Shays Rebellion

[MM38084]

The American revolutionaries fought for a re-ordering of society; indeed, for the overthrow of debt, usury and dispossession from the land, as symbolized by their objective of declaring the mighty legal earthquake that is the Biblical Jubilee. The scriptural warrant for Jubilee was inscribed on the Liberty Bell and more impor-tantly, upon the hearts of the ordinary men and women who had pledged their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" to the call to arms against oppression and tyranny, of July 4, 1776.

The Pollyanna historians have tended to paint the early years of the new republic as idyllic, even utopian, a time when the freedom-loving farmers found their hearts? desire and richly enjoyed the fruits of liberty which their blood, sweat and tears had made possible.

Patriot activists today enshrine those early times and cite them as precedent against the depreda-tions of Clinton and Dole, Reno and Freeh, Kemp and Powell. It is a dangerous precedent to establish, born of historical illiteracy.

The early Republic never did get around to declaring the Jubilee, though the great experi-ment in personal liberty begun in the wake of the Revolution was in general a blessing to mankind, in comparison with the fearsome oligarchies still holding power in Europe. But once the war had been won and the yeomanry were no longer the essential motive engine for securing indepen-dence from Britain, in many regions power was consolidated in the hands of reactionary mercan-tile interests.

The lawyers and bankers had only gone underground during the Revolution and like all parasites were quick to re-emerge when peace was at hand, to declare their "right" to rule the manual laborers who had done the frontline fighting.

As the watch-fob crooks came out of the wood-work, the veterans of ?76 were there to meet them, first with petitions for redress of grievance and later with rifles.

Conservative historians declare that the Shays rebels were forerunners of Bolshevism, "ingrates" who sought to "level" frontier society into some disgusting precursor of Marxism.

Such an interpretation can only be put forth by those who know little or nothing of the Bible-based aspirations of the American yeomanry.

There was nothing "Bolshevik" about Shays? Rebellion. The criminal class was not among the farmers, who Jefferson had nominated as the true "Chosen people" if ever there was one, but among the usual suspects lurking at the top of the Pharaonic pyramid.

I had to smile when Pat Buchanan visited Los Angeles some years ago, in the wake of the devastating Mexican/African riots there, and pro-claimed, in the coded weasel words of Republican conservatism, a statement to the effect that whites are better citizens than the Mexicans and Africans, because whites don?t riot. In truth, the white race is the most insurrectionist nation the world has ever seen, or was, until feminism and TV flea?d the lion?s rump and pared his claws.


THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Massachusetts after the American Revolution was a largely subsistence culture. Farmers made up more than half the population and these were independent freeholders who valued freedom over material wealth, eking out a living on the rocky soil, but reveling in their status as king of their own castle.

These farmers jealously guarded their hard-fought status and were especially fearful of having to work off their land, for a wage, a condition they compared to peonage and slavery.

The life of the farming community in that era was close-knit and reflected in patterns of clan and kinship. Contrasted with this agrarian com-munity was the cosmopolitan society of the seacoast towns. Here the focus was chiefly on the acquisition of wealth. Lawyers were at its center. Before the 18th century, New England?s laws had been largely consonant with Bible law. The voca-tion of the law clerk was to help to imple-ment the Mosaic statutes and facilitate, rather than obstruct, property and business transactions. But by the 1780s law had degenerated into a means for the regular collection of debts and loans.

During the 1780s many clergymen collaborated with the mercantile elite. Money culture slowly replaced the Bible ethos in major coastal towns and the function of the ministry changed.

Government-paid clergymen upheld usury from the pulpit. The tax-exempt status of New England ministers, coupled with the payment of their salaries mostly from tax funds, tied them to the lawyers and bankers.


THE REIGN OF SHYLOCK
Boston mercantile interests convinced yeomen to make their purchases on credit and accepted farm goods for payment. Retailers later withdrew credit from their farmer-customers and demanded payment in gold and silver.

The yeomen faced the loss of their farms and merchants, lawyers and speculators stood to profit. Farmers were being trapped into a chain of debt. "The constables are venduing (seizing) our property... it is sold for about one-third the value, our cattle about one-half the value," angrily peti-tioned the townsmen of Greenwich, Massa-chusetts in January, 1786.

Property seizures enraged the farmers and rein-forced their fear of becoming landless "wage laborers."

"The mortgage of our farms, we cannot think of with any degree of complacency," said a Conway, Massachusetts man. "To be tenants to landlords, who we know not and pay rents for lands pur-chased with our money and converted from howling wilderness into fruitful fields by the sweat of our brow, seems to carry with it in its nature truly shocking consequences."

Taxes were tilted against the landowners and in favor of the mercantile class. Thousands of farm-ers left the state for the western wilderness be-cause of high property taxes.

A small farmer without sufficient property for settling his debts faced an indefinite jail sentence. Considering the horrible state of New England jails during the 18th century, incarceration for indebtedness represented cruel punishment.

But Massachusetts retailers did not hesitate to throw indebted yeomen into prison. In Hamp-shire County from 1784 to December, 1786, they sent to jail for an average two-month term, seventy-three men with relatively small debts and arrested hundreds of other farmers. Significantly, no retailer sat in a jail cell.

The case of Timothy Bigelow, an indebted Massachusetts farmer and Revolutionary War veteran who died in a damp cell of the Worcester County prison, became a cause c?l?bre among the farmers.

One Hampshire County farmer and Revolu-tionary War veteran spoke of how he had "labored hard all his days" and did more than his share of the fighting against King George, but now, with the war over, and liberty supposedly realized, he had been "loaded with class-rates, lawsuits... hauled by sheriffs, constables and (tax) collectors." He predicted the lawyers would "get all we have." (Hampshire Gazette, October 25, 1786).

Now that the British king had been disposed of there were plenty of aspirants to his throne. New England?s republican heritage was hardly the sole experience of colonial America. Even in New England the history of subjecting white laborers to some form of bondage went all the way back to Plymouth Rock.

There were bond servants on the Mayflower and a "goodly body" of white slaves aboard the Puritan fleet that arrived in Massachusetts in 1630. Georgia had been founded expressly as a penal colony for white slaves. Maryland had been a "semi-feudal domain, composed in part of manors owned by great landowners and tilled by white bond servants..." (Cf. Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization and Michael A. Hoffman II, They Were White and They Were Slaves).

The citizens of the new American Republic were determined to forge a heritage of freedom and to maintain the hardy and independent spirit which had sustained them in the New World.

Unfortunately, matters were not necessarily resolved with their victory over the Redcoats, as many historians mistakenly allege. America had its own homegrown aristocrats who felt they were more deserving of elite privilege than the mon-arch across the sea.

The Founding Fathers had motivated the Con-tinental army and the militias of the 13 colonies with visions of a post-Revolutionary Biblical Jubilee according to Leviticus 25, wherein all debts would be wiped out and everyone would start over in the new Republic with a clean slate. The American soldiers took them at their word:

With the ending of the American revolution and the Treaty of Paris of Sept. 3, 1783, there was jubilation in the streets. The future looked bright... Many people even... believed that their debts had been dismissed when the war ended. (Michael Paulin, The Ballad of Daniel Shays).
This was the promise represented by the inscription on the Liberty Bell, but it proved to be an empty one.
Still, the yeomen were slow to wrath. They wanted to farm, not fight. Before turning to armed resistance, New England farmers sought justice through peaceful petitions. During the years 1784 to mid-1786, yeomen in the majority of Massa-chusetts? small towns forwarded their pleas to the Boston courts.

The farmers were not anxious for more blood-letting. They had faith in their new leaders and they sought relief through legal, non-violent means and channels, from the courts to the legislature.

Since gold and silver were beyond their attain-ment, the oppressed New England farmers desired to have barter legalized through the currency of paper money, backed by silver and gold, which would represent so many bushels of corn or wheat or hours of labor. This demand was one of many of the reforms headed under the proposition, "tender laws."

These laws had been in effect in some areas of the colonies during the Revolution, when the Founders were anxious to keep the morale of the yeomen high and their wrath focused on Britain. By means of the tender laws, farmers paid their debts through a legalized form of barter, wherein crops were taken directly as payment or exchanged for specie.


THE "PESTS OF SOCIETY"
As their petitions increasingly fell on deaf ears, the citizens of the new Republic began to examine what force it was that chiefly obstructed them. Like the great anti-Masonic movement that would appear forty years later, the farmers dis-covered that one of the chief obstructions to reform was that class of parasite known as lawyers, who the farmers termed, "the pests of society" and "an altogether useless order."

In running up against the society of lawyers, the farmers felt their petitions were crashing against the equivalent of their famous New England stone walls.

One of the rebels allied with Shays, Thomas Grover, gave as his reason for revolt, the "large swarm of lawyers... who have been more damage to the people at large, especially the common farmers, than the savage beasts of prey." (George R. Minot, The History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts).

As early as 1782, with the war with Britain still officially underway and the Treaty of Paris, concluding hostilities, a year off, the first stirrings of forceful resistance were exhorted by the radical activist Samuel Ely, a homeless, itinerant clergy-man, who was not tax-exempt or tax-supported by the state.

Ely was a hater of oppression and a ferocious opponent of the Massachusetts plutocracy. He told the farmers that the merchants and bankers who oppressed them should be "made a sacrifice of and given to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field."

This was not just talk. In April of 1782, Pastor Ely roused a band of farmers in Northampton for an attack on the judges of the debtor?s court. In a speech he told the farmers:

Come on, my brave boys, we?ll go to the woodpile and get clubs enough to knock their grey wigs off and send them out of the world in an instant.
Then followed hand-to-hand combat between the farmers and the militia defending the court-house. The farmers were driven off and Ely was seized and imprisoned. But not for long. Two months later, more than a hundred farmers attack-ed the building where Ely was confined and released him.

The following autumn farmers closed the debtor?s court in Cheshire County, New Hamp-shire. In early 1783, American freemen, led by Job Shattuck of Massachusetts, assaulted tax collectors and tried to close the Springfield tax court.

There was no U.S. Constitution at this time. The law of the Commonwealth was the 1780 Massa-chusetts constitution, widely derided by the yeomanry as a "lawyers and merchants consti-tution." In New England, only the territory of Vermont had a plan of government equitable to the working men.

But in the midst of these early stirrings, most of New England?s farmers continued to seek peace-ful recourse. For three more years the majority prayed, petitioned and supplicated while the lawyer-controlled state capitals stonewalled.


SHUTTING DOWN THE COURTS
During this period the legislatures and courts issued anti-farmer rhetoric remarkably similar to the "hater" characterizations with which today?s American patriot groups are tarred. The General Court of Massachusetts referred to the protesting farmers of 1786 as, "traitors, incendiaries" and "vile creatures." The legislature threatened the farmers with arrest just for "daring to inquire into the present gross mismanagement."

In August the peaceful petitions came to an end. Though no violence was used, the farmers were no longer in a supplicating mood. A hardscrabble Pelham farmer and former American Continental army veteran, Captain Daniel Shays, began to organize a mass movement of court-house closings.

Shays? friend, George Brock, spoke for both when he said that he thought he saw in the politicians and lawyers of post-Revolutionary New England, the shadow of the same "aristocratical principle" the British had manifested.

These veterans were not willing to tolerate a home-grown dictatorship under a patriotic gloss. Having been once again treated like subjects, once again they arose ? like lions.

Daniel Shays led more than 1,000 farmers and mechanics to the Massachusetts Court of Com-mon Pleas on August 29, 1786 and sealed it tight as a drum. The Second American Revolution had begun!

In September 600 farmers closed the courts in Worcester, as well as at the birthplace of the American Revolution, in Concord. 800 laborers united into a militia of their own making and closed the debt court at Great Barrington. 500 farmers marched on the court in Bristol County and shut it.

By September the rebellion had spread to New Hampshire, the "Live Free or Die" state where the farmers went their Massachusetts brethren one better: they seized the capital and held the governor and the legislature captive.

In western Massachusetts, the stronghold of the insurgents throughout the rebellion, Daniel Shays led 1500 farmers and laborers to Springfield where they occupied the courthouse for three days. By December of 1786 Shays was at the head of an army of 9,000 farmers.

At no time were any of these protests a "mob action." The farmers marched into the towns with self-imposed military discipline. Though con-demned as "seditionists" and "wicked rebels" by the Boston merchants and speculators, this was pure cant, since only twelve years before, in 1774, farmers had closed the Springfield court by similar means, to the general acclaim of the very men who now censured the populist actions of the post-Revolutionary yeomen. (cf. Lee Newcomer, The Embattled Farmers: The Massachusetts Countryside in the American Revolution).

In a tone of outrage, the Secretary of War under the Articles of Confederation, Henry Knox, wrote to George Washington that the Shays rebels "are determined to annihilate all debts public and private." Exactly! That?s what the Jubilee constitutes.

But some of the Founders would have none of it. "Washington was thoroughly frightened. On hearing the news he redoubled his efforts to obtain a stronger constitution ? one that could afford national aid in suppressing such local disturbances." (Beard, op. cit.)

While the fortunes of the farmers? uprising in New Hampshire and Massachusetts were in the ascendant in late 1786, incipient farmer revolts were put down by the militia in Vermont?s Windsor and Rutland counties. The skirmish at the Rutland county courthouse involved an exchange of gunfire between the farmers and the militia. At New Haven, Connecticut, a court-house seizure was halted by means of the mass arrest of the yeomen.


A POLICE STATE ?IN 1787 AMERICA
In many cases the actions of the American Republic?s ruling class in the post-Revolutionary years surpassed Janet Reno and Louis Freeh in despotic arrogance. For example, in March of 1787, Vermont lawmakers enacted The Riot Act authorizing county sheriffs to shoot rebellious farmers on sight.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, Governor James Bowdoin, part-owner of the Massachusetts State Bank, whose worthless currency (on par with our present "Federal Reserve Notes"), was a source of the farmers? wrath, was determined to crush Shays? Rebellion and called upon the militia to stop the farmers at the Worcester courthouse.

To the utter consternation of the banker-governor, the Massachusetts militiamen refused. The militia commander, Jonathan Warner, reported, "Notwithstanding the most pressing orders, there did appear universally that reluctance in the people to turn out in support of the government."

As one Shrewsbury judge noted, the Massachusetts militia were "too generally in favor of the people?s measures" to turn their guns on their fellow farmers. This was true of the militia throughout western Massachusetts. It sent shockwaves through the ranks of the lawyers and speculators and caused some to hope for the imposition of a new monarchy.

Noah Webster, the famous lexicographer, found himself wishing for a "limited monarchy" after watching aghast as the people of the Massachusetts backwoods claimed their rights as Americans against the coastal merchant elite:

I was once as strong a republican as any man in America. Now a Republic is the last kind of government I should choose. I would infinitely prefer a limited monarchy, for I would sooner be the subject of the caprice of one man than the ignorance of the multitude. (Connecticut Courant, Nov. 20, 1786)
Massachusetts began passing draconian laws curtailing the rights of the people and effectively establishing a dictatorship. The Massachusetts Riot Acts of 1786 ordered the killing of any rebellious farmer and instituted a property seizure law more tyrannical than even our con-temporary confiscation laws. Rebellious farmers were to "forfeit all their lands, goods and chattels to the Commonwealth."
The legislature of Massachusetts also sus-pended the writ of habeus corpus. "Suspect" farmers could be placed in preventive detention and incarcerated indefinitely without trial. Free-dom of speech was also banned if it was "to the prejudice of the government." (Acts and Laws of Massachusetts, 1786.)

The chief sponsor of this shameful police state legislation was none other than the once great revolutionary, Sam Adams.

The farmers remained defiant, however, and continued to close courts. Governor Bowdoin sought help from the central government. The Confederation Congress voted the state of Massachusetts a handsome war chest of more than a half million dollars and a force of 1,300 troops, but funds for the punitive campaign had to be appropriated by the individual thirteen states. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress had little power over the treasury.

The states constituted virtually separate nations and most could see no advantage in paying for a war against the people of Massachusetts. They refused to appropriate the monies and the scheme failed. The lawyers and bankers of Boston would have to pay for their war out of their own pockets, something this class of men has traditionally been loath to do.

Without significant armed opposition, by early 1787, the farmers were beginning to establish a groundwork for economic reforms aimed at destroying usury and defanging the lawyers? courts.


THE MASONIC CONNECTION
The bankers and lawyers could no longer hide under color of law and the camouflage of government authority. It was obvious that the army they would raise would be a mercenary one, serving mammon, not justice. The person-nel commanding the counter-revolutionary forces gave ample testimony of this. Government troops were led by judges of the debtor court such as Thomas Cobb and wealthy Freemasons, such as Benjamin Tupper, Henry Lincoln, Rufus Putnam and John Paterson.

It would appear that the Shays uprising did not enjoy the approbation of the American-based "Lodge," as the 1776 revolt had. It seems that only those rebellions sanctioned and partly stage-managed by Freemasonry were allowed to flourish in the U.S.

This is not to suggest, as some critics have alleged, that the American Revolution was little more than an open-air masonic ritual. That is the propaganda of the lodge itself, claiming credit for the fundamentally decent and noble 1776 struggle for individual freedom, which was beyond its competence and resources to control, though it was undoubtedly a factor in the struggle.

The 1776 revolt was as legitimate and necessary a people?s uprising as Shays? Rebellion. The Freemasons of America saw in the 1776 Revolution an opportunity and en-couraged it in the hopes of channeling and controlling it.

The Shays Rebellion was another matter entirely. Now that America was free of Britain, the homegrown "commercial interests" intended to take charge of the parasitic enterprises of speculation and usury. Talk of "Jubilee" and Biblical justice was so much hogwash to the masonic money men.

An intriguing racial note was injected when the leader of the American Freemasonic Lodge, Prince Hall, offered the government the services of several hundred negro masons in the shooting and suppression of the Shays farmers of Massachusetts. Recognizing that the spectacle of armed blacks making war against white yeomen might be just the spark that would ignite the overthrow of the Boston plutocracy, Hall?s offer was politely declined.

Hall ingratiated himself with the Massa-chusetts masonic elite in other ways, however, and contemporary Afro-American masonry is named in his honor and continues to serve an Uncle Tom function on behalf of the ruling class. According to researcher K.A. Badynski, the most prominent Prince Hall Freemason today is retired General Colin Powell.

The laws were stacked against the farmers and a high-paid mercenary army under able com-manders was forming in Boston and would soon march against them. As the opposing camps formed for battle, one observer assessed the men comprising each side, indicating that Shays? ranks were made up of "the most laborious part of the people," from farmers to "reputable mechanics." Their foes consisted of, "lawyers, sheriffs... impost and excise collectors and their... servants and dependents."

Shays? men were unwavering in their resolve. Aaron Broad pledged, "I am determined to fight and spill my blood and leave my bones at the courthouse till Resurrection."

Soon the raids against Shays began. 300 banker-paid troops, commanded by the lawyer Benjamin Hichborn, assaulted the home of Job Shattuck; in resisting the attack, Shattuck was slashed with a sword. Dozens of other farmer-leaders of the rebellion were seized and their homes invaded. "The seeds of war are now sown," proclaimed farmer Elisha Pownell on Dec. 2, 1786.

While many of the upper class urged the farmers to surrender, the erudite Dr. William Whiting came to their defense, proving that the battle was not a class struggle, but a war be-tween liberty and tyranny:

"Whenever any encroachments are made either upon the liberties or the properties of the people, if redress cannot be had without, it is virtue in them to disturb government."

THE BATTLE AT SPRINGFIELD ARSENAL
The farmers attacked the Federal arsenal at Springfield on January 25, 1787. Once pro-visioned with the tons of munitions at Spring-field, Shays announced that his farmer-army would, "March directly to Boston" and "destroy that nest of devils who, by their influence, make the Court enact what they please."

Shays commanded a force of 1300 poorly armed day-laborers and farmers who were pitted against a thousand defenders of the arsenal, fully equipped and possessing artillery.

The working men?s army marched between tall embankments of snow to within two hundred yards of the Federal facility. The mercenaries fired upon them with howitzers and canisters of grapeshot. The farmers were decimated. The mercenary army sought to rout them, but Shays? men disappeared into the forest like will-o-wisps, carrying what wounded they could manage.

Ecstatic at their initial success, Boston merchants poured money, in the form of loans (of course), into the treasury of the government troops.

In the following weeks, the farmers commenced to fight a guerrilla war, sniping from behind rocks and trees and sending out small bands of skirmishers. Their resistance was undaunted, even as Daniel Shays and hundreds of other fugitive farmers were forced to seek temporary refuge in Vermont and New York.

On February 27, 1787, a mercenary battalion surprised a large party of Shays? farmers during a snowstorm near Sheffield, Massachusetts. A blazing gun battle ensued and casualties were suffered on both sides. But with the element of surprise the mercenaries prevailed, killing and wounding thirty yeomen. The remnant had to again scatter, in deep snow, into the woods.

Governor Bowdoin recruited an additional 2,500 handsomely paid troops. The rebels were now everywhere on the run. Many were captured. Courts prosecuting the yeomen screened the jury pool by means of a "disqualification act" which barred any potential sympathizers from being seated on any Massachusetts jury.

One factor Governor Bowdoin and his merchant cronies were unable to "screen," however, were the voting lists, and in April Bowdoin lost the gubernatorial contest and John Hancock was elected governor.


FOUNDING FATHERS:
PRO AND CONTRA
Hancock, another Founder of the American Revolution, had a reputation for moderation and fairness, due in part to the rustic mannerisms he affected. In reality, Hancock was secretly in sympathy with the lawyers and money-lenders and his folksy style was utterly lacking in the substance to match.

Hancock raised another 800 troops and gave them orders to slay every rebellious farmer they could lay hands upon.

Sam Adams, John Hancock and Noah Webster were all comfortable with the status quo and turned their coats and their backs on the ideals which they themselves had once championed.

Writing from England on January 2, 1787, the snooty future First Lady, Mrs. Abigail Adams, blamed Shays? Rebellion on the "luxury and extravagance both in furniture and dress" of the farmers, "accumulating debts upon them which they were unable to discharge."

In neighboring Vermont the case of Ethan Allen, the hero of Bennington and Ticonderoga, was more complex. Allen was walking a delicate political tightrope as he maneuvered the territory of Vermont toward statehood while battling Alexander Hamilton in New York and the government of New Hampshire. Both of those states sought to annex Vermont.

Privately Allen referred to the Massachusetts bankers and lawyers as a "pack of damned rascals" and harbored hundreds of Shays? sympathizers. In public he rebuffed Shays leaders Luke Day and Eli Parsons, who sought his military help in the rebellion, and Allen termed Daniel Shays a "criminal."

The ruse was also acted to the letter by Allen?s ally, Vermont Governor Chittenden who "issued a proclamation at the end of February, 1787, warning the citizens of Vermont that they should not ?harbor, entertain, or conceal? Daniel Shays and three other insurgent leaders. At that time Shays and several other rebels were staying at the farm next to Chittenden?s." (Michael Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws, chapter 10).

Ethan Allen promised the commander of the Massachusetts state troops that Vermont would apprehend and return fugitive Shays men, who were camped by the hundreds in Vermont. Exactly two Shaysites were sent back ? a couple of horse thieves.

If Allen was compelled to play politics in order to guarantee the autonomy of his beloved Vermont against the covetous designs of other states and factions, Thomas Jefferson was free to speak his mind. Jefferson?s statement concerning Shays? uprising constitutes the intact voice of the ?76 Revolution, untainted by the hypocrisy of some of the new lords of the American nation. He wrote:

I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. (Letter of Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, January 30, 1787).
Historian Marion Starkey borrowed Jefferson?s characterization for the title of her 1955 book about the Shays? movement, A Little Rebellion.

EPILOGUE
In April and May of 1787 star chamber "courts" tried captured Shays insurgents. Among these, John Bly and Charles Rose were hung.

Pockets of farmer resistance continued for months and assaults on those who loaned money at interest, such as factory magnate Josiah Woodbridge, continued.

But Shays? rebels lacked funds and as hunted fugitives, it was difficult for them to maintain efficient organization. Daniel Shays? military strategy had not won the conflict and hard luck contributed to his men?s losses. But neither can it be said that the Shays rebels were defeated.

Many were unknown to the government in an era before photographic wanted posters and telegraph communications. These men resurfaced as "reformers" and played a part in the resistance to the sedition laws of John Adams in 1798. Others like Shays himself melted into the American frontier.

The wildlands of New York and Ohio offered territories with fewer laws, better soil and greater opportunities for free men. Some fared well, others never recovered from the loss of their farms and earthly possessions in Massachusetts. Daniel Shays and a hundred yeomen fled to New Hampshire after which they drifted apart and went separate ways.

Capt. Shays took up residence in upstate New York and lived the rest of his life in penury. He was so poor that upon his death his second wife didn?t even bother to probate his will.

The worth of combat is not always determined by success on the field. Those who will only fight if victory is guaranteed, are looking for an insurance policy, not a battleground.

In some cases the very act of resistance is so significant it is itself an achievement. By fighting the tyranny emanating from within, the farmers of western Massachusetts confirmed their ancient heritage of unending struggle for freedom.

Thanks in part to Shays? Rebellion, the intractable fighting spirit of the yeomen of early America would remain kindled for decades to come, first in the anti-Federalist resistance to the U.S. Constitution of 1789 and the Sedition Act of 1798, and later, in 1826, a year after the death of Shays, in the populist movement against lawyers and Freemasons which shook the Northeast, forcing the closure of masonic lodges across the region.

Daniel Shays, Luke Day, Job Shattuck and the other thousands of fighters, were not awed by the prestige of the Founding Fathers, or the glittering cosmopolitan works of their merchant "betters." They insisted on holding their leaders to the principles of 1776 and in compelling them to make good on the Jubilee.

In our time our people also wax sore with debt. Never was the cry of Jubilee more apropos or more necessary than now. Does the blood of Daniel Shays flow yet in our veins?

[Jerry D]

great post and thanks to the IRS we are all wage slaves to the Government our founding fathers tried to free us from..