Shays Rebellion

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  Shays' Rebellion

  The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection

  • David P. Szatmary(Author)
  • 1984(Publication Date)
  • University of Massachusetts Press

    (Publisher)

  7Shays’ Rebellion and the Constitution

  THE UPRISING OF New England farmers in 1786 and 1787 has a historic significance much deeper than that of a regional chronicle. For it is clear that Shays’ Rebellion played an integral part in the genesis and formation of the United States Constitution adopted at Philadelphia in September 1787. The crisis atmosphere engendered by agrarian discontent strengthened the resolve of the nationalists and shocked some reluctant localists into an acceptance of a stronger national government, thereby uniting divergent political elements of commercial society in the country at large.

  Besides affecting the formation of the Constitution, the Shaysite troubles influenced the ratification debates in New England, and especially in Massachusetts. The ratification contest generally pitted backcountry Antifederalists against merchants, professionals, and urban artisans. Following the pattern of Shaysite resistance to government, Massachusetts antifederalism represented an attempt to save a subsistence-oriented way of life from the penetrating edge of a commercial society. As Van Beck Hall has argued, “the debate over the Constitution, instead of raising the curtain on new divisions that would exist in a new political era, actually climaxed the political struggles of the earlier period.” In both the formation of the Constitution at Philadelphia and the ratification debates in Massachusetts, then, Shays’ Rebellion assumed an important role.1

  During the 1780s, most state leaders had been oriented toward a commercial society. New England legislators usually gained their livelihoods through merchant or professional enterprises. In the middle states, lawyers such as James Wilson of Pennsylvania and New Jersey’s William Paterson along with such wholesalers as Philadelphia merchants George Clymer and Thomas Mifflin exercised leadership. A few merchants in and around Charleston, South Carolina, lawyers such as North Carolina’s William Davie and John Rutledge of South Carolina, and such plantation owners as Pierce Butler, Charles Pinckney, and Richard Dobbs Spaight of the Carolinas held the reins in the southern states. Together, merchants, professionals, and planters dominated the political life of the United States.

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  Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History

  An Encyclopedia [3 volumes]

  • Steven L. Danver(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The tax policies of Massachusetts at the time of Shays’ Rebellion helped bring about a shift in both local and federal government policies. At the local level, a powerful group of creditors lost government control to moderates. At the federal level, there was a movement to strengthen the power of the central government, allowing it to raise taxes, rather than delegating the task to states, which, in the case of Massachusetts, provoked rebellion. —Lorri Brown Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. Early Years of the Republic. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Jensen, Merrill. The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781–1789. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Morris, Richard B. The Forging of the Union. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Morris, Richard B. Witness at the Creation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. St. John, Jeffery. Forge of Union, Anvil of Liberty. Ottawa: Jameson Books, Inc., 1992. An Address to the People of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Setting Forth the Causes of Shays’ Rebellion (1786) In 1786, the newly independent United States fell into an economic depression as businesses failed, prices fell, and currency became scarce and unstable. With no power to levy or collect taxes, the central government under the Articles of Confederation could do little to bring the sit- uation under control. In the autumn of 1786, Captain Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War vet- eran, became one of the leaders of an insurrection of impoverished former solders and farmers that erupted in western Massachusetts. Later known as Shays’ Rebellion, the uprising sought to end court foreclosures on farms and properties whose owners could not afford to pay their taxes. Declared traitors by the state, the rebels attacked the government arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts, but were defeated and dispersed by state militia forces. In 1788, all participants in Shays’ Rebellion were pardoned.

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  George Washington's Final Battle

  The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital City and a Nation

  • Robert P. Watson(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  Civil discontent remained very real after the affair, and the wounds would linger for years, in part because most of the militiamen who opposed Shays were from eastern Massachusetts, whereas most of the rioters were from the rural, western part of the state, reflecting the Eastern Seaboard–western split throughout the country. Nor was this the first or only unruly situation. Elsewhere in the country, people were refusing to pay their taxes, and both peaceful protests and violent confrontations and seizures of property were occurring. 4 The insurrection highlighted the weakness of the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s meager finances, and the desperate need for a standing army and political reform. The incident also reaffirmed Washington’s concerns about the weakness of the government and lack of national unity. Of the uprising, the general wrote to his friend Gen. Henry Knox expressing his desire “that good may result from the cloud of evils which threatened, not only the hemisphere of Massachusetts but by spreading its baneful influence, the tranquility of the Union.” 5 In 1786, Madison and Hamilton called for a convention in Annapolis, Maryland, to address the governing crisis and shortcomings of the Articles. The effort accomplished little. The budding sense of promise and effort to build a nation had given way to a sectional divide. In hushed tones, members of Congress were speculating in 1786 and 1787 whether the country would long endure. Would it end at the hands of a North-South split or an East-West divide, or perhaps the states would become separate countries or join regional confederacies? 6 Shays’s Rebellion ended up being a needed catalyst for reform, which occurred at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where a few dozen delegates finally gathered in May 1787 to amend the Articles

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  Class and the Making of American Literature

  Created Unequal

  • Andrew Lawson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I

  Class in Early American Literature

  Passage contains an image

  1

  The Shays Rebellion in Literary History

  Ed White    

  Given its basic, brutal significance—the largest domestic insurrection in U.S. history prior to the Civil War—the so-called Whiskey Rebellion poses something of a puzzle to the cultural historian. In 1794, the rebellion culminated in the paramilitary mobilization of yeomen in Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, but mostly western Pennsylvania, with orchestrated crowd actions against tax-collectors and other elite placemen. President Washington called up militia units from neighboring states, at first personally leading the expedition with Alexander Hamilton at his side; with the arrest, intimidation, torture, and interrogation of leaders and participants, the rebellion was put down. And while the executive did not execute any leaders, the suppression weakened plebeian self-organization—already attacked in the form of the Democratic-Republican societies—until the elections of 1800. These logistical facts, sometimes recited in sanitized form in textbooks, obscure the broader class conflict of the moment, buried in details about taxation and credit. In 1790, Treasury Secretary Hamilton had begun advocating a centralized banking system to promote capital accumulation and investment. Crucial to this program was the consolidation of national and state debt, which entailed the payment of debts incurred during the Revolution. The war had been significantly financed by the poor and the middling, who purchased bonds that quickly devalued from wartime inflation; debt speculators had bought much of this debt at a fraction of the original cost. Hamilton’s successful proposal to honor that debt—calculated at some $830,000—ratified a massive transfer of wealth from the working classes to the financial bourgeoisie. This transfer of wealth was, in turn, significantly financed by a tax on distilled spirits—a privileged form of currency among yeomen farmers—that disproportionately hurt small producers. As the best historian of the rebellion has noted, “Hamilton’s whiskey tax didn’t merely redistribute wealth from the many to the few, subdue rural economies, and pound the restless, defiant west,” but in fact “served as one of the heavier cogs in a machine for restructuring all of American life” (Hogeland 69). In some instances, taxation drove “self-employed farmers and artisans into the [distillery] factories of their creditors” (Hogeland 70). This was a massive assault on small agrarian producers as part of a major plan to finance capitalist development, culminating in plebeian self-organization and an armed insurrection against the new Constitution’s first executive administration.

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  Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

  • Michal Jan Rozbicki(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  HE TWO DECADES FOLLOWING Independence were a laboratory where the Revolutionary conceptual package was tested. The environment had changed; justifying the war and the Patriot cause gave way to the practice of governing. At the same time, various groups began to voice their grievances in terms of the new language of rights popularized by the Revolution. This caused a good deal of friction with the new leaders, who were beginning to have second thoughts about the growing involvement of ordinary people. The tensions soon turned into a struggle over the meaning of new, republican liberty. The upper ranks increasingly worried that “the everlasting flattery of the people as sovereigns” would result in commoners redefining and “democratizing” liberty. They warned that “no counterfeit sense of the people expressed in mob meetings, and dictated by the loudest bawls of the man who happens to rise upon a hogshead, ought to control or prevent the measures of the nation and its government.” This tension inspired first a disillusionment and then a backlash among the political class. Their response was aimed at regaining control over the meaning of liberty, holding back the spread of an egalitarian mentality, and, in cases of insurgency, countering the “spirit of rebellion” contained in the voices of the “usurpers,” who not only had “the insolence to wear badges of their character,” but whose “boldness [wa]s countenanced in many places by popular elections of them to local offices.” This backlash was far from being a case of moral declension or, as we are sometimes told, a betrayal of previously proclaimed values. Instead, it confirmed that there was nothing to betray; the rulers were only defending the logic of freedom tied to a social order they had always accepted as proper.

  The truly novel story of this period was that of the masses of common people seeking respect and independence by eagerly invoking the principles which the Revolutionary leaders designed for another vision of society—one inspired by classical republics ruled by virtuous elites. George Minot correctly identified this eagerness as “that thirst for freedom which the people have discovered in the late revolution,” even as he expressed fear that it might develop into “an unqualified opposition to authority.”1 The earliest and most prominent dispute about the meaning of the Revolutionary narrative was occasioned by the 1786 Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts.

  Most literature on this episode has focused either on the economic conflict involved or on the influence of the event on the shape of the Constitution. At one level, it was certainly a confrontation over economic policy. The state legislature, overwhelmed by public debt, refused to reduce taxes, forcing many farmers into insolvency. Unable to pay debts with hard money, backcountry towns sent moderately phrased petitions to the legislature, which refused to act upon them. Only in response to this inaction did a convention of selectmen from several towns adopt a more dramatic agenda of political demands, including abolishing the upper house and establishing annual elections. They also assembled militiamen, led by former commanders of Revolutionary units like Joel Billings, Joseph Hines, and John Thompson, to block a number of county courts where debt cases were tried.2

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  Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution

  • David B. Mattern(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  In Lincoln's estimation, property and credit had been too easily acquired by farmers during the war. Debts 162 Shays's Rebellion were paid off with depreciated paper money, which led to easy living and profligacy. The prewar habits of hard work, frugality, and simple living were forgotten. Now, when "things were fast returning back into their original channels," it was clear "that the industrious were to reap the fruits of their industry, and that the indolent and improvident would soon experience the evils of their idleness and sloth." To put off the day of reckoning the insurgents' petitioned the General Court for paper money. This request was rejected. They then stopped the courts and tried to sus- pend government operations, ultimately seeking to "sap the foundations of our constitution." For Lincoln the Shaysites showed "evidences of in- sanity," and it seemed likely that government in Massachusetts would collapse because "there doth not appear to be virtue enough among the people to preserve a perfect republican government. " 5 Part of Lincoln's moral stridency could be traced to the striking paral- lels that existed between the crowd action of the Shaysites and the extra- legal activities of the American revolutionaries. County conventions and petitions by the insurgents recalled the town protests and remonstrances that had inundated provincial governments in the early 1770s. Court clos- ings were another tactic of the revolutionaries, as was the organization of militia units and the stockpiling of arms, powder, and ammunition. Men such as Lincoln had only to remember their own successful use of these tactics to fear their use by the Shaysites. As the British had been over- thrown, so could the product of their own revolutionary republicanism, the Massachusetts constitution of 1780. A newspaper writer had the gall to make the connection explicit.

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  The Life of John Paterson Major-General in the Revolutionary Army

  • Thomas Egleston(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Braunfell Books

    (Publisher)

  The political agitation which led to Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts began very soon after the close of the Revolution, and for a time threatened not only the entire subversion of law and order in the State, but also the abandonment of some of the great principles which had been regarded as settled by the Revolutionary War. Its complete suppression, however, by the energetic action of the authorities of the State and the support of these principles by a very large majority of the people was fortunate, as it called the attention of the prominent men of every State in the Union to difficulties whose solution caused a careful study of the conditions which rendered the rebellion possible, and undoubtedly hastened not only the acceptance of the Constitution under which we are now living, but also its very careful revision so as to make such occurrences unlikely in the future.

  Some of the people, exasperated by a condition of things which could hardly have been avoided, lost their judgment, excited their own passions and those of the multitude by public addresses, and sought redress in riot and murder, as if that would right their wrongs. The people of the commonwealth were groaning under burdens and evils of which they imperfectly comprehended the causes and still more imperfectly the remedy. They had some real and more fancied grievances. They had been in a constant state of agitation since the accession of George III. They had now been under arms since 1774. They had been without courts since 1780, and most of the time at war. War and its consequences had become familiar to them, and its rapid methods of justice satisfied them. The State constitution was new, and the Federal not yet adopted. They had not yet learned by experience that under a constitutional government every evil can be removed without resort to arms by patient and peaceable agitation.

  The principal causes of discontent during Shays’ Rebellion were the universal indebtedness, the difficulty of collecting either principal or interest, the injustice of the law against debtors, the abuse of the debtors’ prison, and the scarcity of money. There was no law for the just distribution of the property of the debtor among his creditors. Executions on property were satisfied in their chronological order until the estate was exhausted. The least suspicion of financial unsoundness was followed by attachments. He who came first got the most; those who came last got nothing. The result was great injustice to both debtor and creditor. The efforts of creditors to collect what was due them were resisted. The decisions of the courts against the debtor were regarded as the cause of the distress, since they gave the creditor legal power against the debtor. Gold and silver had for a long time ceased to be a circulating medium, and were rarely seen. The currency of the country was a mere promise to pay based upon nothing, and had become completely valueless. How far values had fluctuated is shown by the fact that the allowance of two-pence a head for killing old blackbirds had become in May, 1780, thirty shillings; that labor on the highways, which had previously been paid at three shillings a day, had become seven pounds. A dollar in silver, for the collection of taxes, was worth one hundred and twenty in Continental currency. The people were really poor. Those who could had borrowed money at exorbitant rates of interest to pay taxes, and now no ready money could be had. The burden fell heavily both on the State and the people. The State could not relax the taxes; the people could not pay them. Both the law and the customs relating to the collection of debts had been harsh and unjust, and when the war was over there arose a fashion about them which made them unbearable. The people knew that they were carrying heavy burdens, and they could find neither the cause nor the remedy. They had fought for eight years to get redress from oppressions much more easily borne, and which in comparison to those they were now bearing seemed trifling. It appeared to some as if the whole war had been fought only to settle a theoretical principle, and many of them, if it would have brought redress, would have willingly gone back to “the king and all the royal family.” The State was as badly off as the citizen. He saw no way out of the situation, for his quota of the national. State, county, and town debt was all incurred in the defense of his liberty and was binding upon him. Besides his obligations to the State he had his own private indebtedness. The principal was piling up, and in addition the interest on the portion not paid was accumulating, as he could pay neither the one nor the other.

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  Terrorism in America

  • J. Lutz(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  38 The protests led local authorities to arrest those who were seen as the ringleaders, but mobs often released them from jail. 39 While Shay’s Rebellion did not generate a public insurrection, the violence and intimidation associated with the protests did have major effects. The government in Massachusetts changed many of the laws that provoked the protests, and the rebellion accelerated demands for a new constitutional structure at the national level to replace the inef- fectual central government under the Articles of Confederation. 40 The government under the new constitution, however, had to face the Whiskey rebellion in 1794 as a test of central authority. Resistance to the central government in this case focused on taxes on whiskey. The western frontier region, including Pennsylvania west of the Appalachian Mountains, was the location of the most opposition to the new laws and taxes. Opponents of the tax on whiskey argued that it was exactly the kind of tax that the British had tried to impose on the colonies before the Revolution and that resistance to this illegal taxation was justified. 41 These dissidents, as those in Shays Rebellion, relied upon the same types of activities used in the years immediately preceding the revolution. Revenue officials were assaulted; some were tarred and feathered, and others were forced to resign their offices. 42 These efforts represented a systematic attempt to drive the revenue officers out of that part of the state. 43 In many parts of the western frontier, tax collectors resigned and nominees refused to accept posts to collect the taxes. Even those who were willing to pay the taxes found it expedient to disobey the law. 44 This antipathy toward the cen- tral government was not new in western Pennsylvania. The region had not supported ratification of the new Constitution and was suspicious The Colonial Era 21

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  Revolutionary Prophecies

  The Founders and America's Future

  • Robert M. S. McDonald, Peter S. Onuf, Robert M. S. McDonald, Peter S. Onuf(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  18

  No less a figure than Alexander Hamilton used the specter of Shays’s Rebellion in the Federalist Papers to advocate for a centralized federal republic, with a standing army capable of suppressing “actual insurrections and rebellions.” Then as secretary of the treasury, he composed his report on public credit that led to the assumption plan, a national debt combining state and national securities, funded indefinitely by excise and customs duties, and the creation of the Bank of the United States to manage it all. Popular resistance to the “Funding System’s” incursions on liberty was as immediate as Thomas Jefferson’s opposition in the cabinet as national parties began to emerge.19

  A representative body of six Upper Ohio counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia, meeting at Parkinson’s Ferry in August 1794, charged that “the taking of citizens of the United States from their respective vicinage, to be tried for real or supposed offenses, is a violation of the rights of citizens, is a dangerous and forced construction of the Constitution, and ought not under any pretense whatever, to be exercised by the judicial authority.”20 They were protesting warrants for excise violators returnable to Philadelphia, hundreds of miles away. At a 1794 liberty pole in Northumberland County, a Pennsylvanian named “Stockman” said, “The Excise Law was dangerous and oppressive & permitting [it] to exist would be the cause of other taxes, more oppression.” The Congress who passed it were “a lot of Damned Rascals,” and “he told them there was a regular mode of redress by the constitution. . . . They had petitioned but could get no redress, that they would have a land tax & then all would be regular.” Before erecting the pole, the crowd procured “silk for the flag” on which “they put Liberty, Equality of Rights, a Change of Ministry, and No Excise.” When challenged on the “Change of Ministry” slogan aimed at George Washington, one participant said that “the President might kiss his backside.” Like their Massachusetts counterparts to the north, western Pennsylvanians were still in pursuit of liberty after the Revolution, even after the adoption of the federal Constitution. For them, as for the Shaysites, taxes were but one threat among many to their liberty.21

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  Thinking Through the Past

  A Critical Thinking Approach to U.S. History, Volume 1

  • John Hollitz(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Iff these things are honest, just and rite, we sincearly wish to be convinced of itt but we honestly confess itt is beyond our skill to reconsile these sallerys and grants with the principles of our Constatution. . . . Jeremiah Powers. Nehemiah Stebbins, Zebedee Osborn January 16th 1786. [and 57 other signatures]. 5 When the Massachusetts legislature refused to respond to popular pressures for paper money, debt-ridden small farmers rose in an armed rebellion led by Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War veteran. Although the rebellion dissipated after rebels engaged state forces in several skirmishes, news of it traveled quickly through the other states. In this letter to Henry Knox of Massachusetts, George Washington recorded his thoughts upon receiving word about the uprising against a state government. What dangers does Wash-ington see in such disturbances? What does he see as a remedy to them? George Washington Reacts to Shays’s Rebellion (1786) My dear Sir, * * * I feel, my dear General Knox, infinitely more than I can express you, for the disorders, which have arisen in these States. Good God! Who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, or a Briton predicted them? Were these people Source: Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation: 1763–1789 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), pp. 507–508; originally from Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Writings of George Washington (14 vols., 1889–1893), XI, pp. 103–107. Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial Review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

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