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Dr. Joseph Foster is assistant professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University. He has been a speaker in the Society’s Sons Speaker Series, talking to us about “The Changing Face of Philadelphia, 1775-1780. Here, in an original article for the PSSR website and newsletter, Dr. Foster discusses Shays Rebellion, a post-war uprising in Massachusetts that threatened the new republic and helped spur adoption of the Constitution.

How Shays Rebellion Led to Our Constitution

By Dr. Joseph Foster

Considering the fate of the country, a discouraged George Washington wrote to his fellow Virginian James Madison on 5 November 1786, asking if the nation will survive or if the governments would dissolve into anarchy. The burdened Washington was commenting on the clash of protestors against Massachusetts militiamen over a depressed economy, rising taxes, and seizures of farms by local sheriffs for unpaid taxes. Throughout August 1786 angry farmers forcibly closed local courts in Massachusetts.

An impoverished farmer, Daniel Shays, a captain in the Revolution army, led hundreds of distressed farmers to Springfield to seize the arsenal there.  But, in  January 1787 a much larger militia was waiting for them and easily routed the so-called insurgents, and in February 1787 another militia disbanded the protestors and the crisis was finally over.

While the crisis was over, the cause was not.  In fairness to the insurgents, the state’s legislature substantially increased taxes and mandated that property owners were responsible for all unpaid taxes beginning in 1782. It refused to pass a paper money bill, leaving the economy on a gold and silver basis only, and further required local sheriffs to execute the seizures of delinquent properties or be held responsible to pay out of their own estates the money not collected.

Thousands of struggling western farmers were facing the loss of their homes and poverty.  And, not unnoticed by them was that the militiamen were privately hired by Boston merchants. Nonetheless, the public perception was condemnatory.  On 11 September 1786 Boston condemned the protestors, and a letter published in the Worcester Magazine on 12 October 1786 dismissed Shays as a “deranged continental officer.”  Future president John Quincy Adams recorded in his diary that Shays was “despicable.”

Many of the nation’s leadership were horrified at the “rebellion.”  Thomas Jefferson in Paris was a more forgiving, noting that little rebellions were a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” Once over, amnesty and pardons were granted to more than 4,300 participants, as well for 16 of 18 leaders of the insurgency who were condemned to death. Daniel Shays, who was hiding in the woods of Vermont, was also pardoned. But Shays Rebellion, as it became known, set into motion a far greater cause. Washington lamented if “government shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws” then “anarchy & confusion must prevail.”

Madison in November 1786 worried that if the gloomy lessons of the rebellion were not learned, “it will be a proof that our case is desperate,” and Henry Knox in March 1787 reported to Washington that the insurgency has attempted to spread to New York. A cadre of political leaders had been pushing for a stronger national government to replace the inefficient Articles of Confederation but failed in their endeavor.  They attempted to at least start such a conversation in the 1786 Annapolis Convention, but only a few states sent delegates. But Shays’ Rebellion was the final act that convinced the Confederation Congress on 21 February 1787 to issue the call for a national convention to meet on 14 May 1787 in Philadelphia. Delegates from 12 states gathered on 25 May and drafted a Constitution that serves as our government today.