A Brief History of Shays’ Rebellion

Three years after the end of the American Revolution, a strong movement arose, centered in western Massachusetts, when former soldiers were unable to pay onerous taxes.

These rural people had lived until then on a barter economy and even paid taxes with crops or animals or other goods. And during the seven years of the Revolution, they had not been able to tend to their farms or, in the case of laborers, hire out for other work. The war debt was huge and debtors included wealthy men who had put up money for the struggle, such as John Hancock, who wanted to be repaid. The taxes imposed were staggering to impoverished farmers.

They were cash-poor for another reason: they had been paid for their services as soldiers with notes that had become worthless. Many sold the notes for pennies on the dollar.

Courts issued orders for seizure of property: farms, houses, animals, even furniture and dishes. In one especially egregious case, an ill, elderly woman was carried outside by sheriff’s men and her bed was auctioned. Towns petitioned the Massachusetts state government for relief; some towns petitioned more than twice. The petitions were ignored.

The people organized into a movement that history knows as Shays’ Rebellion because one of the leading organizers was Daniel Shays of Pelham, Massachusetts, a Revolutionary War veteran who’d been injured at the Battle of Bunker Hill, fought at Ticonderoga and Saratoga, and was injured again at Stony Point.

The people called themselves Regulators. Armed with clubs and muskets, they marched on courthouses and refused to let the courts sit. They would not let auctions be held.

Needing guns, they planned to seize them from the government arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts. The state government meanwhile raised its own army, composed mostly of the sons of wealthy merchants and lawyers. The Regulators expected to meet resistance at the Arsenal, but had not expected to have cannons fired at them. Four men were killed. The Regulators went underground.

Over the next few months many skirmishes occurred and a number of Regulators were arrested and charged with treason, punishable by death. Two men were even led to the gallows and ropes were placed around their necks before the sheriff read the delay issued by Governor Hancock. Hancock had ordered that the reprieve not be read until that moment.

Most of the Regulators were eventually pardoned. Nearly all of the movement’s leaders left Massachusetts and lived the rest of their lives in Vermont or New York. After spending some time in Sandgate, Vermont, Daniel Shays settled in western New York. He befriended a young neighbor, Millard Fillmore, who was later elected to the State Assembly and within two years enacted the nation’s first bankruptcy laws, which eliminated imprisonment for debt. Other armed resistance movements were inspired by the Regulators, including the Whisky Rebellion in Pennsylvania and the Anti-Rent War in upstate New York.

The rebellion shook the new country to its core, resulting in the Constitutional Convention being held four months after the Springfield Arsenal battle. Washington, Jay, Hamilton, John Adams, all the newspapers, all the Massachusetts wealthy class, and even Sam Adams opposed the rebellion and denounced the Regulators, with one exception: Thomas Jefferson. When a friend wrote to him in Paris to get his support for crushing the Regulators, he wrote the letter that gives this web site its title.

Americans objected to the creation of a strong centralized federal government and many in New England objected to slavery not being prohibited, and it took another year before the ninth state ratified the Constitution. Some states had only done so with the assurance that a Bill of Rights would be added, which it was three years later. Without Shays’ Rebellion, we would not have those critically important constitutional rights.

CODA

Remember those worthless notes that impoverished Revolutionary War soldiers had sold for pennies on the dollar? They were now almost entirely in the hands of speculators. Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, came up with a plan for the new federal government to pay the notes at one hundred percent. Madison argued that the original holders of the notes — the Revolutionary War soldiers — should be the ones to receive the face value of the notes.

Hamilton rejected that. The speculators, he said, had shown more faith in the new government and deserved the money. And that was what happened. The wealthy speculators reaped large profits on the notes. The citizen soldiers who’d had to sell the notes for a few pennies lived the rest of their lives in poverty.