Shays' Rebellion and the Fragile Republic

The American Revolution was barely over when Massachusetts started tearing itself apart. By seventeen eighty-six, the state was in an economic depression. Farmers in the western counties, many of them veterans who had fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill, were losing their land to debt collectors and foreclosure courts. The Massachusetts legislature, dominated by merchants and creditors in Boston, refused to issue paper money or grant debt relief.

Daniel Shays was a former captain in the Continental Army from Pelham, in Hampshire County. He had fought at Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga, and Saratoga. He had never been paid. In the summer of seventeen eighty-six, he joined a growing movement of farmers who began closing down the county courts to stop debt and tax proceedings against their neighbors.

By January of seventeen eighty-seven, Shays and roughly fifteen hundred men marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield, hoping to seize weapons. The state militia, privately funded by Boston merchants because the state itself had no money to pay them, drove the rebels off with cannon fire. Within weeks the rebellion was broken.

Shays' Rebellion frightened the political class of the new nation. George Washington wrote that the uprising made the necessity of a stronger central government obvious. James Madison cited it explicitly as a reason to convene the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia that spring. The Constitution of seventeen eighty-seven was, in part, a direct response to the farmers of western Massachusetts and their pitchforks.

The rebels were eventually pardoned. Shays himself died in poverty in New York in eighteen twenty-five, after the government had finally granted him a small military pension.