Shays' Rebellion
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an uprising in Massachusetts, 1786-87. At this time discontent was rife in the colonies. Poverty, instead of prosperity, seemed to follow in the wake of independence. The common people, in particular, were unemployed, or their products brought low prices. They were deeply in debt. Salaries were out of proportion to what a workingman could earn. Taxes, though low in comparison to what the descendants of these men now pay, were for the time exorbitantly high. Debtors' laws were stringent. Strong men were thrown into prison and allowed to languish there for no other reason than that they owed someone whom the people considered comparatively able to get on without payment. There were uprisings in Pennsylvania, in New York City, and in New Hampshire . Shays' rebellion in Massachusetts was merely the climax. The Massachusetts judges went from town to town, holding court. They were accompanied by a horde of lawyers engaged in seizing goods and foreclosing mortgages. Genuine distress prevailed. At this juncture Captain Daniel Shays, who had been an ensign at the battle of Bunker Hill , and who won the title of captain in the Continental army, took it upon himself to prevent the courts from sitting and distressing the people by issuing warrants and granting judgments for debts. He surrounded the court at Springfield with an armed force, until the supreme court, after three days, adjourned without finding indictments. He filled the courthouse at Worcester with armed men, so that the court could not sit. A riot forced the court to give up its sessions at Great Barrington. Early in 1787 Captain Shays got together a force, reputed to be 1,800 men, and made an attack on the Springfield arsenal guarded for a time by a force of militia under General Shepard. According to one account four of Captain Shays' men fell before a volley directed into their ranks. Captain Shays and 150 men were arrested, but later amnesty was proclaimed. Shays was pardoned and went to Sparta, New York, where later he obtained a pension for his Revolutionary services. Washington, with all his love of justice, failed to see the popular side of the situation. He was of the opinion that something stronger than moral suasion was needed to calm these disorders, and wrote to Lee, then in Congress: "It was but the other day that we were shedding our blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live--constitutions of our own choice and making--and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them."
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The narrative Aiton's set down in 1910 still holds: the crowd actions against the debt courts at Northampton, Worcester and Great Barrington, the failed assault on the Springfield arsenal in January 1787 with four of Shays's men killed, the pardon, and Shays's later years in Sparta, New York, where he died in 1825. What has moved is interpretation. Where Aiton's has Washington unable to "see the popular side," modern historians take the rebels largely on their own terms, using the name they used for themselves — Regulators — and reading the rising as a tax and currency revolt by Revolutionary veterans rather than mere disorder; court and tax records have shown the participants were a broad cross-section of hill-town farmers, not a fringe. Historians also argue more cautiously than they once did about the old claim that the rebellion was the decisive spur to the Constitutional Convention: it sharpened nationalist alarm, but the movement for a stronger union was already under way. One small slip of the 1910 text is worth noting: Massachusetts in 1786 was a state, not one of the "colonies."
Written for this edition, 2026.