Especially alarming to conservatives was an outbreak of violence in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts legislature was determined to pay off the state debt and maintain a sound currency. Taxes amounting to almost ?1.9 million were levied between 1780 and 1786, the burden falling most heavily on those of moderate income. The average Massachusetts farmer paid about a third of every year’s income in taxes. Bad times and deflation led to many foreclosures, and the prisons were crowded with honest debtors. “Our Property is torn from us,” one town complained, “our Gaols filled & still our Debts are not discharged.”
In the summer of 1786 mobs in the western communities began to stop foreclosures by forcibly preventing the courts from holding their sessions. Under the leadership of Daniel Shays, a veteran of Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga, and Saratoga, the “rebels” marched
Massachusetts militia crushing Shays's revolt in 1787. Source: North Wind Picture Archives.
On Springfield and prevented the state supreme court from meeting. When the state government sent troops against them, the rebels attacked the Springfield arsenal. They were routed, and the uprising then collapsed. Shays fled to Vermont.
As Thomas Jefferson observed at safe remove from the trouble in Paris, where he was serving as minister to France, Shays’s uprising was only “a little rebellion” and as such “a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” But Shays and his followers were genuinely exasperated by the refusal of the government even to try to provide relief for their troubles. By taking up arms they forced the authorities to heed them: At its next session the legislature made some concessions to their demands.
But unlike Jefferson, most well-to-do Americans considered Shays’s rebellion “Liberty run mad.” “What, gracious God, is man! that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct?” the usually unexcitable George Washington asked when news of the riots reached Virginia. “We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion!” During the crisis private persons had to subscribe funds to put the rebels down, and when Massachusetts had appealed to Congress for help there was little Congress could legally do. The lessons seemed plain: Liberty must not become an excuse for license; greater authority must be vested in the central government.
The uprising in Massachusetts illustrated the clash between local and national interests. The revolt of Daniel Shays worried planters in far-off Virginia and the Carolinas almost as much as it did the merchants of Boston. Bacon’s Rebellion, a far more serious affair, had evoked no such reaction in the seventeenth century, nor had the Regulator War in North Carolina as late as 1771.
•••-[Read the Document Military Reports on Shays's at myhistorylab. com
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