant, restless desperados, without conscience or principles have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their imaginations...There is the necessity of the wisest and most vigorous measures to quell and suppress it. Instead of that laudable spirit which you approve, which makes a people watchful over their liberties and alert in the defense of them, these mobbish insurgents are for sapping the foundation, and destroying the whole fabric at once.^[6]

In the aftermath of the Newburgh Conspiracy in 1783, the high cost of a standing army, and the country's discomfort with a standing army, the Confederation Congress had nearly completely demobilized the army. In the face of the increasing unrest through the fall of 1786, Knox ordered an expansion of the Continental Army; by mid-January, he'd managed to recruit only 100 men.

Some of the nation's leaders were frustrated by the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. James Madison initiated amendment efforts that were blocked by small, but significant, Congressional minorities. Emboldened by his success in the Maryland–Virginia border dispute of 1784–85, Madison decided that decisions outside Congress were the only way for states to resolve their commercial and sundry problems. Others in Congress worried that the government was too weak to repel invasions, but the general sentiment against standing armies kept the power of the government limited.

As an extension of process of working out problems between the states, Madison and others decided to call for a gathering of the states in the fall of 1786. The Annapolis Convention held in Annapolis, Maryland September 11 to September 14, 1786 initially earned the acceptance of eight of the states, but several, including Massachusetts, backed out, in part due to suspicion at Virginia's motives. In the end, only twelve delegates from five states (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia) appeared. The Convention did not accomplish much other than to endorse delegate Alexander Hamilton's call for a new convention in Philadelphia to "render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union."^[7]

The events of Shays' Rebellion over the coming months would strengthen the hands of those who wanted a stronger central government, and persuade many who had been undecided as to the need for such a radical change. One of the key figures, George Washington, who had long been cool to the idea of strong centralized government, was frightened by the events in Massachusetts. By January 1787, he decided to come out of retirement and to attend the convention being called for the coming May in Philadelphia. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a new, stronger government would be created under the United States Constitution.

[edit] See also

• John Fries's Rebellion

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Collier, James Lincoln and Collier, Christopher. The Winter Hero (Four Winds Press, 1978). (The rebellion is the central story of this children's novel.)
• Degenhard, William. The Regulators (The Dial Press, 1943; Second Chance Press, 1981).
• Gross, Robert A., editor. In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion, (Charlottesville: U. Press of Virginia, 1993).
• Kaufman, Martin, editor. Shays' Rebellion: Selected Essays, (Westfield, Mass., 1987)
• Martin, William. The Lost Constitution (2007). (The rebellion plays a central role in this novel.)
• Minot, George Richards. History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts, 1788. (The earliest account of the rebellion. Although this account was deeply unsympathetic to the rural Regulators, it became the basis for most subsequent tellings, including the many mentions of the rebellion in Massachusetts town and state histories.)
• Richards, Leonard. Shays' Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). (A recent examination of the rebellion and its aftermath.)
• Szatmary, David. Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: U. of Massachusetts Press, 1980). (Noteworthy for its reexamination of earlier interpretations of the rebellion.)

[edit] External links

• Shays' Rebellion by Chicago Solidarity (1973) from the Charlatan Stew Collection
• John Hancock's Big Toe and the Constitution by Gary North

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