About Shays Rebellion
Shays Rebellion (also Shays's or Shays'),
1786-87 in Western Massachusetts, was the first
populist uprising after the American Revolution. It's
218 years later, but the spirit of Shays Rebellion has
never been more important to revive than now.
Corporations still derail democracy and use their power
against ordinary citizens by buying our public
officials and blocking sane changes in agriculture,
energy, transportation, health care, manufacturing and
social spending.
Daniel Shays, from Pelham, organized poor
farmers from the Connecticut River Valley to shut down
the courts that were sending them to debtors prison on
behalf of big Boston banks. Many of the farmers were
veterans who had trudged home from the Revolution "with
not a single month's pay" in their pockets, but only
worthless government certificates.
In the days of Shays, as now, corporate interests used
their power against ordinary citizens. Just a few years
after Shays Rebellion, the Constitution was adopted to
protect bankers, landowners & merchants. We've been
living with big government protecting those business
interests ever since.
Historians and scholars, including former President
Woodrow Wilson (when he was a Princeton University
professor), have said that Shays Rebellion was one of
the key forces behind the shaping of the U.S.
Constitution as a document of protection for corporate
interests. The Shays resistance alerted the Founders
to the dangers of a populist democracy to their
business interests.
The importance of Shays Rebellion has never been fully
appreciated, until recently, and Shays and his
followers have always been viewed as a small group of
poor farmers and debtors who closed the courts as a
protest of local civil authority.
The meaning of Shays' Rebellion for our time is to
understand an escalating crisis in which the men who
fought or financed the American Revolution were obliged
to reconsider that revolution and its principles only
ten years later. Was the new country to be "of the
people, by the people, for the people?"
To quote Howard Zinn: "The American colonists, having
fought and won the war for independence from England,
faced the question of what kind of government to
establish. In 1786, three years after the treaty of
peace was signed, there was a rebellion of farmers in
western Massachusetts, led by Captain Daniel Shays, a
veteran of the Revolutionary war. The uprising was
crushed, but it put a scare into those leaders who were
to become our Founding Fathers."
After Shays Rebellion, General Henry Knox warned his
former commander, George Washington, about the rebels:
"They see the weakness of government; they feel at once
their own poverty, compared to the opulent, and their
own force, and they are determined to make use of the
latter in order to remedy the former. Their creed is
that the property of the U.S. has been protected from
the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of
all, and therefore should be the common property of
all."
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia for 1787
was called to deal with this problem, to set up "big
government," to protect the interests of merchants,
slave-holders, and landowners.”
So, who were these Shays rebels?
Daniel Shays, a farmer from Pelham and a Revolutionary
war veteran, organized poor farmers from the
Connecticut Valley try to shut down the courts that
were sending them to debtors prisons on behalf of big
Boston banks and business interests calling in debts.
Many of the farmers were veterans who had trudged home
from the Revolution "with not a single month's pay" in
their pockets, but only worthless government
certificates.
In 1786-87, these debt-ridden farmers, struck by the
economic depression that followed the American
Revolution, petitioned the state senate to issue paper
money and to halt foreclosure of mortgages on their
property and their own imprisonment for debt as a
result of high land taxes. Without such relief, they
were being put into prison and losing their lands for
debts they had no way to pay.
Sentiment was particularly high against the commercial
interests who controlled the state senate in Boston,
and the lawyers who hastened the farmers’ bankruptcy by
their exorbitant fees for litigation.
When the state senate failed to undertake reform, armed
insurgents in the Berkshire Hills and the Connecticut
River Valley, under the leadership of Daniel Shays and
others, began (Aug. 1786) to forcibly to prevent the
county courts from sitting to make judgments for debt.
In September they forced the state supreme court at
Springfield to adjourn.
Other Shays related material on the web:
Also, the book:
- Shays Rebellion - The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection
by David P. Szatmary
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