Chapter 14. Shays’s Rebellion and the Constitution of 1789

Even after independence was achieved, prominent Whigs and radical patriots continued their battle over what kind of republic the states should establish. Most of the moderate Whigs favored a strong, unitary, centralized republic after the war was over. To the camp of John Adams, James Wilson, and Gouverneur Morris were now added Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, as well as many lesser figures. Some of these men, to be sure, were more centralistic in their views: Hamilton and Morris, in fact, would not have been averse to a constitutional monarchy, whereas Adams and Madison merely wanted an oligarchical republic in which mainly men of “wealth and talents” would hold power—in short, a republic that contained checks against “mob rule.” Many patriots, on the other hand, favored a quasi-confederal republic: Richard Henry Lee, John Rutledge, Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams sought to devolve real power on to the state governments or, more precisely, the state legislatures.

None of these parties, however, favored building the new republic upon the institutional machinery of the Revolution, notably the town meetings, popular assemblies, conventions, and the far-flung committee system. Still less did they wish to establish a “revolution in permanence,” with higher levels of authority whose powers diminished as their scope widened and were fully accountable to the local communities, in which real power reposed. Few even held the word democracy in high esteem, although it was to enter into common use as time passed by. The committee system disbanded as quickly as possible once the state governments were in place, sometimes even before hostilities came to an end. In Pennsylvania, the rule of the backwoods farmers who had unseated the Quaker establishment came to an end when the radical Constitution of 1776 was replaced with a bicameral and gubernatorial structure that restored the privileges of the Philadelphia elite in 1790. At the same time, state governments made resolute and largely successful efforts to replace the town meetings and popular assemblies with a system of mayors and city councils. Any man, wrote Gadsden, “whatever station his country may have put him in during the war,” should fall “cheerfully into the ranks again,”“sacrificing all... resentments and private feelings, to the good of the State,” whose legislatures and governors were to be “untrammeled” by citizens.[206] Charleston was duly incorporated in 1783, followed by New Haven and towns in New Jersey and Virginia, many of which had established town-meeting forms of political management. The tide of civic incorporation, however, was halted in much of New England, where Sam Adams and his supporters adamantly rescued the Boston Town Meeting from what they regarded as the encroachment of tyranny. The conflict over municipal selfgovernment was essentially a duel between the wealthy and the relatively poor: in nearly all cases the commercial and patrician strata of the population furiously opposed civic democracy, while less fortunate artisans, laborers, radical intellectuals, and farmers firmly supported it.

In Massachusetts, despite the persistence of the town meetings, the new state constitution—framed primarily by John Adams, now a conservative lawyer, and James Bowdoin, a hard-fisted businessman—raised property qualifications for voting by 50 percent and required sizable estates for holding senatorial, representative, and gubernatorial offices. This constitution, like so many others, clearly reflected the interests of the merchants, lawyers, and well-to-do. As Samuel Eliot Morison observes,“The [Massachusetts) Constitution of 1780 was a lawyers’ and merchants’ constitution, directed toward something like quarterdeck efficiency in government, and the protection of property against democratic pirates.”[207] On this score, Massachusetts suffered setbacks after the Revolution that were not to be undone for years to come.

ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION

At the national level, however, it was the confederalists who seemed to prevail over the centralists in the 1780s. Owing to their years of struggle against the arbitrary power of the Crown, Americans had become acutely mistrustful of any central authority, which they still identified with a single executive. The Articles of Confederation, drawn up in the heat of the revolutionary conflict and ratified in 1781 as the constitutional document for interstate cooperation, created only a loose alliance between the states, giving rise, in effect, to thirteen new and independent republics.

In this sense, the Articles created a decentralized national polity, albeit by no means a democracy based on local bodies and entities. The second article declared quite bluntly, “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.” Its confederation congress had not only legislative power but executive power as well, and its delegates were “annually appointed in such manner as the legislature of each state shall direct... with a power reserved to each state to recall its delegates, or any of them, at any time within the year, and to send others in their stead for the remainder of the year” (Article 5). Each state, regardless of size, had at least two members, and “no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years” (Article 5). The government’s “executive,” which met only between sessions of the Congress, consisted not of an individual president but of a Committee of the States, in which each state had one vote, irrespective of its size or population (Article 9).

The Confederation “central government” was dependent upon the state legislatures for almost every resource and authority. In this respect, the new United States was not a typical nation-state. Expressly forbidden to maintain a professional army, Congress relied entirely upon the states to provide it with military forces as need arose, “for the common defense or general welfare.” It could not call for a mobilization of the militia and naval forces “unless nine states assent to the same.” Nor could the Congress levy taxes or collect customs duties unless every state agreed to it in a unanimous vote, and therefore it was entirely beholden to the state legislatures for financial resources. If a state was delinquent in fulfilling a congressional request for revenue or military forces— as every state was, in fact—Congress could not punish it. Nor could it borrow funds. Although it could issue currency, the national government had no control over currency and banking in general since the states could also issue currency, as seven of them actually did. It had no power to conclude commercial treaties or intervene in any domestic affairs of a state, even in the face of an impending civil war; “nor shall a question of any other point... be determined, unless by the votes of a majority of the United States in Congress assembled.”[208] Once the conflict with Britain was won, the states were less inclined to grant requests that the Congress made and were increasingly indifferent to the alliance as such, regarding themselves as sovereign republics. While the Congress had responsibility for paying off the enormous debt that the former colonies had incurred during their struggle, the states were prepared to allocate it only very meager resources.

However adamantly the Articles of Confederation preserved state powers against central authority, however, this system was not decentralized to the point where power rested in towns and counties. Since the Articles devolved legal power upon the state legislatures, political authority was defined more by the state constitutions than by the Articles themselves. In the southern states and even in Massachusetts, their constitutions were expressly oligarchical, and the legislature usually elected the governor (who could not veto legislative acts) and exercised complete control over the courts, whose rulings were essentially subordinated to the legislature. Although the governor could appoint judges, he essentially remained under the legislature’s control.

Still, oligarchical tendencies often intertwined with republican ones. Countervailing the power of state legislatures was the considerable power enjoyed by the citizenry. Elections were annual affairs, and voters consisted mainly of independent yeomen farmers, most of whom enjoyed a widely extended franchise. In Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New Hampshire property as a qualification for voting, sacrosanct during colonial times, was replaced by the mere fact of tax payments. Typically, the New England states had a very broadly based electorate; as early as 1777, Vermont placed no property or tax qualifications on the male franchise, and it was followed shortly afterwards by Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, which made it possible for such relatively broad electorates to change legislatures very easily if they so chose.

Although “farmers by no means voted against the American aristocracy, for many of them were equally conservative on many issues,” as Merrill Jensen observes, still, “where agrarian interests were involved in such matters as local self-government, paper money, and debt collection policies, they could and did outvote the minority”—that is, the merchants, financiers, and tradesmen in the large cities.

And in such cases, there was no central government to which a hard-pressed minority could appeal for help; the governors had no veto; the courts were weak. Thus the American Revolution made possible the democratization of American society by the destruction of the coercive authority of Great Britain and the establishment of actual local self-government within the separate states under the Articles of Confederation.[209]

NEWBURGH

The conservative Whigs found the polity created by the Articles of Confederation wholly unacceptable, and the old unabated fears of “mob rule” among the commercial classes and their spokesmen resurfaced with particular acuteness after the war. Once the fighting essentially came to an end in 1781, elitist reactionaries such as Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris were resolved to undo the newly achieved republic by establishing a monarchy or, failing that, by placing the states under military rule.

To this end, they tried to exploit widespread disaffection in the army. Despite the Continental Army’s definitive victory at Yorktown in 1781, the soldiers had received little or nothing in the way of pay for four or even six years. Washington pleaded with the Confederation Congress for money to pay his troops their wages and to give them the pensions that they had been promised during the fighting. But no funds were forthcoming. Unpaid, penurious, and uncertain of their future, the neglected soldiers felt unappreciated by the people whose liberty they had sacrificed so much to defend.

After Yorktown the aggrieved army, together with a militant group of officers, had collected around army headquarters at Newburgh, New York. Instead of returning home to Mount Vernon, Washington remained with his troops and tried to ease their semimutinous state of mind. Although he dispatched a committee of officers to Philadelphia to express the soldiers’ disillusionment to Congress and again demand that it fulfill its financial commitments to them, the bankrupt Congress could do nothing. Indeed, just after the committee arrived, a bill that would have allowed it to collect its own taxes was defeated when two states voted against it.

While they were in Philadelphia, the officers on the committee conferred with the financiers Gouverneur and Robert Morris, who were interested in getting Congress to make good on the debt certificates that they held. After exploring their common ground, the officers and financiers agreed that the army should not disband until it had been paid, and if it were not paid, the officers should use the military to establish a strong central government, which could meet its demands—and, needless to emphasize, those of the government’s creditors. For the army officers, the success of this plan depended upon the cooperation of General Washington, who the conspirators eagerly hoped would agree to lead the army, like a prototypical Bonaparte, disband the Congress and the state legislatures, and perhaps even become a constitutional monarch.

The task of gaining Washington’s support for this counterrevolution fell to Alexander Hamilton. In mid-February 1783, Hamilton, following a carrot-andstick policy, sent a carefully composed letter to Washington at Newburgh warning him that the Congress could not pay the soldiers, and that when this became clear the following June, the army would take up arms “to procure justice to itself.”[210] It would do this with or without Washington, Hamilton warned, but he shrewdly added the prediction that without Washington, “the difficulty will be to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation.” The far preferable alternative, he urged Washington, would be for the general to lead his troops in taking control over the country himself and establish a system of taxation that “can do justice to the creditors of the United States.”[211] Monarchy was the system of government that was most known to history and most common in the world today, Hamilton argued; in accepting the offer to become king, Washington would merely be adhering to the norm of the times.

One of Washington’s own confidential correspondents, Joseph Jones, confirmed for him that danger was indeed very real in the army. The general’s reputation with the men he commanded, Jones warned, was being systematically undermined by “dangerous combinations in the army,” so that should Washington refuse to go along with the coup plan, “the weight of your opposition will prove no obstacle to their ambitious designs” and it could be carried out without him. When Washington investigated the situation himself, he found that Jones was correct; the mood of the soldiers was more rebellious than he had supposed.[212]

To his lasting credit, Washington in March rejected Hamilton’s proposal in the firmest possible terms and refused to lead an enterprise that would be “productive of civil commotions and end in blood.” “I shall pursue the same steady course of conduct which has governed me hitherto,” he wrote; “fully convinced that the sensible and discerning part of the army cannot be unacquainted (although I never took pains to inform them) of the services I have rendered it on more occasions than one.”[213]

Once the conspirators realized that they would have to bypass Washington, the “dangerous combinations within the army” of which Jones warned grew rapidly in numbers and decisiveness. Unsigned literature circulated throughout Newburgh deprecating the general himself and calling for a mass meeting of the officers to discuss the upcoming military coup. Frustrated by his own inability to help his soldiers gain the pay they were owed, Washington nonetheless felt that he had “to arrest on the spot the foot that stood wavering on a tremendous precipice.” To head off the upcoming mass meeting, he announced a meeting of his own at Newburgh, for March 15, 1783. “This was probably the most important single gathering ever held in the United States,” writes Washington’s biographer, James Thomas Flexner[214]—a decision by the general that probably rescued the Revolution from defeat and the former colonies from domestic monarchical rule.

Although Washington hinted to his officers that he would not attend the meeting he had called, his sudden appearance onstage took the rebellious officers in attendance aback. He told his angry men that the country in which they were being asked to establish a tyranny was that of “our wives, our children, our farms and other property,” and he implored them not to “deluge our rising empire in blood.” But their faces remained stonily impassive. He then took out a letter from a congressman that he wanted to read, but he could not see it well enough and so had to put on his spectacles. His men had never seen him wear them before. “I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country,” he quietly explained. His momentary helplessness completely won over the hearts of his men, who gathered around him and wept with contrition over the frailty of their commander. The conspiracy simply dissolved. “The moderation and virtue of a single character,” Thomas Jefferson later wrote, “probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”[215]

SHAYS’S REBELLION

The aborted coup still left the decentralized Confederation Congress and the Articles of Confederation in place, and the republic’s wealthy creditors loathed it all the more once the prospect of changing the confederal government seemed to be postponed indefinitely. All the difficulties that the republic faced were portrayed by these men as stemming from the Articles, and later nationalist or so-called “federalist” historians of the Revolution were to paint the Confederation era in the darkest colors. In fact, the 1780s was a period of marked if uneven recovery from wartime dislocations. Trade between the American port cities and Europe began to revive soon after the end of hostilities, and with the Peace Treaty of September 1783—in which His Britannic Majesty recognized his former colonies as “free, sovereign and independent”—American ships were far freer to trade than they had been under the imperial system. The southern economy, too, recovered rapidly: its tobacco, indigo, and raw materials were direly needed by the British, and a brisk trade developed between the two former enemies.

The population in and around Boston in particular was basically oriented toward a market economy, fueled by growing opportunities for profit and expansion. During the Confederation, Boston was no more an industrial town than other American towns and cities, although English methods of mass manufacture were beginning to penetrate the United States; but unlike in much of rural America, money rather than barter was the principal means of exchange, and increasingly one’s needs were supplied by purchasing goods that others had produced with their labor rather than by homemade goods. The city’s population consisted largely of merchants, artisans, speculators, and a host of professionals; it was clearly a commercial town whose authentic concern was business and economic growth.

By contrast, the backcountry agrarian culture was radically different from that of the seaboard towns. The farmers who had settled in central and western Massachusetts had developed a modest subsistence agriculture that allowed them to be almost wholly self-sufficient and required little, if any, currency. The yeoman who remarked that he could acquire “a good living on the produce of [his farm]” for himself and his entire family was not unusual. “Nothing to wear, eat or drink was purchased, as my farm provided all.”[216] Such yeomen, to be sure, usually produced small crop surpluses for the market, which they took to shopkeepers in Deerfield and Northampton to exchange for glass, gunpowder, iron, medical supplies, and the like, but these transactions generally took the form of barter rather than monetary exchanges, in which foodstuffs and homespun cloth were traded off for items crafted by nearby artisans or in distant cities.

In this respect, the household budget of a yeoman family in Whately, Massachusetts, described by David P. Szatmary, was nearly autarchical:

In 1784, twenty-nine-year-old farmer Paul Smith had three dependents and owned fifty-six acres of land, an ox, two cows, and six swine. To feed himself and his family for a full year, he needed roughly 60 bushels of flour, 500 pounds of pork, 200 pounds of beef, flax for making clothes, and small amounts of peas, turnips, potatoes, fruit, and carrots to round out his family’s diet. In addition, he needed grain for seed to be planted the following year, another 16 bushels of corn to feed the cows, some grain to pay the cost of milling grain into flour, and about 5 tons of hay for the ox and the cows.[217]

Moreover, Smith lived outside the market economy:

[He] utilized only enough land to meet these immediate needs. Although he had the chance to grow more surplus crops for market, given his fifty-six acres of land, the labor of himself and his wife, and the close proximity of Whately to the Connecticut River, he generally used only the land and labor necessary for shortrange requirements.[218]

Such eighteenth-century New England yeomen, who farmed mainly to maintain themselves and their families in reasonable comfort, lacked any orientation toward commerce or innovation and followed very traditional customs they had inherited from their fathers. Cultivating only enough to meet his family’s simple needs and enjoying freedom from servitude to others, the backcountry yeoman lived in a premarket culture that fostered a strong sense of individuality, moral probity, and a sturdy willingness to defend his independence from outside commercial interlopers. This condition of near-autarchy, however, was not individualistic; rather it made for strong community interdependence. “Although priding themselves on their autonomy,” Szatmary observes,

yeomen lived in a community-directed culture. During planting and harvesting, family and friends eased their backbreaking work. The independent status of yeomen, then, resulted in neither self-sufficiency nor a basically competitive society but led, rather, to cooperative, community-oriented interchanges.[219]

In fact, the independence that the New England yeomanry enjoyed was itself a function of the cooperative social base from which it emerged. To barter homegrown goods and objects, to share tools and implements, to engage in common labor during harvesting time in a system of mutual aid, indeed, to help newcomers in barn-raising, corn-husking, log-rolling, and the like, was the indispensable cement that bound scattered farmsteads into a united community.

For better or worse, however, this culture could not resist the impact of the outside world. In the early 1780s, the market economy began to penetrate inland to central and western Massachusetts, slowly locking the yeoman culture in what Szatmary calls a “chain of debt collections.” The “chain” started abroad, when major English shippers to America demanded payment of the loans they had previously extended to Boston merchants. These shippers refused to accept anything but specie—that is, gold or silver coin—in payment, since paper currency had become virtually worthless. But specie was relatively rare among war-stricken Yankee merchants, making it extremely difficult for them to pay off debts. By demanding coinage in payment for their goods, English shippers placed an enormous burden on American merchants, who passed it on to traders along the Connecticut River, compelling them to demand specie on the loans they had made to retail shopkeepers in Deerfield and Northampton.[220]

Standing at the end of this “chain of debt collections,” the yeomanry were now cajoled by local shopkeepers not only to purchase more goods than they had in the past but to make all their payments and meet all their debts in money rather than barter. Since the farmers lacked money, the shopkeepers granted them short-term credit for their purchases. In time, many farmers became significantly indebted and could not pay off what they owed, least of all in specie, which was what everyone along the “chain of debt collections” demanded—and significantly lacked.

By the late 1780s, this “chain” began seriously to jeopardize the traditional, basically independent way of life of the yeomen, who faced the loss of their farms to merchants and speculators in debt collections. With their creditors pressing them for specie, merchants and shopkeepers flooded the courts with suits demanding the repayment of their loans to farmers. Many farmers were dispossessed of their landholdings, cattle, implements, homes, and even furniture, valuables they had usually crafted with their own hands; and if the dispossessed goods of a yeoman were inadequate to pay his debts, he was likely to be imprisoned. Between August 1784 and August 1786, the docket of the Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas contained nearly three thousand debt cases from Hampshire County alone, over two and a half times more than in 1770–72. At least 31 percent of the county’s male citizens over sixteen years old were swept up into this wave of prosecutions, and comparable percentages can be cited for Essex, Bristol, and Berkshire counties. Nor was Massachusetts alone in the wave of prosecutions: over a fifth of Connecticut taxpayers were hauled into court for indebtedness in 1786, and such cases were also numerous in New Hampshire and Vermont.

As if to deepen the yeomanry’s outrage, the Massachusetts General Court had biased the state’s tax collection system toward the commercial classes of the seaboard towns, imposing the lion’s share of the tax burden on land rather than on salable stock. Needless to say, taxes, like debt payments, were generally demanded in specie. The yeomanry, many of whom were veterans who had been discharged from the army with paper currency, if they were paid at all, were placed in an intolerable position: not only were they required to pay off impossible debts, but they were also being asked to carry the major tax burden of their respective states.

Precisely because many of the farmers were veterans of the Revolution, they were hardly willing to sit by and allow city entrepreneurs to deprive them of their cherished lifeways. A spontaneous movement of resistance broke out among the yeomanry in which they began to replicate their behavior in opposition to the Intolerable Acts of March-June 1774—much to the consternation of the erstwhile Whigs, who had encouraged these very actions a decade earlier against the British. Calls now went out in town meetings throughout Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire for county conventions, which were chillingly redolent of the assemblies that had led to the Revolution a decade earlier. Initially, the assemblies’ demands were by no means revolutionary. In Massachusetts, they merely asked that the state issue paper money and, to provide debt relief, recognize goods as a legitimate form of debt payment. Nearly a third of all the towns in the state sent petitions to the General Court with such demands, while comparable actions were taken in Vermont and New Hampshire.

The urban commercial elites adamantly resisted these peaceful petitions; indeed, they arrogantly viewed them as appeals from an archaic rural world that lacked a full appreciation of the sanctity of contract and metallic wealth. Despite its legality, paper money was viewed by the puritanical urban elites as immoral by contrast with metallic specie, and they gallingiy blamed the presumably improvident farmers for incurring the very debts they had actually been induced to accumulate by all the merchants along “the chain of debt” from Boston to the frontier. At the same time, financial speculators quickly bought up depreciating Continentals, as the new American currency was called, from debtpressed veterans at scandalously low prices, which in later times they redeemed at their par value, much to the outrage of the soldiers who had sold them for a mere pittance.

Heavily influenced by the coastal elites, the state legislators also turned a deaf ear to the yeomanry’s demands. In fact, state capitals such as Boston, Hartford, and Exeter, where most of the legislatures met, also doubled as major commercial centers; hence merchants and lawyers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were always physically present and well positioned to influence state policy directly. Not surprisingly, state legislators tended to favor specie by persistently refusing to issue paper currency; indeed, only Rhode Island exhibited any sensitivity to the yeomanry’s needs by validating the use of nonmetallic money.

The continuing debt prosecutions and the indifference of state legislators to the plight of the farmers pushed the peaceful movement to violent rebellion. In the late summer of 1786, many Massachusetts yeoman farmers formed militias that systematically closed down courts throughout most of the state’s inland areas. By calling themselves Regulators, these armed farmers were invoking the menacing prerevolutionary agrarian uprising of the Carolina backwoodsmen. To history, however, they came to be known as Shaysites after Daniel Shays, a revolutionary war veteran who was actually only one of several coequal members of a “Committee of the People” for Hampshire County.

In Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, the Shaysite movement mainly took the form of undisciplined crowd actions, which were easily subdued by local militias composed of well-to-do people who assisted local police officials. But in Massachusetts, the rising took a serious, potentially revolutionary form. Not only were many of the Shaysites in the state veterans of the Revolution, but some had even served as officers and knew how to plan and lead a sustained campaign. Daniel Shays himself had served as a captain, as had his fellow leaders Luke Day, Agrippa Wells, and Adam Wheeler, among others. The Massachusetts Shaysites, in effect, were not undisciplined, ill-trained crowds but rather disciplined, single-minded, and well-trained soldiers with able military leaders.

Their militias, moreover, were organized along typically libertarian lines, structured around county committees (“Committees of the People”), each of which assumed military leadership of the armed forces in every county and remained its highest military unit. Whether wisely or not, this structure obviated the need for a supreme command over the entire movement. Local militia committee leaders served more as chairpersons than as officers, and the agreement of the men was indispensable for every major decision and action. As Richard M. Brown has observed in his discussion of American agrarian rebellions, “the protagonist of the back country rebellion rose from the people but, unlike John Adams of the patriot movement, for example, did not rise above them.”[221] They drilled together on greens in front of taverns or in open spaces in the countryside, adopting an evergreen sprig as an insignia on their three-cornered hats—perhaps with no knowledge that the English Levelers of the previous century had used the same symbol.

The Shaysites now formed their militias into well-organized platoons. Shrewdly selecting their targets and carefully coordinating their plans, they marched in regular order to courthouses and systematically closed them down. Their popularity was much too wide and their maneuvers too well planned to make it easy for local authorities to suppress them. In Worcester, the county militia refused to oppose them, while in Berkshire, Hampshire, Bristol, and Middlesex counties, many militiamen deserted to the rebels.

The commercial strata on the seaboard and in the inland market towns responded to these developments with virtual hysteria, raising cries of “anarchy” and actually voicing appeals to replace the Commonwealth with a monarchy.

The legislature, not without the aid of Samuel Adams, shamefully passed a riot act to prohibit any gathering that the authorities might view with suspicion, and even suspended habeas corpus, despite its sanctity in English common law. All of these attempts foundered. It was not until the wealthy strata of the state collected sizable contributions from their own kind to recruit what was little more than a mercenary army, made up partly of their personal servants, that the state could begin to offer serious resistance to the insurgents.

Far from intimidating the Shaysites, however, this mobilization by the upper classes served primarily to radicalize them. From what had started as a debt rebellion, Shaysites now began to escalate their goals to broader and more threatening dimensions. Presumably with the purpose of taking complete control of the state government, various Shaysite detachments united into an army numbering several thousand men and laid plans in January 1787 to capture the Confederation arsenal in Springfield, which would have provided them with 7,000 military muskets, 1,300 barrels of powder, and, very significantly, artillery with a good supply of shot and shell. Had the armory been taken, they would have become a formidable insurrectionary force, probably capable of capturing Boston. Armed with their old muskets and even wooden clubs, the Shaysites, between January 21 and 24, formed three separate companies along three approaches to Springfield. According to their carefully laid plans, the Berkshire County rebels were expected to attack the arsenal from the north on January 25, in conjunction with the Worcester and Middlesex companies from the northeast, and the Hampshire company from the west.

On the day of the planned attack, Luke Day from the Hampshire company decided on his own initiative to send an ultimatum to General William Shepard’s government forces, who were defending the arsenal, giving them twenty-four hours to lay down their arms. Day also sent a message to the two other companies, apprizing them that he had postponed the date of the attack by one day to allow time for a reply from the arsenal. But this message was intercepted by Shepard’s men, and it never reached the other Shaysite companies, which proceeded with the attack on the twenty-fifth as originally planned. Lacking the support of the Hampshire company, the assault entirely miscarried: Columns of yeomen prematurely attacked the government forces, which raked artillery fire directly into their ranks. In the absence of artillery and sufficient forces, the attacking Shaysites were compelled to withdraw to outlying towns, leaving behind twenty-four dead and wounded. Eli Parsons, a Shaysite, later declared that Day’s intercepted message “occasioned [the Shaysites’] failure—they must have carried it, if their measures had been properly concerted.”[222]

Conventional histories of the insurrection create an egregiously misleading impression that the Shaysites were dispatched by a whiff of grapeshot. Armed only with old muskets, clubs, and lacking aid from Luke Day’s column, they had no choice but to retreat; nor did the movement evaporate after the Springfield fiasco. In fact, skirmishes and minor battles continued throughout Massachusetts until the Shaysites were finally quelled by General Benjamin Lincoln, who commanded a well-armed force of three thousand men from Boston, supported by artillery. During February, Lincoln surprised the Shaysites at their Petersham camp and dispersed them with his massively superior forces and equipment. Many Shaysites were subsequently rounded up and tried; others fled, finding refuge in Vermont, as did Daniel Shays himself, or in New York, and ultimately drifting westward into the Ohio Valley. The majority of Shaysites, however, seem to have remained behind in Massachusetts as the economy improved and gradually accepted the new social dispensation that followed the Revolution.

If the definition of a revolutionary requires that the person hold views antithetical to property as such, then in that sense the Shaysites were not revolutionaries. They were property owners themselves and never questioned its legitimacy. But to the New England yeomanry, property, as we have seen, meant something very different from what it did to the emerging bourgeoisie. They regarded it as a means of life that formed the basis for personal independence and individual freedom, not a means for profiteering, acquiring riches, or gaining power. Their notions of property were imbued by a sense of strong moral responsibilities for the land, the community, and communal lifeways and came closer to a form of simple usufruct than production for gain. Although the commercial men of the New England cities and market towns shared the yeomanry’s views of property as sacred, they were engaged in making profit and created a highly monetized market and an expanding economy that conferred power and status as well as security on an exploitative elite. The yeomen, for their part, had literally carved their small properties out of the forest. Hence, as in the German Peasant War, two cultures collided that were guided by radically dissimilar values and economic imperatives: the one to seek enrichment and power, the other to retain modest, traditional, and communal lifeways.

We will never know with certainty what the Shaysites would have done had they seized the Springfield arsenal. But Shays himself told the Massachusetts Sentinel in January 1787 that after taking the arsenal, they planned to “march directly to Boston, plunder it, and then ... to destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence, make the [General] Court enact what they please, burn it and lay the town of Boston in ashes.” The Shaysite farmers would then have it “in their power to overthrow the present constitution” and eliminate the present government, which was controlled by commercial interests.[223] Whether Shays actually made these patently incendiary remarks is difficult to establish. The political system that the Shaysites intended to establish in place of the old regime seems to have been a yeoman democracy, which already existed in varying degrees through their own network of town meetings and county conventions. Had they won, Massachusetts, conceivably, could have become a confederal democracy, not unlike early Switzerland, and yeomen throughout New England could have tried to emulate them. In any case, together with the revolutionary events in Pennsylvania during the war, Shays’s rebellion was as close as America came to an insurrectionary third revolution.

THE CONSTITUTION OF 1789

The men who suppressed Shays’s rebellion were surprisingly lenient in their treatment of the rebels. They made no effort to follow up their victory with a counterrevolutionary bloodletting; indeed, the few Shaysites who were sentenced to death were ultimately pardoned. But if the “men of wealth and talents” drew no blood, they profited immensely from the yeoman rebellion. The Shaysite uprising was portrayed as dramatic evidence that the decentralized Articles of Confederation were unworkable, indeed chaotic, and that they had to be replaced by a new Constitution, one that provided for an effective, centralized nation-state. To frighten wavering supporters of the Articles, General Henry Knox, the Secretary of War and a rabid centralist, bluntly denounced the Shaysites as “levelers,” awakening fears that the British ruling elite had felt in the previous century. To Knox, the “state [confederal] system” was “the accursed thing which will prevent our being a nation ... the vile state governments are sources of pollution which will contaminate America for ages.” What was needed, Knox claimed, was a strong central government with checks and balances. The worthy general himself was prepared to enforce the commands of such a government “by a body of armed men to be kept for the purpose”: that is, by a standing army. Rising to oratorical heights, Knox enjoined such a government, which had yet to be established, to “smite” the state governments “in the name of God and the people.”[224] Edmund Randolph agreed that “the chief danger [in the present situation] arises from the democratic parts of our [state] constitutions. It is a maxim which I hold incontrovertible that the powers of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches. None of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” A senate was necessary as a bulwark against “evils” that stem from “the turbulence and follies of democracy.”[225]

The state constitutions that Knox and Randolph denounced so vigorously were, in fact, the only refuge for small farmers who were faced with crushing debts. Under the pressure of yeoman protests and near revolts, many state legislatures finally did pass laws delaying or suspending the collection of taxes and debts, and more than half of the thirteen states issued paper money, making it possible for impoverished farmers to resolve their financial difficulties. A few states compelled creditors to accept paper instead of specie as an authentic means of exchange. If any single feature of the Articles of Confederation seems to have infuriated James Madison—the “Father of the Constitution”—it was precisely the fact that these measures were taken by the state legislatures. He viewed them as serious transgressions of property rights by improvident agrarians, and regarded creditors as an oppressed minority whose rights it was the government’s responsibility to protect “Government,” Madison wrote, “is instituted to protect property of every sort,” a concern that was clearly focused on the interests of the well-to-do strata in the new country. “This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.”[226]

Despite the differences that existed between them, merchants and plantation owners required no arguments to convince them that the Articles of Confederation had to be supplanted by an entirely new instrument of government. The wealthy and well-educated elite of the new nation thereupon proceeded to adopt a strategy that they learned from the radical patriots during the Revolution: they convoked an extralegal convention to create a new, basically nationalistic, constitution. If “the people” could call conventions in the name of preserving their liberties, the wealthy felt free to call them in the name of protecting their property. In September 1786, an assembly in Annapolis sent out a call for such a convention, presumably to revise the Articles of Confederation. Six months later the Confederation Congress, under strong pressure, agreed to the convention for “the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation” and “to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the union.”[227]

The convention’s mandate, it should be emphasized, was very limited, but the Constitutional Convention, which met from May 25 to September 17,1787, in Philadelphia, blatantly and illegally exceeded it. In fact, the Convention carried out a political revolution—and unlike the assemblies of the people during the Revolution, which were open to all citizens, it was held in extraordinary, indeed conspiratorial, secrecy. The windows on the ground floor of the Pennsylvania Statehouse, where the Convention assembled, were kept shut even during the sweltering summer days to prevent ordinary people from overhearing the debates within, while troops patrolled the grounds outside. The secretary of the Convention recorded little more than the various motions and the votes each one received. Fortunately for later historians, Madison took copious notes of the proceedings, but they were not published until the last of the delegates present—namely, Madison himself—had died. Thus, the process by which the present-day Federal Constitution was drawn up largely remained unknown to the much-revered “people,” in whose name it professed to speak, until well into the nineteenth century, by which time the Constitution had sedimented itself into everyday American statecraft and tradition. Given this procedure and all the maneuvering surrounding the Convention, it is not lurid to consider it a conspiracy by a self-interested elite against the people and the governing institutions of the Confederation. The presence of Washington at the gathering gave the Convention a legitimacy it probably could not have attained on its own. Rhode Island refused to send any delegates, while Patrick Henry declined to attend it with the remark, “I smell a rat.”

James Madison’s political philosophy draws a clear distinction between democratic and representative government. In his famous Federalist No. 10, Madison defines “a pure democracy” as “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.... A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself”[228] —concepts that could almost have come from the writings of Rousseau. The practicability of democracy, Madison observes, is a function of size and scale: it was possible only in small communities of intimates, not in large cities, still less in a nation-state. Rooting his views of politics in the fixities of human nature, he asks: “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Inasmuch as this was not the case, he continued: “In framing a government... you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”[229] A separation of powers is necessary as a check on tyranny by playing each branch of government—the legislative, executive, and judicial—against the other, thereby limiting the powers of any single branch.

Most of the delegates at the convention agreed on the need for a centralized national government whose authority enjoyed preeminence over the states. For some, this meant that the states would have to defer to the central government but would retain real powers that the national institutions did not claim for themselves; for others, including Madison himself, it meant that the states would all but disappear except as administrative units, somewhat like the departments later established in revolutionary France. The majority of the delegates, however, favored a national government not only based on a dear separation of powers but allowing considerable authority to state legislatures. How the powers of the national government were to be structured, allocated, and given authority was the subject of intense debate, but most of the delegates favored a bicameral legislature in which an upper chamber presumably would consist of wise, moderating, and conservative elements over a more popular and irascible lower one.

Madison and his allies were unsuccessful in producing the highly centralized system they wanted. The document preserved considerable states’ rights, which was to produce an ongoing tumult over construing their powers for more than two centuries afterwards. Indeed, in failing to clearly specify the powers of the states, the men who sat at Philadelphia throughout the summer of 1787 created a new form of government that was neither a highly centralized nation-state of the kind that suffocates French political life to this day, nor a Swiss-style cantonal confederacy, but rather a hybridized system in which the federal government remained surprisingly weak throughout the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Only the New Deal era and the Second World War massively bureaucratized the national government and increased its scope over public life.

The government that the Federal Constitution established was nonetheless much more centralized than the Articles, appropriating powers that had formerly been cherished, however briefly, by the states. Indeed, some of the delegates never accepted Madison’s centralistic approach. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts maintained that the respective powers of the President and Congress were too sweeping to avoid a “tyranny,” while George Mason eloquently warned that a constitution formed in secret from the public, with a powerful executive, might expand into a bureaucratic despotism and, lacking any bill of rights, undermine the domestic goals of the Revolution.

The ratification struggle that followed the extralegal convention was fought furiously over precisely these issues. The conventioneers had decided upon a ratification procedure that deliberately avoided submitting the new Constitution to the state legislatures, which almost certainly would have rejected it. Instead, taking another page from the book of the Revolution, the conventioneers decided to bypass the legislatures and go directly to the sovereign “people.” If the legislatures were adamantly opposed to ratification, the “people” might still be persuaded to accept the new Constitution. In each state, it was decided, the people would elect a ratifying convention to consider the document. Aware that most Americans might still remain highly skeptical of a central government after their experience with the British Crown, supporters of the Constitution cynically coopted the label federalist to denote their cause, rather than nationalist, which would more accurately have expressed their authentic goals. Thus was an illegal act, the closed and far-ranging Convention, compounded by a demagogic act of misrepresentation. The Convention prudently instituted the requirement that the support of no more than nine states out of the thirteen was needed to ratify the constitution.

Opponents of ratification were stamped with the unenviable and uninspiring sobriquet of antifederalists. Madison’s arguments for a national government and Mason’s in opposition demarcated the broad outlines of the “debate” over the Constitution, if such it can properly be called, given the level of manipulative “federalist” pamphleteering that went on. Opinion ranged from extreme antifederalists whose views verged on “Switzering anarchy” (as a Cromwellian might have put it more than a century earlier) to extreme nationalists who seemed to favor a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic. The “federalists” shrewdly availed themselves of radical slogans and measures to gain popular support, such as Tom Paine’s maxim, “That government is best which governs least.” When antifederalists expressed concern that the Constitution nowhere guaranteed the basic liberties of each individual, the “federalists” assured them that these guarantees were implied in the Constitution, but the antifederalists were not taken in by this ruse, and the “federalists” were obliged to accept the need for a bill of rights that explicitly stated the liberties that Americans were to enjoy.

Elite and well-to-do sectors of the population mobilized in great force to support an instrument that clearly benefited them at the expense of the backcountry agrarians and urban poor. A powerful central government would be able to establish a sound, well-regulated currency, make international treaties that favored commerce, establish a transportation system that penetrated into the interior of the continent with its potentially inexhaustible riches in furs, forest goods, and cultivable land, and mobilize troops not only to deal with domestic unrest but to wage expansionist territorial wars.

But the economic considerations should not be overemphasized. The ratification debate, as a whole, seemed to be guided primarily by political concerns. Admittedly, many of the “federalists” were men of substance— merchants, well-to-do artisans, patroonlike lords, and slave-owning planters— but furiously as the “federalist” and antifederalist debate was waged among the elite strata of the country, it stirred surprisingly little passion among the socalled lower classes. An economic upswing in the late 1780s had quieted the rebellious agrarians who formerly united as Shaysites and Regulators but now benefited from the country’s relatively stable currency and Europe’s need for grain. Indeed, the debate crossed many class lines. Some of the most adamant antifederalists were actually men of wealth and position such as George Mason, James Winthrop, Christopher Gadsden, Patrick Henry, the Lees of Virginia, and, for a time, John Hancock, whereas Sam Adams was obliged to end his opposition to the Constitution since his constituents among the Boston shipwrights supported it.

The ratifying conventions held in the smaller states quickly accepted the document. It granted them parity of representation (two senators for each state, irrespective of its size) with the larger states in the Senate, which was the most they could have hoped for. Indeed, it was the largest states that posed the most serious obstacles. Massachusetts was so sharply divided on ratification that only the most cunning maneuvering, the most insistent pressure tactics, and major concessions to the antifederalists gave the “federalists” a nineteen-vote majority out of the 355 representatives at the state convention. Virginia and New York’s decisions hung in the balance for months. Despite the strong nationalist sentiment among the delegates that Virginia had sent to the Convention in Philadelphia, Virginians were largely antifederalist. It required much heated debate and maneuvering before the state ratified the Constitution, and then by only a ten-vote margin out of 169. A huge barrage of articles and pamphlets favoring the Constitution was unleashed in order to garner New York’s vote, spearheaded by the Federalist Papers (written mainly by Hamilton and Madison with a few essays by John Jay). Nevertheless the “federalists” won the state by only three votes out of fifty-seven. Rhode Island, having refused to send delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, also refused to call a ratifying convention. The Constitution went into effect without its assent, and only in 1790 did Rhode Island finally ratify the document and rejoin the Union.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights essentially allowed the states and, by indirection, the small localities enough leeway to retain “democratic” features of federalism within a loosely centralized union, as Tocqueville observed in the 1830s. Over time, as new states entered the union, the right to vote was further broadened and a large variety of human rights were granted that did not fall within the purview of the federal government. States could decide whether they would be free or slave, whether they would restrict or expand the franchise, grant the vote to women or not, have bicameral or unicameral legislatures, tax or not tax their inhabitants—indeed, as we see today, allow for abortion, capital punishment, or gambling, harbor or extradite fugitives from all but federal crimes, legally “rebel” or not, and a host of other lesser but personally relevant and politically important rights, including varying degrees of easy access to the levers of government itself. Despite the bourgeois, commercial, and later imperialistic society that emerged in the following decades, the American Revolution had produced a remarkably multilayered governmental system: within the centralized republic existed instrumentalities for creating a fairly decentralized democracy. Whether this structure can continue to exist and its democratic features be expanded at the expense of the centralized nation-state remains the most uncertain and undecided legacy of the Revolution to this very day.