A Revisionist History of Shays' Rebellion: 1786-1788

A Lesson in the Eternal Vigilance Required to Secure Liberty in Each Generation

Introduction

As promised, we are going to soon undertake a new history of the Whiskey Insurrection in western Pennsylvania, 1791—1794. Due to its length the study will probably be a multi-part series.

This “Shays” prequel is part one (both studies will form a chapter in my forthcoming book, “The Ruling Class War on Poor and Working Class Whites,” due for publication next year).

At the age of 22, William Findley (1741-1821) arrived penniless in America from Antrim County in “Ulster” (home to the majority Protestant north of Ireland; the people commonly denominated “Scots-Irish,” in that the place of origin of their ancestors was Scotland). A combat veteran of the Revolutionary War, Findley served for decades in the House of Representatives as an anti-Federalist ally of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. His History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania is primary source material which we will be quoting extensively in our future study.

Findley recognized that the Whiskey Insurrection (sometimes termed “rebellion”), was not an isolated event. Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising in the Early Republic that preceded the Whiskey rebels, was in some ways its harbinger. Findley, who was a moderating influence and no disparager of George Washington, nonetheless acknowledged the righteous grievances of the farmers in Massachusetts who revolted—protesting unjust, oppressive taxation (always an American casus belli)—and usurious lending, holding the people in debt peonage.

He fingered as the culprits the powerful factions of economic predators led by bankers in Boston, and in the next decade by the Secretary of the Treasury  himself, Alexander Hamilton.

In Right wing histories of the United States, Shays’ Rebellion is mentioned usually in only a few lines, containing no analysis of how bankers became so oppressively powerful in post-war Massachusetts (cf. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States [2004], pp. 109-110).

Other books in this genre tend to canonize large swaths of the early chronicle of our nation as sacred history—a veritable fifth gospel: the Biblical United States of America (cf. for instance, W. Cleon Skousen, It’s Coming to America: The Majesty of God’s Law [1996] wherein Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Insurrection are omitted altogether).

Certainly America was a Christian nation at its founding. That fact does not however, confer infallibility or indefectibility on the all-too-human principals engaged in birthing our nation, where temptations of gaining inordinate power in government office, or reaping exploitative profits, were a constant threat.

Both the 21st century Tea party movement and the contemporary “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) campaign, show signs of acute myopia. Here in conservative north Idaho attempts to preserve open spaces, farm land and historic edifices from voracious developers seeking profit at any cost, are met with accusations  of “Socialism!”

Ungodly predatory capitalism is sanctified by local “evangelical churches” and the Idaho Republican Party, often in the name of a Bible which proclaims the land to be God’s and not man’s, condemns avarice and money worship, and assigns careful stewardship of the planet to us. With honorable exceptions, in the face of the development onslaught there is little of that stewardship in post-modern, wild west Idaho. It’s a usurer’s paradise (no cap on interest rates on installment loans), and a low wage plantation where poor whites are unable to obtain affordable housing, and where too many “Christian” landlords believe wholeheartedly in charging rent according to the capitalist standard of whatever exorbitant level “the market will bear.”

It’s pitiful to see impoverished people siding with those who oppress them by greeting attempts at godly reform with the “Socialism!” stigma. The slaves love their chains and they love them in the name of Jesus the Jubilee liberator, about whom they know little or nothing, despite in some cases being members of churches that boast they study the Bible “line by line. ”(This writer’s book: Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not offers evidence of the unscriptural nature of buccaneer capitalism and distinguishes between it and the principles of Biblical free enterprise).

Shays and the Whiskey uprisings were strong indications that even at the birth of America the Money Power and government bureaucrats were working to oppress the people. The study of this neglected history helps us to demystify our nation’s founding, and grasp the fact that what we imagine to be “unprecedented evil” in our time, is only the recurring manifestation of the eternal worm in the apple of human nature, toward which vigilance is ever obligatory.

Shays’ Rebellion, 1786-1788: A Lesson in the Eternal Vigilance Required to Secure Liberty in Each Generation

A few years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and shortly after America’s victory over the British empire, the call for another revolution was heeded by farmers and laborers in rural western Massachusetts

By Michael Hoffman

Copyright ©2024. All Rights Reserved

David Humphreys had served as George Washington’s aide during the American Revolution. In November of 1786 he wrote to Washington, who was in what would prove to be temporary retirement at Mount Vernon, to inform him that a second revolution was taking place in Massachusetts, among Americans he termed “levelers” who were fighting to “annihilate all debts public and private.”

They had forced the closing of the courts and attempted to seize the Springfield arsenal, which would have resulted in the insurgents being more heavily armed than the government of Massachusetts. General Henry Knox, Washington’s former artillery officer, offered a report equally grave. The rebels were intent on seizing the property of the rich and redistributing it to the poor.

Shay’s Rebellion erupted July 18, 1786, ten years and two weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was a time when not all white Americans had the same rights. To vote in local elections one needed to have a certain net worth. In state elections one’s assets had to be higher still. The law, passed in Boston, was mostly ignored in the highly independent farming communities of western Massachusetts like Pelham, where Daniel and Abigail Shays resided on their one hundred acre farm.

Revolutionary War Veteran forced to sell Lafayette’s sword to pay debts on his farm

Shays had served five years in the Continental Army, reaching the rank of captain. Leonard R. Richards in his essential history, Shays’s Rebellion (2002), described Shays as a “winter soldier” who had “served in the worst of times,” the kind of man that “Washington had desperately needed.” Shays had been under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette, who gave him his sword in gratitude for his service—a sword Shays was forced to sell after the war to raise cash to service debts on his farm.

The grievances of the men and women of Pelham for instance, resulted in petitions to the state government that went unanswered. The farmers demanded to know why they were forced to pay their taxes and debts exclusively with hard money, when hard money was so scarce?

Why were there so many layers to the court system—was it so that judges and lawyers could collect gratuitous fees? Why did it seem as though the state government in faraway Boston was dominated not by yeoman laborers, but a highly favored merchant class? Were they not as corrupt as King George’s men?

Toward the end of August, after a series of agrarian-populist county conventions, several hundred farmers from regional towns such as Amherst, West Springfield and the aforementioned Pelham, led by former officers of the American revolutionary army, converged on the courthouse in Northampton and closed it, ending all sessions and scheduled business. They did something similar in Worcester in early September, but not before the Chief Justice, former Revolutionary War General General Artemas Ward, ordered them to disperse. He was rebuffed. The farmers stood their ground and prevailed.

The next day three hundred farmers gathered in Worcester for the same objective. In response, Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin, a financial speculator who supported high taxation on the yeomen, called out members of the state militia who were resident in the Worcester area. The militiamen refused his orders. Many joined with the farmers in obstructing the rackets of the legal fraternity. As in Northampton, the court in Worcester was now shuttered for the remainder of the year 1786.

A contemporary portrait of Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck