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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 (or "Regulators"), were mostly small farmers angered by crushing debt and taxes. Failure to repay such debts often resulted in imprisonment in debtor's prisons. The rebellion started on August 29, 1786. A Massachusetts militia that had been raised as a private army defeated the main Shaysite force on February 3, 1787. The lack of an institutional response to the uprising energized calls to reevaluate the Articles of Confederation, giving strong impetus to the Constitutional Convention, begun in May, 1787.
Background and causes
The rebellion was led by Daniel P. Shays, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. The war's debt ultimately trickled down to consumers, in large part to small farmers. In addition, the tax system at the time--a direct capitation--was highly regressive, especially given the fact that there was a dichotomy in eighteenth century Massachusetts economics. Much of the western and central parts of the Commonwealth had a barter economy, as opposed to the monetary economy that existed in the eastern part of the Commonwealth. Compounding 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 a barter economy. As a result, to meet their debts, many small farmers were forced to sell their land, often at less than one-third of fair market price to eastern Massachusetts speculators. Loss of such property could reduce families to extreme poverty. It also often meant that such men might lose their right to vote since 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.
Rebellion
Calling themselves "Regulators," men from all over western and central Massachusetts began to agitate for a change to a more democratic system. Initial disturbances were mostly peaceful and centered primarily on freeing jailed farmers from debtor's prisons. Shays gathered many outraged farmers for a meeting at Conkey's Tavern, where he vented his anger and said they should rebel. In the late summer of 1786, the conflict escalated into a statewide movement (excluding Boston) when armed Regulators shut down the unpopular debtors' courts in Northampton, Worcester, Concord, and elsewhere. Shays continued to hold meetings at Conkey's Tavern and encourage rebellion. Militia groups called out to confront the Regulators often refused to confront their neighbors or failed to muster.
What is striking about Shays' Rebellion is that, although there was a great deal of confrontation, there were few casualties or damages until the final battles. This was a political struggle of armed demonstrators. For example, in July, 1786, militia units had converged on Springfield, Massachusetts. There, instead of seizing the federal arsenal, they had merely paraded in the streets before a politely drawn up local militia.
The rebellious forces were led by a number of prominent local people. Although Daniel Shays, a farmer from East Pelham and a former captain in the Revolutionary War, was most often identified as the overall commander of these forces, in fact leadership was collective among a number of local leaders. For example, another key leader was Luke Day, the son of a wealthy family in West Springfield. This points to the fact that while the Regulators were usually characterized as rabble, they were, in addition to yeoman farmers and other small landowners, town leaders, members of prominent local families, and very often veterans of the Massachusetts Line including their officers. For example, in Amherst, virtually every key town leader was involved in the regulation in one form or another. Many had distinguished military records; Daniel Shays, for example, a former enlisted man who was eventually promoted to an officer, had been decorated by the Marquis of Lafayette and honored by George Washington himself.
Both the lack of a significant standing army and of statutory power to intervene in the affairs of the individual states under the government of the time, the Congress of the Confederation, was prevented from sending federal forces. The state government had always relied on the militia for civil order, but it was helpless in the face of wholesale resistance. Due to a lack of funds and some empathy for the Regulators, the Massachusetts General Court was unwilling to approve the raising of a militia. After months of indecision and desperate for a solution, in late December 1786, Gov. James Bowdoin and a number of Boston-area bankers raised a pool of private money and hired some 4,400 mercenaries (later legitimized as a militia), under the command of General Benjamin Lincoln. When the Regulators heard about the army, they planned to return to the federal arsenal in Springfield for more weapons.
The rebels were divided into three widely separated regiments led by local leaders. Daniel Shays' unit was to the east in Palmer, Eli Parson's to the north in Chicopee, and Luke Day's across the Connecticut River in West Springfield. The plan had been to attack on January 25, but Luke Day decided to postpone that to January 26th. His note informing his other commanders was intercepted. As a result, only two of the regiments arrived on the late afternoon of January 25th, marching through some four feet of deep snow. Leading the small army were some four hundred "Old Soldiers" marching eight abreast.
Facing them were twelve hundred militiamen led by Gen. William Shepherd, who had managed to keep the militia of Springfield and its environs from becoming Regulators. Shepherd had decided to seize the arsenal without authorization to keep it out of the hands of the rebels. He had deployed several of the arsenal's artillery pieces. As the rebels advanced, he ordered the guns to fire over the troops' heads. Instead of the rebels faltering as he hoped, they accelerated. However, the fire of the cannons panicked several inexperienced mounted troops behind the veterans, and more than a dozen fell from their horses. At that moment, Shepherd ordered his cannons to fire at "waistband height" as a hidden howitzer fired a load of grapeshot at their flank. Four men were killed--the first casualties of the rebellion--and many were wounded. The raw militia at the rear fled at that point, leaving the veterans alone. Seeing that they were now badly outnumbered, the rebels then retreated. The next morning, Lincoln's army of 4,400 arrived after a long march from Worcester through deep snow.
Defeat
Shays and his followers were pursued by Lincoln's now-legitimate militia to Petersham, where they were defeated on February 3, 1787. Shays and many of the leaders escaped to Vermont, where they were sheltered by Ethan Allen and other prominent Vermonters. Vermont Governor Thomas Chittenden is believed to have helped shelter these refugees, though he publicly condemned the practice. Shays himself was sentenced to death for treason, but he and many other leaders were pardoned by the newly-elected Massachusetts governor John Hancock. The breakup of this rebel army was followed by guerrilla warfare, including attacks on wealthy landowners, the freeing of jailed farmers, and arson. The last known battle of this kind was fought in South Egremont. In the end, only two men, John Bly and Charles Rose, were hanged for their part in the rebellion.
In exchange for amnesty, Shays' followers were banned from elected office for three years and were not allowed to serve on juries or vote. Eventually the force for the rebellion was dissipated both by an improving economy and by elections that replaced some incumbents with individuals sympathetic to the rebellion. These elections (despite the ban) included many of Shays's followers.
Effects
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. (See Richards, Shays' Rebellion, 1-4 and 129-130, for example). 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, in fact, so disturbed by the events of the rebellion that the once great advocate of revolution called for the deaths of the men rebelling against similar oppression. He would state "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."
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 nearly completely demobilized Continental Army; by mid-January, he'd managed to recruit only 100 men.
Some of the nation's leading men had long been frustrated by the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. James Madison, for example, initiated several efforts to amend them, efforts that were blocked by small, but significant, minorities in Congress. Emboldened by his success in the Maryland-Virginia border dispute of 1784-5, Madison decided that decisions outside Congress were the only way for states to resolve their various commercial and other problems. Others within Congress worried that the government was too weak to turn back outside invasions, but the general sentiment against standing armies kept the power of the government small.
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." (Leonard, 126-127).
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, a constitution that would give the president a striking amount of power.
Further reading
The first account of the rebellion was George Richards Minot's History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts..., published in 1788. 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. The first modern reassessment was David Szatmary's Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: U. of Massachusetts Press, 1980). Although it did a great service in its re-examination of the events, it is badly flawed in its sources, methods, and conclusions and should be used carefully, if at all. Important contributions are found in Martin Kaufman, ed., Shays' Rebellion: Selected Essays (Westfield, Mass., 1987) and particularly in Robert A. Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (Charlottesville: U. Press of Virginia, 1993).
The best and most recent telling of the story of the rebellion and its aftermath is found in Leonard Richards, Shays' Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
"Shays' Rebellion"