Shays' Rebellion

Reposted from battlefields.org by Isaac Makos

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In 1786, only a few years after the end of the Revolutionary War, the new United States had to confront a crisis: a rebellion was brewing in the very same state where the war for American independence had begun only eleven years earlier.

The roots of Shays’ Rebellion lay in the document which created the first government of the United States, the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, the federal government had extremely limited powers. This made sense to its drafters, who were, at that moment fighting a war to separate themselves from a powerful central government in London that they saw as tyrannical. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government could not impose taxes on the people directly; it could only to request money from the state governments, which held the power to tax their citizens. Each state was also responsible for paying its own portion of the massive debt that had been accumulated to fund the war effort against Britain.

To pay its creditors, merchants in Massachusetts convinced their state government to raise taxes. Among the hardest hit by these new high taxes were farmers in the western part of the state. These farmers had little hard currency on hand, and often relied on barter and credit to obtain goods and services. In addition, many of these farmers were veterans of the Revolutionary War. Throughout the war, these veterans received less than their full amount of earned pay for their service, sometimes receiving no pay at all. Pensions were only provided to men who had been disabled by wounds, and to the widows of soldiers who had been killed.

When farmers could not afford to pay their taxes or debts, their farms were seized through foreclosure. Some who were unable to pay were sent to debtors’ prisons. Revolutionary War veterans like Captain Daniel Shays felt abandoned and betrayed by their government, which had failed to pay them during the war and now crushed their livelihoods. When the Massachusetts state government adjourned in August 1786, without considering petitions for debt relief, a group of over 1,000 farmers marched on the town of Northampton and prevented the court from convening to conduct foreclosure proceedings. The farmers called themselves “Regulators,” referencing a similar rural uprising that had occurred in North Carolina prior to the Revolution.