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| "The Looking Glass of 1787," Library of Congress | | The year 1787 threatened ruin to the new United States from internal turmoil. It ended with the promise of greater union and strength in a new Constitution. |
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Shays’s Rebellion and the attack on Springfield Arsenal, January 25th, 1787
The Last Battle of
the American
Revolution
In the Fall of 1786, General George Washington feared that the American Revolution might destroy the nation he and his countrymen had fought so hard to create. To his fellow Virginian and war comrade, Henry Lee, that October 31st, he wrote: "I am mortified beyond expression when I view the clouds that have spread over the brightest morn that ever dawned in any country... What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious."
Samuel Adams, President of the Massachusetts Senate, expressed his sentiment, when he later weighed in on the issue of pardons for Shays's rebels the following Spring, that:
“Rebellion against a king may be pardoned, or lightly punished, but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death."
Thomas Jefferson, writing to James Madison from Paris, France, however, felt safe and assured when he wrote on January 30th, 1787, that:
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion."
Daniel Shays (born ~1747 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts; died in New York 1825), Revolutionary War army captain recognized for gallantry by Lafayette, helped organize an insurrection against the government of Massachusetts. These were unsettled times of economic hardship and unfair laws. Ruinious property taxes, poll taxes that prevented poorer citizens from voting, unjust procedures of the Court of Common Pleas, costly law suits, and an unstable monetary system made day-to-day life more difficult than it had been before independence. The popular demand for the government issue of paper money was ignored by the state government.
With the Revolutionary War over, the United States had yet to create a truly functional government. A planned Constitutional Convention was not certain while chaos spread.
The Regulators, as the rebels called themselves, sought to correct government and courts ridden with arbitrary and oppressive laws and excessive salaries for officials. Mobbing the court buildings in Concord, Worcester, Northampton, Great Barrington, and Springfield, they halted most court action.
The August 29, 1786, storming of the Northampton courthouse successfully stopped the trial and imprisonment of many debtors. A month later, about 600 armed rebels stormed the Springfield courthouse. Massachusetts's Governor, James Bowdoin, quickly raised an army by private subscription of 4,400 militiamen under General Benjamin Lincoln to restore the courts and to protect the state.
Captain Shays and several thousand veterans, along with about a thousand more men led by Luke Day of West Springfield, next targeted the Continental Arsenal at Springfield. A mix up, however, prevented Day and his regiment from joining Shays. Day's message to Shays was intercepted by militia.
General Lincoln had moved westward from Boston to defend the Worcester court while Shays and nearly 1,500 Regulators marched on the Arsenal late in the afternoon of January 25th, 1787. It was on the grounds of the Springfield Armory National Historic Site that the high-water mark of this violent and wide-spread rebellion, or “Regulation” as it was known at the time, crested in the bloody clash at the arsenal in an effort by the rebels to seize the barracks, cannon, muskets, and ammunition stored there.
The armed rebel column, of about three regiments, advanced from the east along Boston Road (now State Street) toward the militia emplaced on the grounds of Armory Square (the grass quadrangle in front of the Springfield Armory NHS Museum). Militia General William Shepard, defending the arsenal with about 1,200 local militiamen as the rebel column approached, fired his field pieces (a brass field gun and a howitzer) into the ranks of the advancing rebels, killing four and wounding many. The rebels never fired a musket nor did the defending militia. Crying "murder" -- for the insurgents never supposed their neighbors and fellow veterans would fire on them --, the Shays men retreated in disarray toward the north and east.
General Lincoln arrived in Springfield a few days later with reinforcements and quickly chased Shays's army northward. On the morning of February 3rd, the insurgents were taken completely by surprise in Petersham, Massachusetts. General Lincoln had marched his troops from Hadley through a snowstorm the previous night to attack as Shays and his men sat down to breakfast. The regulators scattered, and the rebellion was effectively ended with some fighting and bloodshed continuing in the months ahead in the Berkshire hills to the west.
Most of the insurgents later took advantage of a general amnesty and surrendered. Shays and a few other leaders escaped north to Vermont.
The Supreme Judicial Court sentenced fourteen of the rebellion's leaders, including Shays, to death for treason. However, they were later pardoned by the newly-elected Governor John Hancock. Only two men, John Bly and Charles Rose of Berkshire County, were hung (for banditry).
A newly-elected Massachusetts Legislature began to undertake the slow work of reform. And that summer the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia struggled to create a stronger central government that would "establish justice and insure domestic tranquillity." Shays's Rebellion is considered the one of the major turning points leading to the formation of the United States Constitution.
-Richard Colton, historian, Springfield Armory NHS-
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