Shays' Rebellion and the Cannon's Report

January twenty-fifth, seventeen eighty-seven. A force of roughly fifteen hundred men marched through deep New England winter toward the federal armory on this hill. They were not foreign invaders.

They were farmers, most of them veterans of the Revolutionary War, men who had fought the British and come home to find their farms threatened by debt collectors and courts that accepted only hard currency, which almost none of them had. Their leader, a former Continental Army captain named Daniel Shays, had watched the Massachusetts government levy taxes no working farmer could pay, then throw those who could not into debtors' prison. What they wanted was the armory's weapons.

What they found was Major General William Shepard and twelve hundred state militia, holding the hill on behalf of a government that had no money to pay them but found the money to defend its arsenal. Shepard ordered warning shots. When Shays' column kept advancing, he ordered the cannon to fire directly into the marchers.

Four men were killed and twenty wounded. The column broke and scattered into the winter dark. The rebellion was suppressed within weeks.

But its aftershock traveled faster than any militia. The news of armed farmers marching on a federal arsenal landed in Philadelphia at the precise moment delegates were deciding whether to call a constitutional convention. James Madison and George Washington both cited Shays' Rebellion explicitly as proof that the Articles of Confederation had failed, that the new nation needed a government strong enough to hold itself together.

The cannon fired on this hill in January of seventeen eighty-seven echoed, in a real sense, all the way to the Constitution of the United States.