America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (26 page)

Vaughan once recorded, “served under Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, helped thwart Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne at Saratoga and stormed Stony Point with Mad Anthony Wayne. For recruiting a company of volunteers in Massachusetts, Shays ultimately received a commission as their captain, a position he seems to have filled adequately. And before leaving service, Shays suffered at least one wound in battle.”3

But why was Daniel Shays leading thousands of men, many of whom had served America loyally and often at great sacrifice, against the rightfully elected government of Massachusetts? And by attacking a federal arsenal, why were they fighting against the new American republic they had helped birth?

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t h e c o m m o n ly a c c e p t e d wisdom back then was that these were disgruntled backwoods farmers or rootless “mobbers,” lawless men | 215 \

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overburdened by debt and faced with foreclosures on their homes. The debt part was certainly true. Taxes were high, hard cash was unavailable. The Continental currency they were given had been made worthless by inflation, and Congress was reneging on promised pensions to veterans. Like many others, a strapped Daniel Shays had been forced into giving up prized possessions. Shays had paid off a twelve-dollar debt by selling the famous gold-handled ceremonial sword that had been presented to him by the Marquis de Lafayette in honor of the victory at Saratoga. His detractors would later point to this act of necessity as a comment on his low character—only an ill-bred money-grub-ber would part with such a patriotic icon.

But to Daniel Shays and thousands of other Massachusetts men who joined his cause, it may have seemed that nothing had changed since they swapped an arrogant, distant Parliament for a Massachusetts legislature filled with Boston’s elitist merchants and lawyers—men derided as “thieves, knaves, and robbers” by the average people in Massachusetts. The trouble had begun as early as 1782 when angry crowds closed the courts in the Berkshire Mountains town of Pittsfield to prevent any more foreclosures or confiscated property. In Northampton, Massachusetts, not far from Springfield, a former clergyman named Samuel Ely led a mob that attacked the state courts. Arrested and jailed, Ely was later freed by a large crowd and escaped to that last refuge of the lawless to the north, Vermont. These were people who had fresh memories of the days before the Revolution when western Massachusetts mobs had shut down the colonial courts in reaction to Parliament’s Government Act. To them, the new state courts were just old wine in new bottles.

Although a few seasons of better crops and some halting reforms made by the legislature provided some temporary relief, by late 1786

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the situation in Massachusetts had grown even worse. That year, the state legislature issued a new tax that fell most heavily on the poor, pushing the situation over the brink. In one county in August 1786, a crowd of more than fifteen hundred men with clubs, swords, and guns forced the closure of court sessions. Similar outbreaks occurred around Massachusetts, and there were growing reports of the contagion spreading, with outbursts in neighboring New Hampshire and Vermont. Some of these mobs were met effectively by state militia forces. The “Cradle of the Revolution” was rocking madly.

But it was about more than just unfair taxes and keeping out of debtor’s prison. While the insurgent army included many dirt-poor farmers, straining under the threat of bankruptcy, its ranks were not filled with the dregs of Massachusetts society, as opponents and critics claimed then and for centuries after. Men such as Luke Day, whose decision to delay the attack was blamed for the defeat of the Shaysites at the Springfield armory, were established members of prominent old families. For his insightful account of Shays’ Rebellion, historian Leonard L. Richards unearthed the tax rolls of old Massachusetts to reveal that many of those who joined Daniel Shays at Springfield were pillars of their communities, landed families at the top of their town’s list of taxpayers. They included Moses Dickinson and four other members of his immediate family, one of the most respected and prominent in Amherst; a total of thirty Shaysites were Dickinsons by blood or marriage, among them the great-grandfather of poet Emily Dickinson.4

To many of these protesters, the system itself was rotten, and they were as angry at who was passing the taxes as at the taxes themselves.

One of the “muster forms” signed by some of the insurgents read, “We do Each one of us acknowledge our Selves to be Inlisted . . . in Colo | 217 \

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Hazleton’s Regiment of Regulators . . . for the Suppressing of tyrannical government in the Massachusetts State.”5

Across the state, unauthorized town conventions petitioned for drastic reforms aimed at taking power out of the hands of the Boston merchants and professional men who were gaming the tax system to their advantage. Boston’s attorneys were especially singled out for abuse. 6 They were seen as crafting laws and tax codes that helped mostly themselves. Indeed, history does repeat itself.

During the run-up to the actual fighting in Springfield, the retired George Washington waited anxiously for news from Massachusetts. It was only a few years before, in November 1783, that he had addressed a farewell to the army: “Who, that was not a witness, could imagine that the most violent local prejudices would cease so soon, and that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed, by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers . . . ?

And shall not the brave men, who have contributed so essentially to these inestimable acquisitions, retiring victorious from the field of War to the field of agriculture, participate in all the blessings which have been obtained; in such a republic, who will exclude them from the rights of Citizens, and the fruits of their labour.”7

Washington had asked, “Who will exclude them?” and the Massachusetts legislature had answered by its deeds. Regressive taxes were sapping the people who tilled Washington’s “field of agriculture.” Poll taxes and restrictive rules kept them from voting. Legislative rules tipped the scales in favor of merchants and bankers in the eastern part of the state.

But to men such as Samuel Adams, who had finally made some money and now owned property in the West Indies, the rules had | 218 \

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changed. So had his revolutionary tune. “In monarchies, the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished,” Adams said in September 1786, as the insurgency was building toward its climax. “But the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” Adams, always a conservative Puritan at heart, helped push through the legislature a Riot Act that made sheriffs and other officials blameless for killing rioters and threatened rioters with forfeiture of homes and property and with public whippings—“39 stripes on the naked back.”

Henry Knox, Washington’s trusted old friend who now served as war secretary, saw the insurgents as a danger to the republic. Knox, whose wife had inherited an enormous parcel of Maine land, making the former bookseller a wealthy man, was sending Washington regular dispatches. His letters to Mount Vernon were not reassuring and included alarming accounts of “twelve to fifteen thousand desperate and unprincipled men” scattered throughout New England. He claimed—inaccurately—they were “determined to annihilate all debts public and private.”

“This was an exaggeration of the rebels’ number and their intentions,” Richard Brookhiser notes in his admiring biography of Washington,
Founding Father.
“The principle of self-government, which he had fought a war to secure, seemed to be threatened, for the rulers Shays and his followers were rebelling against were their own representatives. . . . Washington felt he knew what the government should do. ‘Know precisely what the insurgents aim at. If they have
real
grievances, redress them if possible. . . . If they have not, employ the force of government against them at once.’”8

The fears of mayhem and chaos that Shays’ Rebellion had provoked among many of America’s “great men” was far from unique in | 219 \

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post-Revolutionary America. The idealized image of the heroic minuteman valiantly joining in solidarity with political geniuses and patriotic icons such as Washington and the Adamses to overthrow a tyrannical English monarch is tidy and convenient. But its simplicity masks the complexity of the American Revolution and the motives of the men who fought it.

The sort of popular, grassroots rebellion represented by Daniel Shays is an excellent reminder that
E pluribus unum,
the national motto later chosen by the Framers, means “Out of the many, one.” There was no one America before the Revolution, but many. And there were many Americans with very different agendas fighting for independence. Among them were the colonial-era have-nots, some of whom called themselves “Regulators,” just as the men who enlisted in Daniel Shays’ revolt would.

The first Americans to call themselves Regulators were a group of North Carolina’s backcountry farmers distressed at the way the eastern coastal aristocracy was abusing them. Often members of the Baptists, Quakers, or other sects, they were all opposed to paying taxes to support the Anglican Church, as was the practice in North Carolina, Virginia, and other southern states. (The Congregational Church enjoyed similar support in Massachusetts.) As Gary Nash explains in
The Unknown American Revolution,
“They called themselves Regulators, a term borrowed from England, where it had been used for generations to describe those who reformed ‘publick grievances and abuses of power.’”9

The movement got its start in the late 1760s and exploded in open revolt in North Carolina in 1771. Claiming that corrupt local officials “continually Squez’d and oppressed poor . . . families through taxation and extortion,” the Regulators vowed not to pay any more taxes | 220 \

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until their grievances were addressed. As in the Shays’ Rebellion years later, they disrupted the courts and freed their leaders from jail. But the movement was doomed. As Ray Raphael notes, “Although the Regulator movement in the North Carolina backcountry involved an overwhelming 80 percent of the white male residents, in 1771 the Regulators were defeated in a full-scale military confrontation with the colonial government that left more than 25 killed and 160 wounded. Forced to disband, over 6,000 former Regulators repudiated their past misdeeds by signing oaths of allegiance to the Crown. In this trial run at Revolution—featuring an oppressive government accused by ordinary citizens of unfair taxation and abuses of power—the rebels lost.”10

A similar mood had struck in New York a few years before. In 1766, ten years before the Declaration, land disputes—not tea and taxes—had sparked a major rebellion, not against England but against American landowners. Inspired by the Stamp Act riots in New York City, tenants on some of New York’s vast estates—a holdover from the Dutch era when wealthy patroons were granted enormous parcels of land—refused to pay their rents. These properties were owned by the most powerful families of New York, who ruled more like medieval feudal lords than modern landlords. In April 1766, an angry crowd from Van Cortlandt Manor, complaining of rising rents, short leases, and frequent evictions, decided to march to New York City, liberate prisoners from debtor’s jail, and tell John Van Cortlandt they would “pull down his house in Town” if he did not give them “a grant forever of his Lands.”

“The 1766 uprisings in New York foreshadowed the greater conflict that followed,” historian Ray Raphael has argued. “Angry farmers, apparently powerless, stood tall in the face of their rulers, who had to be bailed out by the British Army. The tenant rebellions of the | 221 \

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middle colonies, along with the Regulator movements in the South, contributed indirectly to the coming Revolution by chipping away at the notion that a few men of prestige and privilege could exploit those beneath them with impunity.”11

Although the concept of socialism wouldn’t appear until the early nineteenth century, this was a sort of class warfare that carried over into America’s Revolutionary years. In 1779, Philadelphia had just changed hands once again after the British had evacuated in May 1778. The city was also sharply divided among rich and poor. Its wealthiest families and merchants, such as Robert Morris—known as the “financier of the Revolution”—were accused of price gouging, profiteering by hoarding goods to drive up prices on all basic necessities, including flour. Morris and other merchants argued that this was free trade and they had the right to charge whatever prices the market would bear.

Although a city committee recommended price controls in Philadelphia, they were difficult to enforce in a city fighting for independence.

But by the fall of 1779, the working class of Philadelphia was ready to go to the barricades against the city’s merchants and power brokers, some of whom had cozied up to the British while they were occupying the city.

Making hostages of four Philadelphia merchants singled out as particularly onerous for their practice of hoarding to force prices higher, an armed militia marched to the house of James Wilson, an attorney who had argued against the price controls. Wilson and thirty-five other Philadelphia gentlemen, including Robert Morris, barricaded themselves inside the house at Third and Walnut Streets. The angry militiamen wheeled artillery pieces in front of Wilson’s home; the Revolution was threatening to eat its own. After a brief skirmish, a detachment of Pennsylvania soldiers, led by the state’s governor, Joseph | 222 \

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Reed, one of George Washington’s most trusted aides, rescued Wilson and the others. But in what came to be known as the Fort Wilson Riot, five men died and fourteen others were wounded in the heart of Franklin’s City of Brotherly Love.