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An American Affidavit

Sunday, August 30, 2020

The Confidence Man and the Preacher Part 2

NOTES

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX



NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

AAS
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
Feer
Robert Arnold Feer, Shays’s Rebellion (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988)
Hall
Van Beck Hall, Politics without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780–1791 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972)
MA
Massachusetts Archives, Boston
MHS
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
Minot
George Richards Minot, History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts, 2d ed. (Boston:
James W. Burditt & Co., 1810)
Starkey
Marion L. Starkey, A Little Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1955)
Szatmary
David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980)
WMQ
William and Mary Quarterly

introduction. The Uninvited Guest: Daniel Shays and the Constitution

1. Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1813–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), 137.
2. Robert A. Gross, “Daniel Shays and Lafayette’s Sword,” OAH Newsletter 15 (Nov. 1987): 8–9; Massachusetts Centinel, Dec. 2, 1786; Gregory H. Nobles and Herbert L. Zarov, eds., Selected Papers from the Sylvester Judd Manuscript (Northampton, Mass.: Forbes Library, 1976), 581–82; Elmer S. Smail, “The Daniel Shays Family,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 140 (1986): 301–2; Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . . , 13 vols. (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1890–97), 4:424–26.
3. New York Evening Post, Oct. 15, 1825; George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: Norton, 1979).
4. Hampshire Gazette, Oct. 19, 26, 1825 (rept. from the Boston Commercial Gazette); Concord Yeoman and Middlesex Gazette, Oct. 22, 1825; Boston Columbian Centinel, Oct. 19, 1825.
5. Forrest McDonald and Ellen Shapiro McDonald, Requiem: Variations on Eighteenth-Century Themes (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1988), chap. 4, “On the Late Disturbances in Massachusetts.”
6. Novels: [Ralph Ingersoll Lockwood], The Insurgents (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835); Edward Bellamy, The Duke of Stock-bridge: A Romance of Shays’ Rebellion (New York: Silver, Burdett, 1900); Walter A. Dyer, Sprigs of Hemlock (New York and London: Century Co., 1931); William Degenhard, The Regulators (New York: Dial Press, 1943); Robert Muir, The Sprig of Hemlock: A Novel about Shays’ Rebellion (New York: Longmans, Green, 1957); James L. and Christopher Collier, The Winter Hero (New York: Four Winds Press, 1978); Harvey Wasserman, “The Secret Life of Daniel Shays,” Valley Advocate, Feb. 16, 23, Mar. 2, 9, 16, 23, Apr. 6, 1987. Plays: Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1787), in Montrose J. Moses, ed., Representative Plays by American Dramatists, 3 vols. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918–25), 1:433–98. In 1936, at the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Shays’s Rebellion in Pelham, several boys from New York City performed a play written by eleven-year-old David Granet; the previous summer the children had attended the Pioneer Youth Camp, where they had learned about the Massachusetts insurrection from a teacher, Shays enthusiast Walter Ludwig (see Springfield Union and Republican, Sept. 20, 1936). Films: The People vs. Job Shattuck (1975); A Little Rebellion (1986). Murals: Diego Rivera, Portrait of America: With an Explanatory Text by Bertram D. Wolfe (New York: Covici, Friede, 1934); Edward Bruce and Forbes Watson, Art in Federal Buildings: An Illustrated Record of the Treasury Department’s New Program in Painting and Sculpture, vol. 1, Mural Designs, 1934–1936 (Washington, D.C.: Art in Federal Buildings, 1936). Music: Gurdon Barrows, “The Ballad of Daniel Shays” (1793), in Charles H. Barrows, ed., The Poets and Poetry of Springfield in Massachusetts from Early Times to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Springfield, Mass.: Connecticut Valley Historical Society, 1907), 26–29; Daniel Shays Highway, album by Shays’ Rebellion, Flying Fish Records, 1987. Official opening of Daniel Shays Highway, 1937. President Reagan, quoted in Springfield Union, Jan. 15, 1986. Gore Vidal, Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays, 1952–72 (New York: Random House, 1973).
7. Anson E. Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Univ. Library, 1909), 40; Joseph T. Buckingham, Specimens of Newspaper Literature: With Personal Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences, 2 vols. (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1850), 2:40–56; Richard D. Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 113–27.
8. Interestingly, Robert J. Taylor made a similar point years ago. Noting the inconsistent course taken by the Massachusetts legislature in funding state securities, Taylor observed that “with respect to redemption, the General Court pursued a confused policy which satisfied neither creditor nor debtor classes” (Western Massachusetts in the Revolution [Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1954], 132).
9. Taylor draws the concept of the “protection covenant” from Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 37–46.
10. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974).
11. I owe this splendid turn of phrase to Edward Countryman of the University of Warwick.
12. For a similar argument, see Gregory H. Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1740–1775 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983).
13. Peter S. Onuf observes that Shays’s Rebellion confirmed and crystallized conservative anxieties about the dissident movements gathering on the frontiers of every state. “Shays’s Rebellion assumed the stature of a national event,” he writes, “because it offered a model for domestic dissidence in every state. New state movements in frontier areas were irritating and even potentially dangerous. . . . But Shays’s Rebellion struck at the authority of the leading northern state within its universally recognized boundaries” (The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983], 178). See also Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 46–60.
14. For more on cultural politics in the 1780s, see Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 484–567; Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 19–54.
15. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Higham, From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848–1860 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: William L. Clements Library, 1969).
16. Richard D. Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and Its Aftermath: A View from Springfield, Massachusetts, 1787,” WMQ, 3d ser., 40 (1983): 598–615; Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” 113–37; Grindall Reynolds, “Concord during the Shays Rebellion,” A Collection of Historical and Other Papers (Concord, Mass.: Privately printed, 1895), 195–244.
17. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Random House, 1955).

1. The Public Creditor Interest in Massachusetts Politics, 1780–86

1. Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1947), 41–48; Whitney K. Bates, “The State Finances of Massachusetts, 1780–1789” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1948); Paul Goodman, The Democratic-Republicans of Massachusetts: Politics in a Young Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 14; Hall, 167, 204; Szatmary, xiii, 4–46, 70–76.
2. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), 26.
3. See Congress’s “Address to the States,” Apr. 26, 1783, in W. C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904–47), 24:277–83.
4. See Benjamin Lincoln to James Warren, Apr. 5, 1783, MHS Collections 73 (1925): 200.
5. See James Warren to John Adams, Oct. 27, 1783, Jan. 28, 1785, ibid., 230, 248.
6. Lincoln to Warren, Apr. 5, 1783, James Warren to John Adams, June 24, 1783, ibid., 203, 220. See also Nicholas Brown to Nathaniel Appleton, Dec. 13, 1784, Brown Papers, John Carter Brown Library, Brown Univ.
7. Warren to Adams, Oct. 27, 1783, MHS Collections 73 (1925): 232.
8. Hall, 154–57. See also Nicholas Brown to David Howell, Aug. 26, 1782, Brown Papers.
9. The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay . . . , 21 vols. (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1869–1922), 20:588.
10. Nicholas Brown to Moses Hayes, Oct. 31, 1782, Brown Papers.
11. See Roxbury’s response to Wrentham’s and Medway’s instructions, Independent Chronicle, Mar. 25, 1784.
12. Richard Buel, Jr., “Samson Shorn: The Impact of the Revolutionary War on Estimates of the Republic’s Strength,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1984), 164–65. See also Ralph Volney Harlow, “Economic Conditions in Massachusetts during the American Revolution,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 20 (1920): 183–84.
13. John Hancock to Elias Boudinot, Oct. 23, 1783, Papers of the Continental Congress, Library of Congress. See also Richard Buel, Jr., Dear Liberty (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1980), 244; Bates, “State Finances,” 83, 143.
14. Congress did print a report of a grand committee recommending compensatory measures for the old Continentals, but these proposals were never enacted. See The Grand Committee to Whom Was Referred a Letter of the Governor of Massachusetts of the 28th of October 1783 Relative to the Continental Bills of Credit of the Old Emissions . . . (Annapolis: Printed by John Dunlap, 1784); Journal of the Continental Congress 37:395–96; Independent Chronicle, Apr. 22, 1784; Report of the Committee considering the Congressional Requisitions, ibid., Dec. 29, 1785. Massachusetts did finally receive credit against the Continent for its expenses in the Penobscot expedition in 1784; see report in ibid., July 7, 1784. I have found no reference to this in the Journals of the Continental Congress, which appear to be incomplete for this period.
15. Bates, “State Finances,” 85, 144.
16. On the commercial revival and the influx of bullion, see James Warren to John Adams, Oct. 12, 1780, MHS Collections 73 (1925): 141. James Swan, National Arithmetick . . . (Boston, 1786), 82, estimated that by the end of the war Massachusetts had accumulated two to three times the gold and silver that had been present in 1774. See also Bates, “State Finances,” 73, 79.
17. See “Honorius” in Independent Chronicle, Oct. 9, 1783; Boston Magazine, Mar. 1786, 139.
18. See Eaton and Benson to Nicholas Brown, Aug. 8, 1781, Brown Papers.
19. Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . . , 13 vols. (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1890–97), 1:525–33, 573–79, 2:152–53. The resulting measure was really a combined excise-impost.
20. Delays were normal; see Nicholas Brown to Thomas Ives, Dec. 29, 1784, Feb. 9, 1786, George Benson to Nicholas Brown, Mar. 23, 1785, Brown Papers; “A.B.” in Massachusetts Centinel, Feb. 22, 1786.
21. Benjamin M. Stillman to Nicholas Brown, Dec. 16, 1783, Brown Papers.
22. The difficulties that creditors could face in getting paid the interest due on their consolidation notes are documented in Nicholas Brown to Thomas Ives, June 23, Oct. 20, 1784, Brown to George Benson, Oct. 12, 1785, Brown to Thomas Ives, Feb. 20, June 23, 1786, Brown Papers. See also Hall, 115.
23. See Nicholas Brown to Moses Hayes, Oct. 31, 1782, Brown to James Walker, June 17, 1784, Brown to Ephraim Willard, Apr. 2, 1785, George Benson to Nicholas Brown, Mar. 14, 1785, Eaton and Benson to Nicholas Brown, Nov. 13, 23, 1782, Brown Papers.
24. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, chap. 12, has a good account of this. Hall cites evidence suggesting that ownership of the Massachusetts state debt had become highly concentrated; see Hall, 43 n.46.
25. The traders in the eastern towns had engrossed most of the Massachusetts consolidated notes (Boston Magazine, Mar. 1786, 139–40, and Nov.–Dec. 1786, 437). See also “Excise” from the Hampshire Herald in Massachusetts Centinel, Feb. 15, 1786.
26. See “Free Republican,” Independent Chronicle, Dec. 22, 1785.
27. See “An Address from the General Court to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Nov. 14, 1786, Acts and Laws 3:47. See also petition of the public creditors to the legislature of Pennsylvania, rept. in Independent Chronicle, Jan. 25, 1785; Pennsylvania General Assembly Address to the Council, ibid., Feb. 3, 1785; “Honestus,” ibid., Mar. 10, 1785. There was also a tendency to moralize the creditor-debtor relationship, of which modern commentators have been critical; see Hall, 79, 83, 96.
28. “Public Faith,” rept. from a Springfield paper in Massachusetts Centinel, Feb. 8, 1786, and Independent Chronicle, Feb. 16, 1786, forcefully advanced such a position. It was greeted by a chorus of denunciations, including “A Friend to the Community,” Massachusetts Centinel, Feb. 11, 1786; “An American,” ibid., Feb. 18, 1786; “A.B.,” ibid., Feb. 22, 1786. See also Hall, 119.
29. “Address from the General Court,” Acts and Laws 4:146; Boston Magazine, Nov.–Dec. 1786, 435.
30. See James Warren to Elbridge Gerry, Jan. 11, 1785, in C. Harvey Gardiner, A Study in Dissent: The Warren-Gerry Correspondence, 1776–1792 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), 182; James Warren to John Adams, Jan. 28, Sept. 4, 1785, Apr. 30, 1786, MHS Collections 73 (1925): 249, 264, 272. See also Independent Chronicle, Mar. 18, 1783; Hall, 189, 192–93; Minot, 11–14; Swan, National Arithmetick, 82.
31. Journal of the Continental Congress 29:765–71.
32. Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1931–47), 2:48–56.
33. See James Bowdoin’s address, Oct. 24, 1785, Acts and Laws 3:602–3.
34. See “A.B.” in Independent Chronicle, Dec. 29, 1785; Acts and Laws 3:602–3.
35. See Boston Magazine, Dec. 1785, 475.
36. Acts and Laws 3:453–57; Independent Chronicle, July 29, 1785.
37. See “A Friend of Commerce” in Independent Chronicle, Aug. 12, Oct. 14, 1784. See also ibid., Mar. 2, 1786.
38. Though only the House was supposed to represent population proportionately, in effect the Senate did also; see Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, eds., The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), 451, 454; Hall, 69, 72. Bates, “State Finances,” 66, emphasizes the disproportionate influence the seacoast towns exercised by virtue of their proximity to the capitol at Boston. For the attempt to divert the funds raised from the excise and impost to other purposes, see Boston Magazine, Mar. 1788, 139–40, and Nov.–Dec. 1788, 437. See also “S” in Massachusetts Centinel, Mar. 8, 1786. The utility of partial funding had been amply demonstrated when the supply of specie had dwindled in the mid-1780s. The consolidated notes had then provided a substitute medium of exchange, being collateral for loans. In addition, merchants were able to discount their duties at the customshouse with them. See N. S. B. Gras, The Massachusetts First National Bank of Boston, 1784–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), 50–51, 246, 272; see also Boston Magazine, Mar. 1786, 139–40, and Nov.–Dec. 1786, 437.
39. See MA, vol. 161.
40. The evaluation procedures are discussed in Boston Magazine, Mar. 1785, 175, and Mar. 1786, 138.
41. The regressive aspect of relying on a poll tax has been emphasized by modern commentators. See Bates, “State Finances,” 56, 99, 146, and Handlin, Commonwealth, 37. But if labor was indeed the principal source of wealth in the rural economy, as has been recently argued by Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), 29, 33, failure to assess it at some fixed rate would seem less fair than what was actually done.
42. The process is documented in MA, vols. 162–63.
43. The political process is best followed through newspaper allusions. See Independent Chronicle, Apr. 8, Nov. 10, Dec. 16, 22, 1785, Jan. 26, Feb. 9, Mar. 8, 1786. Suffolk County’s share of the state’s direct taxes dropped from 17.5% in 1780 to 14.9% in 1786; Essex County’s from 19.9% to 14.1%. On the other hand, Hampshire’s rose from 7.9% to 10.9%, Worcester’s from 10.9% to 13.8%, and Berkshire’s from 3.9% to 5.7%. Though the coastal counties succeeded in reducing their own share of the grand list, they felt it was only proper that areas that had seen the growth of new settlements during the war should begin to bear some of the public burden. Criticism of the evaluation process was voiced by “Public Faith” in Independent Chronicle, Feb. 16, 1786, on the grounds that the western towns’ consent had been extracted through exhaustion rather than persuasion.
44. Boston Magazine, Mar. 1786, 141–42.
45. See Governor Bowdoin’s address to the legislature in May 1785, Independent Chronicle, June 2, 1785; “A Friend to America” and “H,” ibid., Feb. 9, 1786.
46. See “Letter from a Gentleman in a Southern State,” ibid., Mar. 25, 1784. See also Address of L. J. Brutus, ibid., Oct. 26, 1786; Stephen Higginson to John Adams, Dec. 30, 1785, in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., “Letters of Stephen Higginson, 1784–1804,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1896 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1897), 1:732. Massachusetts citizens were reminded of the state’s relative size in the Massachusetts Register (1786), appended to T. & J. Fleet, Pocket Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1787 . . . (Boston: T. &J. Fleet, 1787), 15.
47. “A Republican” in Independent Chronicle, Oct. 6, 1785; “Honestus,” ibid., Feb. 2, 1786. See also “Correspondent,” ibid., June 8, 1786. A fear that the state was losing ground to Virginia also played a role in its vanguardism; see “Portius,” ibid., Sept. 7, 1786; “Speech of a Member of the General Court of Massachusetts,” American Museum 1 (1787): 361; Hall, 143.
48. Warnings against the dangers of a consolidated government frequently found their way into the public prints; see “Jonathan of the Valley” in Independent Chronicle, June 16, Oct. 20, 1785. These sentiments were shared by the eastern leadership; see Stephen Higginson to John Adams, July 1786, “Letters of Higginson,” 734–35. The preservation of the Articles of Confederation seemed to be very much on the mind of the public creditor interest in the state; see “An American” in Independent Chronicle, Jan. 26, 1786.
49. See “Honestus” and “Solon” in Independent Chronicle, Mar. 10, 1785, Feb. 23, 1786; “Speech of a Member of the General Court of Massachusetts,” American Museum 1 (1787): 360.
50. Thomas Paine, “Dissertation on Government: The Affairs of the Bank and Paper Money,” rept. in Massachusetts Centinel, Mar. 22, 1786, and in William M. van der Weyde, ed., The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Thomas Paine Historical Association, 1925), 4:234.
51. These sentiments were those of the national leadership; see Alexander Hamilton, “To the Public Creditors of the State of New York,” Sept. 30, 1782, in Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961–79), 3:176; James Madison, “Notes on Debates,” Feb. 27, 1783, and “Congress’s Address to the States,” Apr. 25, 1783, in William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of fames Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press and Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1962–91), 6:298, 494; George Washington to John Jay, May 18, 1786, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1937–44), 28:431–32. But they were echoed by many others of less exalted station; see Nathaniel Hazard, Observations on the Peculiar Case of Whig Merchants . . . (New York: By a citizen, 1785), 13, 20, 25. And they repeatedly surfaced in the Massachusetts press; see, for instance, the reprinting of Paine’s “Dissertation on Government” in Massachusetts Centinel, Mar. 15 and 22, 1786.
52. See Hall, 227–28, 232, 235, 246, 252; Bates, “State Finances,” 12, 107, 131, 134. In its May session the General Court had finally granted Congress the supplemental funds it had been requesting since 1783 to service the federal debt, but since this law became operative only when all the other states had passed similar laws, it remained a dead letter. See Boston Magazine, Nov.–Dec. 1786, 439.
53. See Szatmary, 78–79, 124–26. For agitation outside the Northeast, see Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in the American Revolution, 1763–1789 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1942), 125; Philip A. Crowl, Maryland during and after the Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1943), 92–94, 106–7.
54. Virginia leaders reacted with extreme sensitivity to developments in Massachusetts; see Henry Lee to James Madison, Oct. 28, 1786, Madison, “Notes on Debates,” Feb. 19, 1787, Madison to James Madison, Sr., and to James Monroe, Feb. 25, 1787, Edmund Randolph to Madison, Mar. 1, 7, 1787, Madison to Monroe, Apr. 19, 1787, and to Edmund Pendleton, Apr. 22, 1787, Papers of James Madison 9:145, 277, 278, 297, 301, 303, 391, 394–95. See also James Madison to James Madison, Sr., May 27, Sept. 4, 1787, Joseph Jones to Madison, July 6, 1787, James McClurg to Madison, Aug. 22, 1787, and Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Sept. 6, 1787, ibid., 10:10, 161, 98, 155, 164. For reactions elsewhere, see American Mercury, Feb. 5, 1787, and “Harrington” from the Independent Gazette in Philadelphia, both in ibid., June 11, 1787; American Museum 1 (1787): 278, 430, 443, 445. See also Alexander Hamilton, “Notes for a Speech on a Plan of Government,” June 8, 1787, Papers of Alexander Hamilton 4:179.
55. New York enjoyed such advantages and managed to fund not only its own debt but the Continental debt held by its citizens in 1786. See Forrest McDonald, E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776–1790 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 59–61, 63.
56. Stephen Higginson to Henry Knox, Nov. 25, 1786, “Letters of Higginson,” 743; Hall, 161, 191, 256–57, 264.

2. Shays’s Rebellion in Long Perspective: The Merchants and the “Money Question”

The present essay is from a work in progress concerned with the money question in eighteenth-century New England. I found the work of Leslie V. Brock, Marc Egnal, Ronald Michener, and William D. Metz and the theses and dissertations written at the University of Wisconsin following World War II that are cited below especially useful. A York University research grant facilitated the essay’s completion.
1. John Adams identifies the “Merchantile Interest” in a letter to James Warren, Oct. 20, 1775, in Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977–83), 3:217. Spelling and punctuation in all quotations in this essay have been changed to conform to modern usage.
2. See the recent discussion of ideological “languages” in Isaac Kramnick, “The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787,” WMQ, 3d ser., 45 (1988): 3–32.
3. Libertarian opposition to “government by money” is developed at length in Rodger D. Parker, “The Gospel of Opposition: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Opposition” (Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1975). See also the recent discussions by Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” and Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” WMQ, 3d ser., 43 (1986): 3–34.
4. Nov. 14, 1786, Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . . , 13 vols. (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1890–97), 4:142–64.
5. Peter G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1736 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 16.
6. The introduction of paper currency is discussed in Andrew M. Davis, Currency and Banking in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, pt. 1, Currency (1839; rept. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 11–64. Leslie V. Brock, The Currency of the American Colonies, 1700–1764: A Study in Colonial Finance and Imperial Relations (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 591–92, is the source throughout this chapter for currency figures before 1776.
7. For the view of a breakdown in de facto convertibility and its connection with specie exports and paper currency issues, see Ronald Michener, “Fixed Exchange Rates and the Quantity Theory in Colonial America,” in Karl Brunner and Allan Metzler, eds., Empirical Studies of Velocity, Real Exchange Rates, Unemployment, and Productivity 27 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987): 233–305. The increasing price of silver in Massachusetts, or the depreciation of the currency, is the subject of great controversy among some economists and economic historians; see, for instance, Bruce Smith, “Money and Inflation in Colonial Massachusetts,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 8 (1984): 1–14, and Smith, “American Colonial Monetary Regimes: The Failure of the Quantity Theory and Some Evidence in Favor of an Alternative View,” Canadian Journal of Economics 18 (1985): 531–65. Compare Roger C. West, “Money in the Colonial American Economy,” Economic Inquiry 16 (1978): 1–15; Elmus Wicker, “Colonial Monetary Standards Contrasted: Evidence from the Seven Years’ War,” Journal of Economic History 45 (1985): 869–84; Ronald Michener, “A Neoclassical Model of the Balance of Payments,” Review of Economic Studies 51 (1984): 651–64; Leslie V. Brock, “The Colonial Currency, Prices, and Exchange Rates,” Leslie V. Brock Collection, Univ. of Virginia Library, Charlottesville.
Economic conditions in Massachusetts at the time are considered in Curtis P. Nettels, The Money Supply of the American Colonies before 1720 (1934; rept. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), 67–98, 128–61, 179–201, 251–58, and William D. Metz, “Politics and Finance in Massachusetts, 1713–1741” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1945), 44–56, 70–73. Silver prices for the colonial period are listed in John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1978), 151. For Massachusetts currency issues, see the Brock references cited above; cf. Davis, Currency and Banking, pt. 1, Currency, 443.
8. In his history of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., claimed that the controversy over the currency in 1714 shattered nearly six years of relative political peace and divided the House of Representatives, “towns, parishes and particular families” into those supporting the private bank and those supporting the public bank. Hutchinson declared the “very numerous” backers of the private scheme to be persons “in difficult or involved circumstances in trade, or such as was possessed of real estates, but had little or no ready money at command, or men of no substance at all”; still others probably joined “out of mistaken principles,” he went on, or “in apprehension” that the plan benefited the public, presumably by helping to enliven an ailing economy. Public bankers in contrast were said to represent two factions: one “very small,” which included among others Hutchinson’s own father, threw in with the public bank as the lesser of two evils; the other, headed by the “principal men of the Council,” viewed a public bank where the interest went into the treasury as an “easy way” of paying government charges.
According to William Metz, while none of the private bankers were great merchants and a few were traders in shaky circumstances, the vast majority were men of some means who “optimistically aspired to improve their standing by use of capital borrowed from the bank.” Similarly, six of the nine sponsors of the Bank of Credit were ambitious commercial men, entrepreneurs and property holders, but not great merchants. The other three were prominent politicians and members of the Popular party. Metz’s conclusions rest on his scrutiny of a surviving list of 200 bank supporters. See Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence S. Mayo, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), 2:154–56, and Metz, “Politics and Finance,” 73–82.
Other studies of these and related events include Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), 188–89; Joseph B. Felt, Historical Account of Massachusetts Currency (1839; rept., New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 64–68; Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 62–65, 112–13; William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1981), 62–65; Robert F. Seybolt, The Town Officials of Colonial Boston, 1634–1775 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1939), 122, 130 n.32; G. B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 68–79.
9. For a general discussion of party at the time, see Stephen E. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 3–62; Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution, 4–6. A specific discussion of the relationship between party and the money question is to be found in Metz, “Politics and Finance,” as indicated in the many references already cited; but see as well Robert Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods: An Essay on Eighteenth-Century American Politics (Boston: Gambit, 1971), esp. 265–75; Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 6–8, 20–37.
10. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Roy H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, 2 vols. (1776; rept. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 1:428.
11. The Present Melancholy Circumstances of the Province, Considered . . . , The Distressed State of the Town of Boston, Considered . . . , A Letter from One in the Country to His Friend in Boston . . . , and The Distressed State of the Town of Boston Once More Considered . . . , in Andrew McFarland Davis, ed., Colonial Currency Reprints, 1682–1751, 4 vols. (1910–11; rept. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), 1:351–63, 397–409, 416–42, 2:65–90.
See the brief but suggestive discussion in Michener, “Fixed Exchange Rates and the Quantity Theory in Colonial America,” 277 n.35.
12. A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country . . . , and A Letter to an Eminent Clergy-Man . . . , in Davis, Colonial Currency Reprints 2:159–223, 227–42.
Other scholars have placed this debate in a larger ideological framework but with little or no interest in the interplay between language, or discourse, and the social and political-economic environment; see, for instance, J. E. Crowley, “This Sheba Self”: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), 34–116; Timothy H. Breen, The Character of a Good Ruler: A History of Political Ideas, 1630–1730 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 203–69. On the other hand, E. James Ferguson asserts that colonial Americans never had occasion to “reflect upon the connection between currency finance and their conceptions of liberty”; such matters confronted the nation for the first time following the end of the Revolution and the rise of the nationalist movement, according to Ferguson; see Ferguson, “Political Economy, Public Liberty, and the Formation of the Constitution,” WMQ, 3d ser., 40 (1983): 389–412. The present chapter rejects both the abstracted ideological views of Crowley and Breen and the interpretation of Ferguson.
See also Davis, Colonial Currency Reprints 1:352, and Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography . . . A Genetic Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and Paul M. Zall (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1981), 30. I am indebted to Ronald Michener for these citations and for sharing with me results of his own research.
13. See Brock, Currency of the American Colonies, 28–32; Felt, Massachusetts Currency, 73–78; Metz, “Politics and Finance,” 190–231, 290–97; William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620–1789, 2 vols. (1890; rept. New York: Hillary House, 1963), 2:480–81.
14. For varying analyses of Belcher’s uneasy political relations during his early years as governor, compare Davis, Currency and Banking, pt. 1, Currency, 109–20; Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay 2:280–87; Metz, “Politics and Finance,” 360–442; Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution, 91–108; Joel A. Shufro, “Boston in Massachusetts Politics, 1730–1760” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1976), 56–76; Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods, 99–128.
15. John B. MacInnes, “Rhode Island Bills of Public Credit, 1710–1755,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Brown Univ., 1952), 1:71–209, offers an excellent analysis of that colony’s currency practices during this period. See also Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York: Scribner’s, 1975), 157, 171, 176; Christian McBurney, “The Rise and Decline of the South Kingston Planters, 1660–1783” (B.A. honors thesis, Brown Univ., 1981).
16. Davis, Colonial Currency Reprints 2:439–41. Compare Davis, The Merchants’ Notes of 1733 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1903); Shufro, “Boston in Massachusetts Politics,” 92–97; Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods, 102–14; John A. Schutz, “Succession Politics in Massachusetts, 1730–1741,” WMQ, 3d ser., 15 (1958): 508–20.
17. See Shufro, “Boston in Massachusetts Politics,” 24–34, 37–55, for a suggestive analysis of party alignments based upon the money question during Belcher’s governorship. See also Davis, Currency and Banking, pt. 1, Currency, 131—51; Metz, “Politics and Finance,” 453–94.
18. The best published study of the Land Bank controversy is George A. Billias, The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1740 (Orono: Univ. of Maine Press, 1959). Metz, “Politics and Finance,” 495–540, displays a better understanding of the political-economic background of the struggle, however. Other important accounts include: Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay 2:298–300; Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods, 117–41, 273–76; Davis, “Provincial Banks: Land and Silver,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Transactions 3 (1896): 2–40; Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution, 103–8, 116–19; Cathy Mitten, “The New England Paper Money Tradition and the Massachusetts Land Bank of 1740” (M.A. thesis, Columbia Univ., 1979); Herman Belz, “Paper Money in Colonial Massachusetts,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 51 (1965): 159–62.
19. Compare the modern accounts cited in notes 16 and 18 above with the contemporary Account of the Rise, Progress, and Consequence of the Two Late Schemes Commonly Called the Land Bank, or the Manufacturing Scheme, and the Silver Scheme in Davis, Colonial Currency Reprints 4:237–351. See also Davis, “List of Subscribers to the Silver Bank,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 3 (1910): 199–200.
20. See Mitten, “The New England Paper Money Tradition,” 60–80; John A. Schutz, William Shirley: King’s Governor of Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), 33–44, 70–72, 82–85, 90–92, 107, 115, 124, 132–33, 142–43; Brock, Currency of the American Colonies, 244–70; Shufro, “Boston in Massachusetts Politics,” 213–21, 235–57; Malcolm Freiberg, “Thomas Hutchinson and the Province Currency,” New England Quarterly 30 (1957): 197–204; Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution, 309–15; Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay 2:334–35.
21. 24 Geo. II, c. 53, Statutes at Large . . . of Great Britain. Anno 1701 Continued to 1806, ed. Danby Pickering (Cambridge: J. Bentham, 1762–1807), 20:277–90. See also the extensive discussion in MacInnes, “Rhode Island Bills of Public Credit,” 511–26, and Brock, Currency of the American Colonies, 201–43.
22. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay 2:335–37; Thomas Hancock to Christopher Kilby, May 5, 1750, to Kilby and Bernard, June 21, 1750, Letter Book of Thomas Hancock, New-England Historical and Genealogical Society, Boston.
For a careful and well-written analysis of the economic situation in the northern colonies in the years 1750–54, see William Sachs, “The Business Outlook in the Northern Colonies, 1750–1775” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 1957), 28–63. Both politics and economics in relation to the money question are discussed in Shufro, “Boston in Massachusetts Politics,” 258–68. Also see the suggestive study by Gloria L. Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England,” WMQ, 3d ser., 45 (1988): 124–34.
23. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay 3:7. An informed consideration of the treasury notes is to be found in Brock, “The Colonial Currency, Prices, and Exchange Rates” and Currency of the American Colonies, 270–89; note especially Brock’s changing and mature views on the subject. See also Anne Rowe Cunningham, ed., Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759–1762, 1764–1779 . . . (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1903), 339. The study by Sachs, “Business Outlook in the Northern Colonies,” 64–127, has an excellent discussion of both monetary and general economic conditions during the French and Indian War.
24. In addition to the references in note 23 above, see Andrew M. Davis, “Emergent Treasury-Supply in Massachusetts in Early Days,” AAS Proceedings 14 (1905): 45–46.
25. The political dimensions of these matters are taken up in Shufro, “Boston in Massachusetts Politics,” 275–351. For contrasting analyses of divisions within the merchant ranks in the Revolutionary movement, see Stephen E. Patterson, “Boston Merchants and the American Revolution to 1776” (M. A. thesis, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1960), and John W. Tyler, “The First Revolution: Boston Merchants and the Acts of Trade, 1760–1774” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ. 1980).
26. See the tables, references, and discussion in William B. Norton, “Paper Currency in Massachusetts during the Revolution,” New England Quarterly 7 (1934): 45–55. See also James Warren to John Adams, May 7, 1775, and William Tudor to John Adams, May 1, 1775, Papers of John Adams 3:3, 6, 65, 161. The government did actually try taxation and borrowing, but they had proven too uncertain and slow in their effect. Currency finance was the only alternative.
27. For contemporary responses to these developments, see, for example, entries for Jan. 1 and 30, 1776, in Oliver E. Fitch, ed., The Diary of William Pynchon of Salem: A Picture of Salem Life, Social and Political, A Century Ago (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), 1, 3; Josiah Quincy to John Adams, Oct. 25, 1775, William Tudor to John Adams, Oct. 28, 1775, James Warren to John Adams, Nov. 5, 1775, Joseph Hawley to John Adams, Dec. 18, 1775, Papers of John Adams 3:249–50, 259, 280–81, 369–70. See also The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay . . . , 21 vols. (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1869–1922), 5:669 and nn. These and related matters are discussed at length and with great clarity in a chapter about “The War, the Government, and the Massachusetts Economy, 1774–1776,” in Marc Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts, 1774 to 1778” (M. A. thesis, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1967), 85–115.
28. James Sullivan to John Adams, May 9, 1776, John Adams to William Gordon, June 23, 1776, Papers of John Adams 4:179, 329; Abigail Adams to John Adams, June 3, Aug. 25, 1776, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963–), 2:5, 107. Compare Ralph Volney Harlow, “Economic Conditions in Massachusetts during the American Revolution, 1775–1783,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 20 (1920): 166–67; Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (1938; rept. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 49–65; Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 144–46, 155–60; and the Egnal reference in note 27 above.
29. See especially Aug. 29, Dec. 4, 1776, Journal of the Honourable House of Representatives of . . . Massachusetts-Bay, 1776–1780, in William S. Jenkins, ed., Records of the States of the United States of America: A Microfilm Compilation (Washington, D.C.: microfilmed by the Library of Congress Duplication Service, 1949), and the Patterson reference in note 28 above. Treasury notes and bills of credit are compared in Norton, “Paper Currency in Massachusetts,” 46–51, and in Brock, Currency of the American Colonies, 278, 279 n.56; but see Brock, “Colonial Currency, Prices, and Exchange Rates” for his later views on this subject. See also Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, “Revolutionary Economic Policy in Massachusetts,” WMQ, 3d ser., 4 (1947): 8–9; Felt, Massachusetts Currency.
For economists the core difference is that treasury notes, as interest-bearing securities, would not have the high velocity of circulation that lawful currency would have. The economist and student of Massachusetts’s monetary system, Ronald Michener, notes that the distinction is “somewhat arbitrary” and that in Massachusetts “many instruments were used from time to time to extinguish debt” (letter to author, Sept. 1, 1986).
30. New Hampshire Historical Society Collections 9 (1889): 245–71; Acts and Resolves . . . of Massachusetts Bay 5:669–70nn.; James Sullivan to John Adams, Oct. 11, 1776, Adams to unknown, Nov. 5, 1776, Papers of John Adams 5:51–53; Independent Chronicle, Dec. 13, 1776.
See the discussion in Kenneth Scott, “Price Control in New England during the Revolution,” New England Quarterly 19 (1948): 453–58; another matter at issue was the impact of depreciation on military recruitment. No doubt a contributing factor to the growing sense of crisis in Massachusetts at the time was the treasury’s failure to find lenders who would subscribe to the enormous government loans in late 1776. As one historian has aptly remarked, the treasury note loans of 1775 and early 1776 for which there were subscribers represented “an investment in public securities yielding interest”; the forced loans of December 1776 were simply payments “to soldiers, furnishers of supplies for the army, and others who had financial claims on the treasury.” Both kinds of treasury notes were negotiable; see Norton, “Paper Currency in Massachusetts,” 48.
For a contemporary view of the critical importance of government borrowing, a view which both supported commercial and monied interests and reflected a larger moral vision of the role of money in commercial society, see John Adams to James Warren, Feb. 12, 1777, Papers of John Adams 5:80–83; cf. Adams to unknown, Nov. 5, 1776, ibid., 5:51–53.
31. James Warren to Samuel Adams, Feb. 24, 1777, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., Warren-Adams Letters . . . John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743–1814, 2 vols. (1917–25; rept. New York: Arno Press, 1972), 2:446; Acts and Resolves . . . of Massachusetts Bay 5:564–89, 669–73. Massachusetts also banned exports of most foodstuffs, cloth, and leather (ibid., 19:808–10; William Tudor to John Adams, Mar. 16, 1777, Papers of John Adams 5:113). See also Norton, “Paper Currency in Massachusetts,” 50.
Compare the extended discussion in Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 108–13, 121–26, and Richard B. Morris, “Labor and Mercantilism in the Revolutionary Era,” in Richard B. Morris, ed., The Era of the American Revolution (1939; rept. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1971), 94–98. See also Barbara Clark Smith, “The Politics of Price Control in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1774–1780” (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1983), 380–404, for a general discussion of these and related events in Boston in 1777.
32. James Warren to John Adams, Mar. 23, 1777, Papers of John Adams 5:127. Adams shared Warren’s views, as did most of Adams’s correspondents at the time; see, for instance, ibid., 5:182–83, 201–11; Adams Family Correspondence 2:156–57, 172–73, 201, 210–12, 214–15, 217–19. See as well Samuel Adams to Mrs. Adams, Mar. 19, 1777, to John Scollary, Mar. 20, 1777, in Harry A. Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams, 4 vols. (1904–7; rept. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 3:364–66; Feb. 31, 1777, Pynchon Diary, 24.
33. Papers of John Adams 5:127; Abigail Adams to John Adams, Apr. 20 and 21, 1777, Adams Family Correspondence 2:217–19; Acts and Resolves . . . of Massachusetts Bay 5:642–47. See also Apr. 21, 26, 28, 1777, Pynchon Diary, 29; Independent Chronicle, Apr. 3, 1777.
Extended treatments of these events are given in Albert Matthews, “Joyce Junior” and “Joyce Junior Again,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Transactions 8 (1906): 90–104 and 11 (1910): 280–94; Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 127–43; Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 166. For some information concerning the “doing away” with the currencies of the other states on the grounds of widespread counterfeiting, see Acts and Resolves . . . of Massachusetts Bay 5:639–40; Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 6, 1777, Adams Family Correspondence 2:232. Kenneth Scott’s study of Counterfeiting in Colonial America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), 256–61, is also useful, although this subject is in the process of being revised by historian John Brooke.
34. A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston Containing the Boston Town Records . . . (Boston, 1887), 285; Samuel Cooper to Samuel Adams, June 12, 1777, Samuel Adams Papers, New York Public Library; see also James Warren to John Adams, June 11, 1777, Papers of John Adams 5:223.
For a more detailed analysis, see Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 152–56, and Morris, “Labor and Mercantilism,” 105–6, and compare “A Countryman” in Independent Chronicle, Aug. 29, 1777. Evidence of merchant control of Boston’s town meeting is discussed in Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 102–4, 122–23.
35. James Warren to Samuel Adams, June 16, 1777, Warren-Adams Letters 2:449. See also June 10, 19, 24, 27, 1777, Journal of House of Representatives; James Warren to John Adams, June 22, Aug. 10, 1777, Papers of John Adams 5:230, 271. For what appears to have been personal and political reasons, Orne did not attend the conference. A sense of the problems of price controls and currency inflation at this time is conveyed in the letters of Abigail Adams to John Adams, June 10, 15, 23, July 1777, Adams Family Correspondence 2:265–66, 269–70, 278–79; see as well June 30, 1777, Pynchon Diary, 33.
36. Public Records of the State of Connecticut (1894), 1:599–606. See also Aug. 12, 13, Sept. 19, 20, 23, 26, Oct. 9, 10, 13, 1777, Journal of House of Representatives; Acts and Resolves . . . of Massachusetts Bay 5:733–37, 720–58; Samuel Freeman to John Adams, Sept. 4, 25, 1775, Papers of John Adams 5:282, 294–95.
Whitney K. Bates, “The State Finances of Massachusetts, 1780–1789” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1948), 44–58, and Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 157–79, 248, treat these matters at greater length. Contemporary descriptions of the out-of-doors violence appear in Abigail Adams to John Adams, July 30, 1777, Adams Family Correspondence 2:296–97 n.3, and Independent Chronicle, Sept. 18, 1777. See also John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, Dec. 6, 1777, Papers of John Adams 5:345–47, for an instructive response to the question of inflation and taxation, and Gerry to Adams, Jan. 25, 1778, ibid., 5:394–97, to the question of inflation and price controls.
37. Acts and Resolves . . . of Massachusetts Bay 5:816–17nn; Nov. 28, Dec. 1–2, 4–5, 12, 15, 1777, Journal of House of Representatives; Samuel Adams to unknown, Jan. 10, 1778, Writings of Samuel Adams 5:6–7; John Adams to Abigail Adams, Dec. 13, 1777, Adams Family Correspondence 2:369–70.
Further analysis of these issues is to be found in E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), 28–32; Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 181–82; Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 179–86.
38. Acts and Resolves . . . of Massachusetts Bay 5:759–60.
39. Independent Chronicle, Jan. 1, 1778. John Adams described these “monied men” in a letter to James Warren of Feb. 12, 1777, Papers of John Adams 5:82.
40. See, for instance, “Letter from a Gentleman in the Country . . . , VI, VII,” Independent Chronicle, Apr. 2, May 7, 1778; Samuel Adams to Francis Lightfoot Lee, Apr. 1778, Writings of Samuel Adams 4:19–20. Discussions of economic conditions appear in Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 201–10; Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1954), 91–92; Morris, “Labor and Mercantilism,” 107–9. See also Smith, “Politics of Price Control,” 405–46, for a general analysis of events in 1778.
41. Boston Town Records . . . (Boston, 1895), 9, 13; James Warren to John Adams, June 7, 1778, Papers of John Adams 5:188n; see also “Record of the Commissioners’ Meeting at New Haven, Jan. 1778,” New Hampshire Historical Society Collections 9 (1889): 272–95.
Compare the analyses in Scott, “Price Controls in New England,” 458–65; Morris, “Labor and Mercantilism,” 110; Harlow, “Economic Conditions in Massachusetts,” 175–78; Jonathan Grossman, “Wage and Price Controls during the American Revolution,” Monthly Labor Review 66 (1973): 3–10.
42. Sept. 18, 1778, Pynchon Diary, 57. See Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 44–46; James L. Cooper, “Interests, Ideas, and Empires: The Roots of American Foreign Policy, 1763–1789” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1964), 533. Some comments concerning comparative inflationary rates appear in Egnal, “Society and Politics in Massachusetts,” 189–91, 195.
43. Independent Chronicle, Apr. 15, June 17, 1779. See as well Abigail Adams to John Adams, Mar. 20, June 8, 1779, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution . . . (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1875), 361, 364; William H. Whitmore et al., eds., A Report of the Records Commission of the City of Boston Continuing the Selectmen’s Minutes from 1776 through 1786 (Boston, 1894), 96–98; James Warren to John Adams, June 13, 1779, Warren-Adams Letters 2:104–5.
Ferguson, Power of the Purse, is the standard work on congressional monetary and fiscal policies; see especially p. 32. For a detailed discussion of events in Massachusetts during 1779, see Smith, “Politics of Price Control,” 447–96.
44. Independent Chronicle, June 17, 1779.
45. Ibid., June 24, 1779.
46. Ibid., July 29, Aug. 19, 1779; Boston Town Records, 78–79, 100–101; Warren to Adams, July 29, 1779, Warren-Adams Letters 2:112. See the discussion in Morris, “Labor and Mercantilism,” 112–14; see also William Lincoln and Charles Hersey, History of Worcester, Massachusetts (Worcester: C. Hersey, 1862), 107–9.
47. Independent Chronicle, Sept. 9, 1779, and Morris, “Labor and Mercantilism,” 112–14; cf. Harlow, “Economic Conditions in Massachusetts,” 181–82.
48. See Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 46–53; Norton, “Paper Currency in Massachusetts,” 49, 58–59.
49. Independent Chronicle, Apr. 27, Oct. 12, 19, 1780, Jan. 25, 1781. The most frequently proposed solution to the currency crisis was increased taxation. The debate over this subject is a matter for separate investigation, though it should be noted that Charles Beard could easily have discerned a distinction between “Realty” and “Personalty” interests from reading contemporary newspaper accounts; see, for instance, “To Squaretoes” in Independent Chronicle, Feb. 8, 1781. See also Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 32.
50. Independent Chronicle, Jan. 25, May 29, June 2, July 8, 1781; Pynchon Diary, 96, 97, 100; Felt, Massachusetts Currency, 190. See also Independent Chronicle, Jan. 11, Feb. 1, Mar. 22, Apr. 12, July 5, 12, 1781; Abigail Adams to John Adams, Jan. 28, 1781, Familiar Letters, 390. A discussion of some of these events is to be found in Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 104–9, and E. James Ferguson ed., The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973–), 2:135–38; see also note 52 below.
Van Beck Hall uses the analytical category “commercial-cosmopolitan,” as opposed to mercantile interest. I would add that the two are closely, and functionally, related.
51. Bates, “State Finances of Massachusetts,” 85–93, and Hall, 104–2; see also Norton, “Paper Currency in Massachusetts,” 67–69.
52. See Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara M. Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 4:261–62. Cf. the general discussion in Crowley, “This Sheba Self” 76–95, and Joyce Appleby, “The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology,” Journal of American History 64 (1978): 935–38.
53. See Minot and Szatmary.

3. “Debt Litigation and Shays’s Rebellion”

1. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard estimate that the per capita GNP for the period 1774–90 declined approximately 46%. Comparing this to the 48% decline for 1929–30, they believe the colonial figures underestimate the actual situation (McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985], 373–75). Winifred Rothenberg asserts that farm prices fell approximately 30% in Massachusetts between 1783 and 1784. Prices rebounded slightly in 1785, only to drop below 1784 levels the following year (Rothenberg, “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” Journal of Economic History 39 [1979]: 983). See also Ruth Crandall, “Wholesale Commodity Prices in Boston during the Eighteenth Century,” Review of Economic Statistics 16 (1934): 127. Crandall argues wholesale prices for 1785–86 in Boston were at a high in March and April 1785. The prices, however, were lower than they had been the previous year and did not reach comparable levels until winter 1791.
2. Charles A. Beard’s classic statement of this theme used Worcester County as the principal buttress of the argument; see An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913; rept. New York: Free Press, 1965), 59, 262–64. Szatmary, esp. 1–13, 33–36, is the most recent reiteration of this theme. See also Barbara Karsky, “Agrarian Radicalism in the Late Revolutionary Period (1780–1795)” in Erich Angermann, Marie-Luise Frings, and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., New Wine in Old Skins: A Comparative View of Socio-Political Structures and Values Affecting the American Revolution (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 92. Even Jonathan Smith, who argued that legal costs were not excessive, still saw the twin polarities of rural-urban and yeoman-merchant divides. See “Some Features of Shays’ Rebellion,” Clinton Historical Society Publications 1 (1905): 11, 13, 15, and “The Depression of 1785 and Daniel Shays’ Rebellion,” WMQ, 3d ser., 5 (1948): 84–85. Hall, 167–68, modifies the geographical but largely retains the economic polarities of the traditional explanation. For an example of the way in which scholarship moves from this presumption of class distinctions in the courts to other attributes of post-Revolutionary Massachusetts, see J. R. Pole, “Shays’s Rebellion: A Political Interpretation,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 415–16, 429–30.
3. Bruce H. Mann describes this process for eighteenth-century Connecticut; see Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 12–27. See also Margaret Martin, “Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750–1820,” Smith College Studies in History 24 (1939): 156, 162; Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), 29–32; Michael A. Bellesiles, “The Establishment of Legal Structures on the Frontier: The Case of Revolutionary Vermont,” Journal of American History 73 (1987): 906.
4. Promissory note, Jan. 15, 1785, Salisbury Family Papers, box 5, folder 1, AAS. The turnover of the note would seem to indicate that it was negotiable. William E. Nelson points out that the holder of a nonnegotiable note only had recourse against the maker (Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1783 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975], 43). A nonnegotiable note, however, could easily be made negotiable. The recipient of an endorsed note could obtain recognition of the original writer’s obligation by demanding immediate payment as part of the process of accepting the note. See, for example, Stevens v. Sterne, Supreme Judicial Court (hereafter cited as SJC) Records, Feb.–June 1785, 120–21, and Gates v. Hillhouse, Suffolk Files, nos. 154214, 154220, SJC Archives, MA. See also Mann, Neighbors and Strangers, 39–41.
5. Since the notes were fixed, the requirement for payment in lawful money, specie, thereafter meant a dramatic decrease in the purchasing power of even relatively secure notes. James Sullivan estimated that property on which a note of £100 was given in 1783 had declined in value to £40 (Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution [Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1954], 134).
6. Creditors could have the debtor’s goods or land appraised and then seized to the specific amount of his debt or have the goods sold at auction and obtain their satisfaction out of the proceeds of the sale (Nelson, Americanization, 41–45).
7. Peter Coleman, Debtors and Creditors in America (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1974), 8–11, 42–43. Pennsylvania in 1785 discharged both the debt and the debtor; see S. Lawrence Shaiman, “The History of Imprisonment for Debt and Insolvency Laws in Pennsylvania as They Evolved from the Common Law,” American Journal of Legal History 4 (1960): 207. See also Robert Feer, “Imprisonment for Debt in Massachusetts,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (1961–62): 256.
8. Feer, “Imprisonment for Debt in Massachusetts,” 267–68. Louis Edward Levinthal notes a minor, tertiary objective of bankruptcy is the protection of honest debtors from their creditors after the discharge of the debts—something the Massachusetts law clearly does not do—“but this is by no means a fundamental feature of the law” (Levinthal, “The Early History of Bankruptcy Law,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 66 [1918]: 225–26). See also Thomas H. Jackson, The Logic and Limits of Bankruptcy Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 3, 7–15. See especially Jackson’s perspective on the proper role of bankruptcy law: “Bankruptcy law, at its core, is debt-collection law.”
9. Salisbury Family Papers, box 5, folder 2. Also see Julian Hoppit’s observations on eighteenth-century bankruptcy in England in Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 18, 27.
10. Feer, “Imprisonment for Debt in Massachusetts,” 256. Note that only in the event that the sale of a debtor into servitude produced an amount greater than or equal to the indebtedness would there be any discharge of the debt (Shaiman, “The History of Imprisonment for Debt,” 207).
11. Salisbury Family Papers, box 5, folder 1. Jennison subsequently would be committed for a debt of £138 in Jan. 1786 by Benjamin Lee (A Register of All Persons Committed to the Worcester Gaol, Worcester County, Massachusetts, MSS Collection, box 2, folder 1, AAS).
12. See, for example, the problem as explained by Samuel Corey, who petitioned the Supreme Judicial Court for his release after a year’s confinement for being unable to pay the remainder of his sentence of £7.15.8. Corey had a wife and two children, ages 3 and 11/2 (Suffolk Files, no. 15418).
13. Committee to Review the Jail, Dec. 8, 1785, Worcester County, Mass., MSS Coll., box 2, file 2; Feer, 62, 67; Feer, “Imprisonment for Debt in Massachusetts,” 260–61.
14. List of Prisoners, Dec. 6, 1785, box 2, folder 1, Petition Complaining of Poor Jail Conditions, Dec. 7, 1785, Committee to Review Jail, Dec. 8, 1785, box 2, folder 2, and Register of All Prisoners Committed to Gaol, box 2, folder 1, Worcester County, Mass., MSS Coll. The closing date for the list is presumed to be Mar. 16, 1786, the last entry provided.
15. Aaron Hunt wrote Stephen Salisbury on Jan. 25, 1786, that two small executions had kept him confined to his house (Salisbury Family Papers, box 5, folder 3). In the town of York, imprisoned debtors were allowed access to the village center in 1785. After 1799, the definition was extended to include a quarter-mile radius from the center. In Boston, the Suffolk County Court received a petition to include the entire city of Boston plus a hundred yards into the water (Feer, “Imprisonment for Debt in Massachusetts,” 261).
16. Wiser entered on June 21, 1784, and was released June 14, 1785 (Register of All Persons Committed to Gaol, box 2, folder 1). His name does not appear on the state treasurer’s sheriff’s account book as a tax collector. Four other men from Southborough, Paul Newton, Ezekiel Collins, Jotham Bellows, and John Richards, were held responsible for over £800 in uncollected executions relating to three state taxes dating back to 1781 and still outstanding in October 1785. (Sheriff’s Account Book 1781–85, Massachusetts Treasurer’s Records, MA).
17. Richardson was also listed on the Dec. 7, 1785, petition and the Dec. 6, 1785, list of prisoners. Feer notes that frequently a debtor’s fate depended upon the whims of the justices before whom the case was heard, the reputation of the debtor, and the willingness of the jailer to support his prisoners (“Imprisonment for Debt in Massachusetts,” 253).
18. Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study in the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1947), 42–43. For a detailed description of the implications of public policy and redemption for the money supply, see Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 105–8. See also Minot, 28.
19. Twenty served in excess of 100 days, four had terms of nearly a year, and eight of the prisoners were released within the 50-day limit. When only a month and a year are provided, I have assumed that release occurred on the last day of the month. Assuming the first of the month made no difference; in each case, the prisoner was released within the 50-day statutory limit (Register of All Prisoners Committed to Gaol, box 2, folder 1).
20. Suffolk Files, no. 154255; SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 129. Rawson alleged the amount in dispute was £600. The files suggest that Cogswell may have satisfied part of the note but that the amount was subject to dispute; hence the suit.
21. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 166.
22. Suffolk Files, no. 154336; SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 158.
23. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 143, 144, 170, 171, 176.
24. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 171; Suffolk Files, no. 154388. On the appeal bond, Rawson is listed as being the major surety and responsible for the first £6 on the appeal.
25. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 143, 144, 170, 176.
26. Ibid., 129, 158; Register of All Persons Committed to Gaol, box 2, folder 1.
27. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 170; Suffolk Files, no. 154384. Note that Weson could have submitted the action to the June session of the Worcester Court of Common Pleas, but then one would have to consider why would Weson have acquired a note he knew was probably unsound. The note was for £12.14 and was payable on demand with interest. The court assessed 12s. 4d. in interest and an additional £3.10.10 in costs. Also note that Rawson was present at the two cases in which he was the plaintiff.
28. Register of All Prisoners Committed to Gaol, box 2, folder 1.
29. Ibid., SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 122.
30. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 146, 163. See also Albert Farnsworth, “Shays’s Rebellion in Worcester County, Massachusetts” (Ph.D. diss., Clark Univ., 1927), 16.
31. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 122.
32. Prisoner’s Bonds, Aug. 10, 1785, and Sept. 14, 1785, box 2, folder 3, Worcester County, Mass., MSS Coll. Steam’s own bond was for £98.18.8. The Shaysite confrontation at the Sept. 1786 session of the Worcester Court of Common Pleas took place at Patch’s tavern (Farnsworth, “Shays’s Rebellion in Worcester County,” 3–18).
33. Mar. 1786, Salisbury Oversize Manuscript. See generally Salisbury’s collection problems in the correspondence to be found in box 5 of the Salisbury Family Papers.
34. Feer counted 700 cases at the December session of the Worcester Common Pleas (Feer, 60). The 2-to-7 ratio would understate the number of cases actually appealed since a number of cases were continued or never called; see, for example, Legate v. Parsons, Legate v. Downing, and Stevens v. Porter, SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 122, 125. See also Legate v. Porter, Worcester Minute Book of the SJC, Sept. 1784–Apr. 1786, no. 15, SJC Archives.
35. See the fee schedule in Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1782–83, (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1890), 16–21; ibid., 1786–87 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1893), 226–35. For the rate of interest, see Bancroft v. Wiser and Lee v. Frost, Suffolk Files, nos. 154262, 154342.
36. John Adams collected a flat rate of two days per diem for every default judgment. The papers for the Worcester session of the SJC do not indicate a consistent practice. In some instances the lawyers’ fees are included in the cost of drafting the writ; in others they are given as a separate charge (L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., The Legal Papers of John Adams, 3 vols. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965], I:IXX).
37. The judgments for White and Alexander were £16.5.10 and £74.16.5, respectively (Suffolk Files, no. 154286; SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 144, 146, 171).
38. Promissory note and copy of the lower court judgment in Suffolk Files, no. 154221; SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 133. Note too that an execution of judgment would not necessarily have made the creditor whole. If the debtor was insolvent, the judgment would remain unsatisfied, and the creditor’s only remedy was to hope that the debtor would ultimately become solvent and discharge the obligation.
39. Nelson, Americanization, 41. See also Shaiman, “History of Imprisonment for Debt,” 207.
40. Minot, 32; David Grayson Allen et al., eds., Diary of John Quincy Adams, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), 2:92. See also Caleb Strong to Theodore Sedgwick, June 27, 1786, Theodore Sedgwick Papers, MHS.
41. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution, 130–31; Hall, 60–61.
42. The bonds for each case list the primary and secondary sureties and may be found in the Suffolk Files for the pertinent cases.
43. Suffolk Files, nos. 154209, 154210, 154211, 154213, 154222, 154255, 154338 (the four attorneys in these eleven cases were Dwight Foster, Nathaniel Paine, John Sprague, and Caleb Strong), and nos. 154225–27, 154238, 154241, 154252, 154279, 154292–93, 154302, 154327.
One of the actions was Steam v. Johnson, described above in the action involving £10.12.6 (SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 122). In this case, Lincoln would have been subsidizing the creditor interest.
44. Legal Papers of John Adams I:XlVi; Register of All Prisoners Committed to Gaol, box 2, folder 1; Levi Lincoln Family Papers, octavo 5, AAS.
45. Moreover, the granting of services indicates lawyers had something to gain from subsidizing appeals. One could argue that Bangs collected no fees from these bonds, but that would, of course, leave two unanswered questions: what was the extent of the oppression suffered by defaulting debtors and why would he put money at risk for no return?
46. He had fifty-seven plaintiffs, twenty-five defendants, and one client in both capacities.
47. D. Hamilton Hurd, comp., History of Worcester County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1889), I:xxiv-xxv.
48. Kenneth J. Moynihan, “Meetinghouse vs. Courthouse: The Struggle for Legitimacy in Worcester, 1783–1788,” in Martin J. Kauffman, ed., Shays’ Rebellion: Selected Essays (Westfield, Mass.: Institute for Massachusetts History, 1987), 34–36, 43–47. See Lauren Abramson’s table, “Members of the Second Parish Society, 1787,” in her essay, “A New World View,” typescript, in AAS 1980 American Studies Seminar Papers.
49. Gerard W. Gawalt, The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760–1840 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 44–45, 51–55, 63. See also “Honestus” [Benjamin Austin], Some Observations of the Pernicious Effects of Lawyers (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1786), 6–7.
50. To be distinguished from the above-mentioned William Jennison Stearn.
51. Suffolk Files, no. 154198; SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 111–12.
52. SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 126–28.
53. Andrews to Salisbury, Jan. 5, Feb. 21, 1786, Salisbury Family Papers, box 5, folder 3. Despite a number of delinquent debtors during 1784–86, Salisbury did not commit anyone to jail in 1785–86 or have any cases before the Supreme Judicial Court in April 1785. See, in addition, his correspondence from Aaron Hunt, Peter Rowell, and John Coburn in box 5, ibid.
54. Wetmore to Salisbury, Apr. 6, 1786, ibid., box 5, folder 3. On Salisbury’s business, see especially the correspondence between him and his brother in Boston, ibid. See also Account Book, 1783–1810, General Merchandise, Salisbury Family Ledger, ibid.
55. Jennison to Sewall, Mar. 4, 1786, ibid., box 5, folder 3. Jennison, in Mar. 1784, was responsible for committing John Taylor to jail for a debt of over £913.
56. See, for example, Deputy Sheriff Levi Thayer’s inability to obtain an execution on £94.15.9 at the Worcester Court of Common Pleas. The Supreme Judicial Court ordered him to pay damages for that amount plus interest and costs (Pearce v. Thayer, SJC Records, Feb.–June 1785, 125, and Suffolk Files, no. 154241).
57. Maxwell Bloomfield, American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776–1876 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), 44. For an opposing view, see Hall, 181–82.
58. “Honestus,” Some Observations of Lawyers, 4–6. Austin’s critics seemed to have recognized the implications of this point. Indeed, they were somewhat mystified by Honestus’s identification with the debtor interest. Sidney Kaplan points out that Austin’s vilification of lawyers is the link that paradoxically made him a favorite of debtors (“‘Honestus’ and the Annihilation of the Lawyers,” South Atlantic Quarterly 48 [1949]: 412–14).
59. Demand determined the frequency of the justice of the peace sessions. In Worcester County, justice of the peace courts met almost continuously. See, for example, Benjamin Read, Judicial Records, 1786–1800, and Joseph Allen, Justice Trials before Joseph Allen, 1786–1794, Allen Family MS Coll., both in AAS.
60. Courts of Common Pleas met quarterly while the sessions of the Supreme Judicial Court were, depending upon the population of the county, annual or semiannual (Michael Hindus, “Guide to the Court Records of Early Massachusetts,” in Daniel Coquillette et al., eds., Law in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630–1800, Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 62 [Boston, 1984], 522–23).
61. Minot, 13–15, 39–40. See also Diary of J. Q. Adams 2:93, and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 411–13, 417–19. Rawson was one of the leaders of a group of insurgents in Leicester on Feb. 2, 1787 (Deposition of Samuel Flagg, Suffolk Files, no. 133939).

4. The Federalist Reaction to Shays’s Rebellion

1. Jonathan Smith, “The Depression of 1785 and Daniel Shays’ Rebellion,” WMQ, 3d ser., 5 (1948): 77–94, esp. 77–78. First published as a pamphlet in 1905, this article was republished by the WMQ because it was, in the view of the editor, “the best single article on the causes for the rebellion” (77).
2. William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620–1789, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), 2:779–81; Ralph Volney Harlow, “Economic Conditions in Massachusetts during the American Revolution,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 20 (1920): 163–90.
3. Hall, 96–110, 122–27, 192.
4. Gerald W. Gawalt, The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760–1840 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 45.
5. For a slightly later period and in different ways, Richard D. Brown has written about similar changes in “The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1790–1820,” Journal of American History 61 (1974): 29–51.
6. Stephen E. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 249; Hall, 166–89; James Sullivan to Benjamin Lincoln, Jan. 16, 1782, in Thomas C. Amory, Life of James Sullivan, with Selections from His Writings, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1859), 2:384; Massachusetts Spy, Jan. 31, 1782; Joseph Hawley to Ephraim Wright, Apr. 16, 1782, “Documents: Shays’s Rebellion,” American Historical Review 36 (1931): 776–78.
7. Hall, 256, 263–65, 286–93; Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1973), 111–13, 119, 366, 396–97; Merrill Jensen, The Making of the American Constitution (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), 142.
8. Stephen E. Patterson, “The Roots of Massachusetts Federalism: Conservative Politics and Political Culture before 1787,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1981), 31–61, 44–45, 48–50; Robert A. East, “The Massachusetts Conservatives in the Critical Period,” in Richard B. Morris, ed., The Era of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), 359–60.
9. Hawley to Ephraim Wright, Apr. 16, 1782, “Documents: Shays’s Rebellion,” 776–78.
10. Independent Chronicle, Apr. 5, 1784; Massachusetts Spy, Feb. 26, Mar. 25, 1784; [Thirty-First] Report of the Records Commissioners of the City of Boston Containing the Boston Town Records, 1784–96 31 (1903): 3, 12–14.
11. Minot, 9–10, 20–22; “An honest and chearful Citizen” and a column headed “Boston,” Independent Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1786; Circular Letter of the town of Boston, Sept. 8, 11, 1786, Boston Gazette, Sept. 18, 1786; “Charge of the Chief Justice to the Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex,” Independent Chronicle, Nov. 16, 1786; William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 18, 1786, “Letters of William Plumer, 1786–1787,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 11 (1910): 387–90.
12. See, for example, Alden Vaughan, “Shays’ Rebellion,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Historical Viewpoints, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 1:152–65; E. James Ferguson, The American Revolution: A General History, 1763–1790 (Homewood, 111.: Dorsey Press, 1979), 284–85.
13. “An American,” Boston Gazette, June 19, 1786; “Seneca,” Independent Chronicle, June 29, 1786; “An honest and chearful Citizen,” Independent Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1786; “Political Paragraphs,” Boston Gazette, Dec. 4, 1786.
14. See, for example, “A letter signed N.T.,” Independent Chronicle, June 29, 1786, which purports to be “an extract of a letter from a gentleman at W[est]t S[pringfiel]d, to his friend in a remote part of the country.” The letter discusses the plot in which both the author and correspondent are presumably engaged to restore British control of America. See also “Publicus” and “Boston,” Independent Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1786; Boston Circular Letter, Boston Gazette, Sept. 18, 1786; “Justice,” Boston Gazette, Oct. 9, 1786.
15. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (1918; rept. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), 308–9, 311–25, 359, 604; Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1938), 219–20; Patterson, Political Parties, 65–70, 75–86.
16. Patterson, Political Parties, 148–50, 158–61, 162, 179–80; Patterson, “The Roots of Massachusetts Federalism,” 45–46.
17. Pickering to Mrs. Mehitible Higginson, June 15, 1783, Pickering Papers, MHS, as quoted by Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781–1789 (New York: Knopf, 1950), 267.
18. See, for example, the advertisement of Samuel Eliot of Boston, Massachusetts Spy, July 19, 1784.
19. Weeden, Economic and Social History 2:819–20; Edmund C. Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1921–36), 8:xv.
20. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982), pt. 1: Neil McKendrick, “Commercialization and the Economy,” 9–194.
21. Massachusetts Spy, May 20, June 3, July 1, Aug. 26, Sept. 2, 9, 1784.
22. Szatmary, esp. 29–36.
23. Massachusetts Spy, Oct. 7, 14, 1784.
24. Ibid., Mar. 31, 1785.
25. Typical of the attacks on British factors in the Massachusetts press was one appearing under the heading “Worcester,” ibid., June 16, 1785.
26. Boston Gazette, Apr. 18, 1785. See also “To all whom it may concern,” ibid., Apr. II, 1785.
27. Ibid., May 9, 1785.
28. Merchants & Traders of Boston to Gov. Bowdoin, June 4, 1785, Committee of Tradesmen & Manufacturers to Gov. Bowdoin, June 7, 1785, Bowdoin-Temple Papers, MHS.
29. Nathan Dane to Rufus King, Oct. 8, 1785, in Charles R. King, ed., Life and Correspondence of Rufus King; Comprising His Letters, Private and Official, His Public Documents, and His Speeches, 6 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1894–1900), 1:67–69.
30. Stephen E. Patterson, “After Newburgh: The Struggle for the Impost in Massachusetts,” in James Kirby Martin, ed., The Human Dimensions of Nation Making (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), 218–42.
31. Massachusetts Spy, Nov. 24, 1785.
32. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (1921; rept. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1961), 44–46.
33. Theodore Sedgwick to Caleb Strong, Aug. 6, 1786, Letters of Members of Continental Congress 8:415.
34. James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1786, Charles Thomson’s Minutes of Congress, Aug. 16, 1786 (Rufus King’s speech), ibid., 8:403–4, 427–30.
35. James Monroe to James Madison, July 26, 1785, Richard Henry Lee to Madison, Aug. 11, 1785, David Howell to Gov. William Greene of Rhode Island, Aug. 23, 1785, ibid., 8:171–72, 180–81, 198–200.
36. John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1986), 100–107, 230–31, 238.
37. Massachusetts delegates to Gov. Bowdoin, Sept. 3, 1785, Rufus King to Nathan Dane, Sept. 17, 1785, Massachusetts delegates to Gov. Bowdoin, Nov. 2, 1785, Letters of Members of Continental Congress, 8:206–10, 218–19, 245–46.
38. King to John Adams, Nov. 2, Dec. 4, 1785, ibid., 8:247–48, 268–69.
39. Among the most vociferous antilawyer spokesmen was “Honestus,” Boston ropemaker Benjamin Austin, Jr., who wrote in Boston’s Independent Chronicle, Mar. 9, 30, May 25, 1786. See also “An Elector,” “One of the People,” and “Agrippa,” Boston Gazette, Apr. 3, June 12, 19, 1786, and “Equity,” Independent Chronicle, Apr. 27, 1786. For a full discussion of the antilawyer campaign, and especially of Austin, see Sidney Kaplan, “‘Honestus’ and the Annihilation of the Lawyers,” South Atlantic Quarterly 48 (1949): 401–20.
40. Boston Gazette, May 1, 1786. For the prolawyer view, see “Zenas,” Independent Chronicle, Apr. 27, 1786.
41. Caleb Strong to Theodore Sedgwick, June 24, 1786, Theodore Sedgwick Papers, MHS.
42. Rufus King warned Jonathan Jackson that the persons organizing the convention were opposed to a general regulation of trade and sought only to promote new state regulations (King to Jackson, June 11, 1786, Letters of Members of Continental Congress 8:389–90).
43. Theodore Sedgwick to Caleb Strong, Aug. 6, 1785, James Monroe to Gov. Patrick Henry, Aug. 12, 1786, ibid., 8:415, 421–25.
44. The mood of Federalists is indicated in Nathan Dane to Theodore Sedgwick and [Timothy?] Dwight, Feb. n, 1786, Nathan Dane Papers, Library of Congress; Theodore Sedgwick to Nathan Dane, Feb. 24, 1786, Livingston Papers, ser. 2, box 2, (1784–87), New-York Historical Society.
45. Artemas Ward wrote Gov. James Bowdoin that the insurgents’ demands could be easily satisfied, while most of the inhabitants of the interior were not very sympathetic to the Shaysites (Ward to Bowdoin, Dec. 7, 1786, Shays’ Rebellion Papers, MHS).
46. The material in this paragraph derives from a reading of the Boston Gazette and the Independent Chronicle for the fall and winter of 1786–87.
47. “Consideration,” Boston Gazette, Apr. 17, 1786.
48. Stephen Higginson to [Henry Knox], Nov. 25, 1786, Henry Knox Papers, MHS.
49. Knox to Stephen Higginson, Feb. 25, 1787, ibid.
50. Patterson, “Roots of Massachusetts Federalism,” 44–45.

5. “The Fine Theoretic Government of Massachusetts Is Prostrated to the Earth”: The Response to Shays’s Rebellion Reconsidered

Research for this chapter was funded by a grant from the American Philosophical Society. I wish to thank Richard D. Brown, William Fowler, Robert Gross, Shirley Marchalonis, Barry Shain, Robert J. Taylor, and Conrad Edick Wright for their criticisms. The quotation in the title is from Henry Knox to George Washington, Oct. 23, 1786, Henry Knox Papers, MHS.
1. Minot, 149, 192; Feer, 412–19.
2. Josiah Gilbert Holland, History of Western Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Springfield: S. Bowers, 1855), 297; see also John Fiske, “The Paper Money Craze of 1786 and the Shays’s Rebellion,” Atlantic Monthly 58 (1886), 376–85; Seth Chandler, History of the Town of Shirley, Massachusetts (Shirley: For the author, 1883), 707; Poets and Poetry of Springfield (Springfield: Conn. Valley Hist. Soc, 1902), 26–27.
3. Springfield Republican, Sept. 14, 1936, Daniel Shays file, Springfield City Library (hereafter cited as SCL); A AS Proceedings 15 (1902): 115, 118–20.
4. Joseph Parker Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1905), 31, copy at AAS; Feer, 101, 94, 434, 352, 265; Barbara Karsky, “Agrarian Radicalism in the Late Revolutionary Period (1780–1795),” in Erich Angermann, Marie-Luise Frings, and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., New Wine in Old Skins: A Comparative View of Socio-Political Structures and Values Affecting the American Revolution (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 89, 98; Szatmary, 70, 83, 95.
5. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 3 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), 1:277; Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781–1789 (New York: Knopf, 1950), 56, 365; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), esp. 22; Gordon Wood, “A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution,” WMQ, 3d ser., 23 (1966): 641, quoted in Szatmary, 76.
6. Cecilia M. Kenyon, “Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government,” WMQ, 3d ser., 12 (1955): 3–43; John P. Roche, “The Founding Fathers: A Reform Caucus in Action,” American Political Science Review 55 (1961): 799–816; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969); proclamation in MA, 189:3–4.
7. C. O. Parmenter, History of Pelham, Mass., from 1738 to 1898, Including the Early History of Prescott . . . (Amherst: Carpenter and Morehouse, 1898), 366; various petitions, Shays’s Rebellion Papers, AAS; Stephen T Riley, “Dr. William Whiting and Shays’s Rebellion,” AAS Proceedings 66 (1957): 157; a good discussion of conventions generally is in J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (New York: St. Martin’s, 1966), 227–44.
8. Adam Wheeler declaration, Nov. 17, 1786, petitions folder, Shays’s Rebellion Papers, AAS; Samuel Buffinton narrative, 102, Caleb Strong Papers, Forbes Library, Northampton (hereafter cited as FLN); Massachusetts Centinel, Jan. 17, 1787; Samuel Holden Parsons to Benjamin Lincoln, Sept. 29, 1786, Benjamin Lincoln Papers, MHS.
9. Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), 21; Massachusetts Centinel, Dec. 13, 1786, Daniel Stebbins Notebook, 45, FLN.
10. See note 7 above; Feer, 142–56, 530–39; Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion,” 37.
11. Massachusetts Centinel, Nov. 11, 1786.
12. MA, 189:3–4; “Proceedings of the Mob at Worcester,” MA, 318:7; Loammi Baldwin to James Bowdoin, Sept. 26, 1786, MA, 318:13; Massachusetts Centinel, Sept. 6, 1786; “Rumors from the Country” (William Pynchon probable author) and Testimony of Robert Fowler, AAS trial folder, Shays’s Rebellion Papers, AAS; Daniel Stebbins Notebook, 46.
13. Parmenter, History of Pelham, 3 73–74, 395–96; Worcester Magazine, second week of Oct. 1786; rank of prisoners in Worcester jail, Apr. 10, 1787, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23, MHS; Buffinton narrative, 102, Caleb Strong Papers.
14. Justus Forward Diary, Sept. 27, 1786, AAS; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and the American Character, 1773–1783 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1979), 237; Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Feb. 15, 1787, Theodore Sedgwick Papers, MHS; Silas Tyson to Benjamin Lincoln, Feb. 20, 1787, anonymous letter to Lincoln, Apr. 2, 1787, Lincoln Papers.
15. Holland narrative reprinted in appendix to Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion”; see also Jonathan Smith, “The Depression of 1785 and Daniel Shays’ Rebellion,” WMQ, 3d ser., 5 (1948): 88 (rept. of 1905 paper).
16. Parmenter, History of Pelham, 391–96; signed note dated Feb. 24, 1777, and Edward Phelan to Benjamin Russell, Dec. 27, 1786, misc. folder, Shays’s Rebellion Papers, AAS; James Avery Smith, “Families of Amherst, Massachusetts,” Reuben Dickinson, entry no. 1584, Jones Library, Amherst (hereafter cited as JL); warrants for “principal abettors,” Feb. 9, 1787, MA, 189:121; Wheeler listed in Massachusetts, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, 17 vols. (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1896–1908), 16:959.
17. Lee cited in Sidney Kaplan, “Veteran Officers and Politics in Massachusetts, 1783–1787,” WMQ, 3d ser., 9 (1952): 52 (see also Henry Knox to Marquis de Lafayette, Feb. 13, 1787, Knox Papers: “the great body of officers, and all those of proper grade, were firm to good government”); Szatmary, 64–65, 176; Paul Guzzi, Historical Data Relating to Counties, Cities, and Towns in Massachusetts (Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Office of the Secretary of State, 1975); Hopkinton petition, Feb. 1, 1787, petitions folder, Shays’s Rebellion Collection, AAS; Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23; government warrants in MA, 189:36, 75, 100, 121–22; men traced in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors in the Revolutionary War.
18. Royster, Revolutionary People at War, 239; Daniel Stebbins Notebook, 46–47; “Rumors from the Country” (William Pynchon?), Shays’s Rebellion Papers, AAS; Walter A. Dyer, “Embattled Farmers,” New England Quarterly 4 (1931): 467.
19. Szatmary, 60, 66; Karsky, “Agrarian Radicalism,” 90; Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 273, 274; for farm sizes, see various tax lists in MA; letters for 1786 in box 5, Salisbury Family Papers, AAS; Caleb Strong to Theodore Sedgwick, Mar. 13, 1786, Sedgwick Papers; Ebenezer Mattoon to Major Cushing, May 8, 1787, JL.
20. Barnabas Bidwell to David Daggett, June 16, 1787, AAS Proceedings, new ser., 4(1887): 368; Lemuel Tyler to (?) Maltbie, Sept. 26, 1786, SCL; Forward Diary, Sept. 27, 1786; Worcester Magazine, fourth week of Dec. 1786.
21. E. Haskell letter of Feb. 1787, SCL; Holland narrative in appendix to Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion”; Benjamin Lincoln Orderly Book, Jan. 31, Feb. 21, 1787, Shays’s Rebellion manuscripts at the Pittsfield Atheneum, copies at FLN.
22. Jedidiah Baldwin to Benjamin Lincoln, Jan. 19, 1787, Lincoln Papers, for Brookfield volunteers; Springfield volunteers listed in Shays’s Rebellion Papers, SCL; “Newbury Men in Shays’s Rebellion,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 77 (1941): 103–4; men traced in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors; Holland narrative, Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion”; Daniel Stebbins Notebook, 48; Massachusetts Centinel, Jan. 17, 1787; petition of army officers, Oct. 11, 1786, Lincoln Papers; proclamation of Feb. 4, 1787, MA, 189:108; Independent Chronicle, Aug. 17, 1786; Samuel Salisbury to Stephen Salisbury, Sept. 8, 1786, Salisbury Family Papers, box 5.
23. Data compiled by Philip Swain, seminar paper, Tufts Univ., 1979; Royster, Revolutionary People at War, 134; Ralph Volney Harlow, “Economic Conditions in Massachusetts during the American Revolution,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 20 (1920): 176–83; E. Wayne Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984).
24. Harlow, “Economic Conditions,” 176; Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy, Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (1947; rept. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 12–13.
25. Independent Chronicle, Aug. 24, 1786; Noah Webster to Timothy Pickering, Aug. 10, 1786, Timothy Pickering Papers, vol. 19, MHS; Diary of John Quincy Adams, David Grayson Allen et al., eds., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), 2:92, 150; farmer’s quotation from Harlow, “Economic Conditions,” 189; “An Address to the People of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Acts and Resolves of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1786–1787 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1893), 142–64.
26. For the problems of eastern Massachusetts, see William Pencak and Ralph J. Crandall, “Metropolitan Boston before the American Revolution: An Urban Interpretation of the Imperial Crisis,” Bostonian Society Proceedings (1985): 57–79; Massachusetts Centinel, Aug. 19, Sept. 6, 1786; “An Address to the People,” 146.
27. Independent Chronicle, Sept. 7, 1786; Massachusetts Centinel, Sept. 13, 1786, Jan. 7, 1787; Worcester Magazine, last week of Aug. and second week of Oct. 1786.
28. Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1954), 52.
29. Handlin, Commonwealth, 27–31, 247–48.
30. Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 32, 82.
31. Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 40–46; Handlin, Commonwealth, 27–31.
32. MA, 189:108.
33. Acts and Resolves, 1786–1787, fall session, ch. 32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45; “Address to the People,” 142–64; statement of Dr. Dix relative to case of Dr. Isaac Cheney, Shays’s Rebellion Collection, A AS; Worcester Magazine, third week of Jan. 1787.
34. MA, 189:64, subscription for funds dated Jan. 4, 1787; Braintree Petition dated Oct. 23, 1786, Shays’s Rebellion Collection, A AS; Peter Thacher to Thomas Cushing, Sept. 15, 1786, misc. MSS, MHS; John Pickering to Timothy Pickering, Oct. 27, 1786, Pickering Papers, vol. 19, MHS; Thomas Cabot to Benjamin Lincoln, Feb. 13, 1787, Lincoln Papers; Winthrop Sargent to Henry Knox, Jan. 30, 1787, Knox Papers.
35. Petition to John Brooks, Sept. 10, 1786, MA, 189:18–19; Peter Thacher to Thomas Cushing, Sept. 15, 1786, misc. MSS, MHS; town of Rowe, “To all it may concern,” Lincoln Papers.
36. Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1973), 105; Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 151–67. Shepherd had about 1, 200 men at Springfield, and Patterson an equal number in Berkshire, in addition to General Lincoln’s 4, 400 men, justifying Colonel Henry Jackson’s estimate of 10, 000 men in arms throughout the state, including 3, 000 insurgents (Jackson to Henry Knox, Jan. 28, 1787, Knox Papers; Kaplan, “Veteran Officers and Politics in Massachusetts,” 30; Minot, 104; Benjamin Lincoln to James Bowdoin, Feb. 27, 1787, Lincoln Papers).
37. Levi Lincoln to ?, Dec. 28, 1786, Emmett Collection, New York Public Library, quoted in Feer, 345; Jonas Cummins testimony relative to Caleb Cushing, Jan. 1, 1787, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23; Daniel Stebbins Notebook, 48; Holland narrative, Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion”; William Shepherd to James Bowdoin, Jan. 26, 1787, in American Historical Review 2 (1896–97): 694–95; James Bowdoin to William Shepherd, Jan. 30, 1787, SCL.
38. General Lincoln’s orders for Jan. 19, 21, Feb. 5, 1787, materials relating to Shays’s Rebellion at the Pittsfield Atheneum, copy at FLN; Benjamin Lincoln to John Patterson, Feb. 6, 1787, Walker-Rockwell Papers, box 1, New-York Historical Society; Benjamin Lincoln to James Bowdoin, Feb. 27, Mar. 1, 1787, with copies to General Knox, Knox Papers. Park Holland writes of a similar attitude on the part of a Captain Foote, who captured a group of Shaysites who only wanted to return home. He said: “That is the very best thing you can do, I earnestly wish it also. . . . If you need provision, or sleighs to carry you, I will furnish them, you are now at liberty to depart. They bade the General and all of us a friendly farewell, with their eyes filled with tears of joy and gratitude. I believe it is very seldom that we see so many men so completely happy as they were. They would be the last men that would raise their hands a second time against government” (Holland narrative, Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion”).
39. Henry Jackson to Henry Knox, Jan. 28, 1787, Knox Papers.
40. Boston Magazine, Dec. 5, 1786, quoted in appendix to Warren, “Shays’s Rebellion”; Henry Jackson to Henry Knox, Jan. 21, 1787, Knox Papers; Massachusetts Centinel, Nov. 8, 18, 1786; Diary of J. Q. Adams 2:150.
41. Massachusetts Centinel, Dec. 9, 1786, Jan. 13, 1787; Minot, 169–70; Henry Van Schaack to Theodore Sedgwick, Feb. 16, 1787, Sedgwick Papers.
42. Federalist Papers no. 14 and No. 10; Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates of the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: For the editor, 1830), 2:116; Minot, 192.

6. Regulators and White Indians: Forms of Agrarian Resistance in Post-Revolutionary New England

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and to the Institute of Early American History and Culture for their financial support during the preparation of this essay. The essay extends the analysis in my book, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1990). I appreciate the generous assistance afforded me by Gil Kelly, Michael McGiffert, Thad Tate, Fredrika Teute, and the late Stephen Botein of the Institute. I especially wish to thank the editor of this volume for his help in improving my work.
1. Szatmary, 101–5.
2. Alan Taylor, “‘Stopping the Progres of Rogues and Deceivers’: A White Indian Recruiting Notice of 1808,” WMQ, 3d ser., 42 (1985): 90–103; A. Mann to Gov. James Sullivan, Feb. 15, 1808, Lemuel Paine to Sullivan, Feb. 15, 1808, Henry Johnson’s deposition, Feb. 15, 1808, Pitt Dillingham’s deposition, Feb. 15, 1808, Council Files, box 16 (Aug. 1807–May 1808), MA.
3. William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 20, 1786, “Letters of William Plumer, 1786–1787,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications n (1910): 390–92; see also Jeremy Belknap, The History of New Hampshire, vol. 2, Comprehending the Events of Seventy-five Years, from MDCCXV to MDCCXC (Boston: For the author, 1791), 470–73; Lynn Warren Turner, The Ninth State: New Hampshire’s Formative Years (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983), 50–52.
4. William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 20, 1786, in “Letters of William Plumer,” 392; “An Account of the Insurrection in New Hampshire in 1786 . . . ,” New Hampshire Historical Society Collections 3 (1832): 120; Jeremy Belknap to Col. Josiah Waters, Sept. 24, 1786, MHS Collections, 6th ser., 4 (1891): 315; Belknap, New Hampshire 2:473.
5. Jeremy Belknap to Col. Josiah Waters, Sept. 24, 1786, MHS Collections, 6th ser., 4 (1891): 315–16; William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 21, 1786, “Letters of William Plumer,” 392; Belknap, New Hampshire 2:473–74.
6. Lynn W. Turner, William Plumer of New Hampshire, 1759–1850 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1962), 24; William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 21, 1786, “Letters of William Plumer,” 393–94.
7. William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 26, 1786, “Letters of William Plumer,” 394–96; Belknap, New Hampshire 2:475–76; Turner, The Ninth State, 55.
8. Belknap, New Hampshire 2: 474–75; William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 21, 1786, “Letters of William Plumer,” 392; “An Account of the Insurrection,” 121.
9. John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 215–24. For the logic of elite leniency to defeated rebels, see also chapter 8 below, by Gregory H. Nobles.
10. For the limited impact of republican notions on the Regulators, see Richard D. Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and Its Aftermath: A View from Springfield, Massachusetts, 1787,” WMQ, 3d ser., 40 (1983): 598–99; Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth, 222–24. For the protection covenant, see Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), esp. 37–46, 235–37. For the nature of political leadership in eighteenth-century New England towns, see Robert Zemsky, Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods: An Essay on Eighteenth-Century American Politics (Boston: Gambit, 1971), 28–38; Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 23–118; Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 10–15; Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), 10–15; Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York: Norton, 1979), 121–23; Turner, The Ninth State, 60–61. For the older Progressive interpretation of the Regulators as egalitarian democrats, see James Truslow Adams, New England in the Republic, 1776–1830 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926), 136–66.
11. John Howe, “Attitudes toward Violence in the Pre-War Period,” in John Parker and Carol Urness, eds., The American Revolution: A Heritage of Change (Minneapolis: Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1975), 84–95. For the King confrontation, see Silas Burbank’s deposition, June 28, 1773, and Jonathan Wingate’s deposition, June 16, 1773, in L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., The Legal Papers of John Adams, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), 2:121, 125; James T. Lea-mon, “The Stamp Act Crisis in Maine: The Case of Scarborough,” Maine Historical Society Newsletter 11 (Winter 1971): 74–93.
12. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth, 189–92. In contrast to my interpretation, Szatmary, 97–100, interprets alleged talk of marching on Boston as a new commitment to actually overthrowing their rulers. There is reason to doubt that any Regulators actually talked of marching on Boston, and there is reason to believe that if they did, it was more bluff than intent.
13. William Plumer to John Hale, Sept. 21, 1786, “Letters of William Plumer,” 394. For the evolving attitudes of Whig gentlemen, see Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” WMQ, 3d ser., 27 (1970): 33–35; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 319–21, 403–13.
14. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth, 224–29, 234–38. Richard D. Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 113–27.
15. Pitt Dillingham to Arthur Lithgow, Jan. 30, 1808, Related papers filed with Resolve 55 (June 19, 1809), MA; Dillingham to Nathan Weston, Feb. 4, 1808, Council Files, box 16 (Aug. 1807–May 1808). This section summarizes the discussion in my Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, 181–208.
16. John O. Webster’s deposition, Feb. 12, 1808, Council Files, box 16 (Aug. 1807–May 1808); James W. North, The History of Augusta from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Augusta, Me.: Clapp and North, 1870), 358, 373; Charles Vaughan to the Kennebeck Proprietors, Mar. 9, 1806, Kennebeck Proprietors Papers, box 6, Maine Historical Society.
17. Ephraim Ballard to the Kennebeck Proprietors, Jan. 1, 1796, Kennebeck Proprietors Papers, box 4; Elliot G. Vaughan to Col. Thomas Cutts, Oct. 30, 1810, misc. box 24 (“Papers Relating to Lands in Lincoln County . . . ”), MA. For the blasphemous style in English crowds, see E. P. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in Douglas Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 306.
18. Henry Johnson’s deposition, Feb. 15, 1808, Pitt Dillingham’s deposition, Feb. 15, 1808, Council Files, box 16 (Aug. 1807–May 1808); Abraham Welch to George Ulmer, July 11, 1801, Thurston Whiting and Benjamin Brackett to Henry Knox, Aug. 28, 1801, Henry Knox Papers, MHS.
19. Gov. James Sullivan to John Chandler, Apr. 2, 1808, House File (unpassed) no. 6311, MA; Sullivan to Chandler, Apr. 29, 1808, House File (unpassed) no. 6380, MA; Thomas C. Amory, Life of James Sullivan, with Selections from His Writings, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1859), 2:273–75; Charles Hayden to Sullivan, Feb. 13, 1808, George Bender’s deposition, Feb. 13, 1808, Council Files, box 16 (Aug. 1807–May 1808).
20. John Chandler to Gov. James Sullivan, Apr. 25, 1808, House File (unpassed) no. 6381, MA.
21. Amory, Life of James Sullivan 2:273–75; Gov. James Sullivan to Edmund Bridge, June 24, 1808, Eastern Lands Committee Papers, box 45, MA; Samuel Titcomb to Sullivan, Feb. 14, 1808, Council Files, box 16 (Aug. 1807–May 1808), MA.
22. Henry Knox to George Ulmer, July 11, 1801, to Ulmer and Robert Houston, Aug. 23, 1801, Knox Papers; [John Merrick], Remarks on Some of the Circumstances and Arguments Produced by the Murder of Mr. Paul Chadwick, at Malta, on the East Side of the Kennebec, on the 7th [sic] of September, 1809 (Hallowell, Me.: n.p., 1810), 19; North, Augusta, 354. Maine’s agrarian unrest is briefly addressed in Gordon Kershaw, The Kennebeck Proprietors, 1749–1773: “Gentlemen of Large Property and Judicious Men” (Somersworth, N.H.: New Hampshire Publishing Co., 1975), 290–95; Robert E. Moody, “Samuel Ely: Forerunner of Shays,” New England Quarterly 5 (1932): 105–34; Richard E. Ellis, Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), 224–29; Frederick S. Allis, Jr., ed., William Bing-ham’s Maine Lands, 1790–1820, Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 36 (Boston, 1954), 3–34.
23. James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1813 (New York: Knopf, 1970), 183, observes “many of the subsistence farmers of Worcester and ‘Old Hampshire’ [Regulator centers] were Federalists, while similarly circumstanced men in Maine exhibited a tenacious Republicanism.”
24. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth, 247–68; Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1984), 59; David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 1–28.
25. In his study of Worcester County, John Brooke concludes that the Jeffersonians found their constituency among the Baptists and artisans—groups that overlapped considerably—in the county’s larger, more commercial, more cosmopolitan towns, people and places that had been indifferent or hostile to the Regulation (Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth, 252–59). Similarly, James Banner observes that in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, the larger, more commercial towns voted Jeffersonian while the smaller, more isolated towns (that had been the Regulator strongholds) voted Federalist (Banner, To the Hartford Convention, 176). On New Hampshire’s Regulators lapsing back into their normal deference, see Turner, The Ninth State, 61. Middlesex County, Massachusetts, a haven of Regulators in 1786 and of Jeffersonians after 1790, was an anomaly to the general pattern; see Paul Goodman, The Democratic-Republicans of Massachusetts: Politics in a Young Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 82–83.
26. In 1803, of the 75 mid-Maine communities detected by the 1800 federal census, 55 voted, 20 did not; 29 of 55 towns cast 90% of their ballots for one candidate, 26 of those 29 for the Federalist Caleb Strong. The Federalists won majorities in 44 of 55 towns and 2, 861 of the 4, 005 votes (71%). I define “mid-Maine” as Kennebec County (excluding the northern towns set off to Somerset County), Lincoln County, and Hancock County west of the Penobscot River and south of Hampden. See Abstract of Votes for Governor and Lieutenant Governor, 1785–1819, MA; James Shurtleff, The Substance of a Late Remarkable Dream in Which Was Presented the Celestial Worlds and the Infernal Regions . . . (Hallowell, Me.: Peter Edes, 1800), 15, 19.
27. Ronald F. Banks, Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785–1820 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1970).
28. Ibid., 55–56; Amory, Life of James Sullivan 2:277; “The Betterment Act,” chap. 74 (Mar. 2, 1808), in Acts and Laws of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston, 1808), 290–92; North, Augusta, 373–76; John Merrick, Trial of David Lynn, Jabez Meigs, Elijah Barton, Prince Cain, Nathaniel Lynn, Ansel Meigs, and Adam Pitts for the Murder of Paul Chadwick at Malta in Maine on September 8, 1809 (Hallowell, Me.: Ezekiel Goodale, 1810), 1–11; Robert Hallowell Gardiner, “History of the Kennebeck Purchase,” Maine Historical Society Collections 2 (1847): 290–94.

7. Reinterpreting Rebellion: The Influence of Shays’s Rebellion on American Political Thought

1. James MacGregor Burns, J. W. Peltason, and Thomas E. Cronin, Government by the People, 13th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 2. See Richard D. Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 113–27. The most important exception to the consensus is Feer.
2. Ronald E. Pynn, American Politics: Changing Expectations, 2d ed. (Monterey, Calif: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co., 1984), 53; John C. Shea, American Government and Politics, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 68; G. Calvin Mackenzie, American Government: Politics and Public Policy (New York: Random House, 1986), 24; Henry Knox to George Washington, Dec. 21, 1784, cited in Szatmary, 127. On the place of conceptual history in political science, see James Farr, “Historical Concepts in Political Science: The Case of ‘Revolution,’” American Journal of Political Science 26 (1982): 688–708.
3. Isaac Kramnick, “The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787,” WMQ, 3d ser., 45 (1988): 3–32. On keywords, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), and on contested concepts, see W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Aristotelian Society Proceedings 56 (1955–56): 167–98; John N. Gray, “On the Contestability of Social and Political Concepts,” Political Theory 5 (1977): 331–48; Terence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 6–14. On the relationship between conceptual conflict and political reform, see William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1974), 1–7, 180–210. On transformation, see Ball, Transforming Political Discourse, 6–17. See also Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock, eds., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1988), 1–4. On the relation between transformation and tradition, see Russell L. Hanson, The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations with Our Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 22–53.
4. “A Citizen,” “From the Massachusetts Gazette. On Conventions,” Worcester Magazine, Aug. 1786; “A New Hampshire Freeman,” letter to the New Hampshire Mercury, Sept. 6, 1786; “A Countryman,” letter to ibid., Sept. 6, 1786; “Not a Mobb man,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Jan. 1787. For background on the political economy of the protests, see Szatmary, 1–36.
5. “Modestus,” “To the Member of the Convention,” Worcester Magazine, Oct. 1786.
6. “A Freeman,” letter to ibid., Oct. 1786; “Monitor,” letter to ibid., Nov. 1786; “A Friend to Humanity and Good Government,” letter to ibid., Feb. 1787; “Camillus,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Mar. 8, 1787. The “Camillus” letters were written by Fisher Ames.
7. “Suffolk,” “To Honestus,” Independent Chronicle, Jan. 18, 1787.
8. “Camillus,” letter to ibid., Mar. 8, 1787; “A Citizen of Philadelphia” [Peletiah Webster], “The Weakness of Brutus exposed . . . ,” 1787, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, N.Y.: n.p., 1888), 130; “Camillus,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Mar. 8, 1787. See also Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” 121–27.
9. “A Member of the Convention,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Oct. 1786. On radical Whig republicanism, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 283–84. For background on the concept of resistance, see Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1763–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 27–48.
10. “A Freeman,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Oct. 1786. On popular protests, see J. R. Pole, “Shays’s Rebellion: A Political Interpretation,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 416–34.
11. “Attleborough,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Aug. 31, 1786; “A Freeman,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Oct. 1786.
12. “Petition of a committee from several towns in the county of Worcester . . . under the command of Capt. Shays and Capt. Wheeler . . . ,” New Hampshire Mercury, Dec. 20, 1786; Luke Day, “To the Commanding Officer at Springfield,” Worcester Magazine, Feb. 1787; Francis Stone, Daniel Shays, and Adam Wheeler, “To the Honorable General Lincoln,” Independent Chronicle, Feb. 8, 1787; “A Member of the Convention,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Oct. 1786; Daniel Shays, “To the Honourable Major-General Lincoln,” ibid., Feb. 1787; “Attleborough,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Aug. 31, 1786.
13. “Jonathan of the Valley,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Oct. 5, 1786; Rev. James Madison to Jefferson, Mar. 28, 1787, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 23 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1950—), 11:252; “Ploughjogger,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Nov. 1786; Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 28, in Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library, 1961), 178.
14. “One of the People,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Dec. 1786; “A Worcester County Man,” letter to ibid., Jan. 1787; Knox to George Washington, Oct. 23, 1786, cited in Szatmary, 71; “Cassius,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Jan. 1787.
15. “A Member of Society,” “To Mr. Adam Wheeler,” Worcester Magazine, Jan. 1787; “Nestor,” letter to ibid., Jan. 1787; “Extract from a Thanks-giving Sermon, Delivered in the County of Middlesex,” ibid., Jan. 1787; “A Bostonian,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Aug. 10, 1786.
16. “An Other Citizen,” “On Conventions,” Worcester Magazine, Sept. 1786.
17. George Washington to Henry Lee, Oct. 31, 1786, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Writings of George Washington, 14 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889–93), 11:76; Henry Lee to James Madison, Oct. 25, 1786, in William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press and Charlottesville, Univ. Press of Va., 1962–91), 9:145; “Extract from a Sermon preached in a neighbouring town, on the late Thanksgiving Day,” Worcester Magazine, Jan. 1787; “Camillus,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Mar. 1, 1787; Ames to the Massachusetts ratifying convention, Jan. 15, 1788, in Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution . . . , 5 vols., 2d ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1861–63), 2:10. For background, see Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988), 237–87.
18. “Brutus,” letter to the New York Journal, Jan. 24, 1788, in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist, 7 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 2:416; Richard Henry Lee to Henry Lee, Sept. 13, 1787, cited in Szatmary, 126; “A Columbian Patriot,” “Observations on the new Constitution . . . ,” Pamphlets, 22; James Warren to John Adams, May 18, 1787, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., Warren-Adams Letters . . . John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743–1814, 2 vols., MHS Collections 72–73 (Boston, 1917–25), 2:292.
19. Shays et al. to Luke Day, Jan. 20, 1787, and rebel enlistment form, 1787, both cited in Szatmary, 97.
20. “A Member of the Convention,” letter to the Worcester Magazine, Oct. 1786. For background on the concept of revolution, see Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 94–143; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 28–36; and for its role in the mid-1780s, Michael Lienesch, “Historical Theory and Political Reform: Two Perspectives on Confederation Politics,” Review of Politics 45 (1983): 95–99.
21. “Candidus,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Dec. 6, 1787, in Complete Anti-Federalist 4:125; “Centinel,” letter to the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, Jan. 16, 1788, ibid., 2:185; “Petition . . . of Shays and . . . Wheeler,” New Hampshire Mercury, Dec. 20, 1786; Jefferson to Madison, Jan. 30, 1787, Papers of James Madison 9:247; Jefferson to Ezra Stiles, Dec. 24, 1786, Papers of Thomas Jefferson 10:629. In one of Jefferson’s most famous letters, he would explain to Abigail Adams why he hoped that Shays and his supporters would be pardoned: “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere” (Feb. 22, 1787, ibid., 11:174).
22. Madison to Washington, Feb. 21, 1787, in Edmund Burnett, ed., Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1921–36), 8:546; Massachusetts General Court, Feb. 4, 1787, cited in Szatmary, 106; “Camillus,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Mar. 1, 1787. See John Adams to Benjamin Rush, May 21, 1807, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Charles E. Little and James Brown, 1851–65), 9:598.
23. “Brutus,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, July 13, 1786; “Landholder,” letter to the Connecticut Courant, Nov. 26, 1787, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Essays on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Historical Printing Club, 1892), 151; “Cassius,” letter to the Massachusetts Gazette, Nov. 23, 1787, ibid., 15.
24. Hamilton, Federalist No. 9, in Federalist Papers, 71; Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States . . . ,” Works of John Adams 4:285, 287.
25. “Caesar,” letter to the New York Daily Advertiser, Oct. 17, 1787, Essays, 289; Adams, “Defence,” Works of John Adams 6:151; “Landholder,” letter to the Connecticut Courant, Dec. 3, 1787, in Essays, 157.
26. John Dickinson to the Federal Convention, June 2, 1787, Hamilton to the Federal Convention, June 26, 1787, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1911), 1:87, 432.
27. John Jay to John Adams, Nov. 1, 1786, in Henry P. Johnston, ed., The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890–93), 31214; “Cassius,” letter to the Massachusetts Gazette, Sept. 18, 1787, in Essays, 6, 7.
28. Hamilton to the New York ratifying convention, June 28, 1788, Debates 2:360.
29. “Cato Uticensis,” letter to the Virginia Independent Chronicle, Oct. 17, 1787, in Complete Anti-Federalist 5:121; “Cato,” letter to the New York Journal, Nov. 22, 1787, in Essays, 267. On Clinton, see Szatmary, 117.
30. Shays, “To the honourable Major-General Lincoln,” Worcester Magazine, Feb. 1787.
31. “A Countryman,” letter to the New York Journal, Dec. 20, 1787, in Complete Anti-Federalist 6:82.
32. Patrick Henry to the Virginia Convention, June 24, 1788, Debates 3:595; “Federal Farmer,” “Observations leading to a fair examination of the system of government, proposed by the late Convention . . . ,” Oct. 8, 1787, Pamphlets, 280. On the Antifederalist concept of reform, see Storing, “What the Anti-Federalists Were For,” Complete Anti-Federalist 1:71–76. See also Michael Lienesch, “In Defence of the Antifederalists,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 65–87.
33. “A Plebian,” “An Address to the People of the State of New York,” 1788, Pamphlets, 94; “Agrippa,” letter to the Massachusetts Gazette, Nov. 27, 1787, in Essays, 57; “Vox Populi,” letter to the Massachusetts Gazette, Nov. 9, 1787, in Complete Anti-Federalist 4:50.
34. “Federal Farmer,” “Observations,” Oct. 8, 1787, Pamphlets, 279; “An Old Whig,” letter to the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, 1787, in Complete Anti-Federalist 3:39; “Brutus, Jr.,” letter to the New York Journal, Nov. 8, 1787, in Complete Anti-Federalist 6:39; S. Thompson to the Massachusetts ratifying convention, Jan. 23, 1788, Debates 2:80.
35. Madison to James Madison, Sr., Feb. 25, 1787, Papers of James Madison 9:297; Jay to Jefferson, Apr. 24, 1787, Papers of Thomas Jefferson 11:313; Washington to Henry Lee, Oct. 31, 1787, Writings of Washington 11:78. On the election of Hancock, and its relation to the rebellion, see Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” 120–21.
36. “Phineas,” “From the Hampshire Gazette,” Worcester Magazine, Feb. 1787; “The Republican,” letter to the New Hampshire Mercury, Mar. 14, 1787; “From the Massachusetts Centinel,” Worcester Magazine, Mar. 1787; Washington to Madison, Mar. 31, 1787, Papers of James Madison 9:343.
37. David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem, 1786–1787, ed. Luther G. Riggs (New Haven: Thomas H. Pease, 1861), 6, 20, 37.
38. “Camillus,” letter to the Independent Chronicle, Mar. 15, 1787.
39. Rev. Thomas Thacher to the Massachusetts ratifying convention, Feb. 4, 1788, Debates 2:144; Josiah Smith to the Massachusetts ratifying convention, Jan. 25, 1788, ibid., 2:102, 103; Rev. Thomas Thacher to the Massachusetts ratifying convention, Feb. 4, 1788, ibid., 2:146.
40. “Cassius,” letter to the Massachusetts Gazette, Nov. 16, 1787, in Essays, 14, 13; “Caesar,” letter to the Daily Advertiser, Oct. 17, 1787, ibid., 290; “A Plain Dealer,” letter to the Virginia Independent Chronicle, Feb. 13, 1788, ibid., 391. On Shays’s exile, see Szatmary, 119.
41. Uriah Foster to Jefferson, Dec. 11, 1787, Papers of Thomas Jefferson 12:416; “Centinel,” letter to the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, Apr. 5, 1788, in Complete Anti-Federalist 2:204–5; “Federal Farmer,” “Observations,” Oct. 15, 1787, Pamphlets, 321; “Agrippa,” letter to the Massachusetts Gazette, Jan. 20, 1788, in Essays, 113.
42. Ames to George Richards Minot, July 23, 1789, in Seth Ames, ed., Works of Fisher Ames, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 1:66; Minot, iii, 192.
43. Mercy Warren, “History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution,” 1805, Complete Anti-Federalist 6:203, 204, 205, 207. On reports of Shays’s last days, see Brown, “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” 126–27.
44. Adams to Jefferson, June 30, 1813, Works of John Adams 10:47.

8. Shays’s Neighbors: The Context of Rebellion in Pelham, Massachusetts

Earlier versions of this essay were also presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (1984) and the History Department Colloquium at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1987). I am grateful to all the participants in those gatherings—especially Alfred L. Young, Richard D. Brown, and Robert A. Gross—for their comments and suggestions. None of them, of course, bears responsibility for any weaknesses that remain in this final version. I am also extremely grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association for State and Local History, and the Georgia Tech Foundation for the generous financial assistance that made the research possible.
1. “The Confession of Capt. Shays,” in C. O. Parmenter, History of Pelham, Mass., from 1738 to 1898, Including the Early History of Prescott . . . , (Amherst: Carpenter and Morehouse, 1898), 399–402.
2. Szatmary; Barbara Karsky, “Agrarian Radicalism in the Late Revolutionary Period (1780–1795),” in Erich Angermann, Marie-Luise Frings, and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., New Wine in Old Skins: A Comparative View of Socio-Political Structures and Values Affecting the American Revolution (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 87–114.
3. For recent critiques of the New England community studies, see Gregory H. Nobles, “The New England Town: The Past Fifteen Years,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 131–38; Marcus Rediker, “Toward a ‘Real, Profane History’ of Early American Society,” Social History 10 (1985): 367–81.
4. The differences among Massachusetts towns at the time of Shays’s Rebellion are analyzed in Hall, esp. chaps. 6–8.
5. The standard sources for identifying insurgents are the lists of men who surrendered their arms and took the oath of loyalty in the spring of 1787, in MA, vol. 190. Of these men, 103 gave their residence as Pelham, but that number is too high. After comparing the list of Pelham insurgents against Pelham’s 1771, 1780, and 1784 valuation lists, the 1790 federal census, a 1795 tax list, and a 1799 voter list, I have excluded 15 of the alleged Pelhamites because neither they nor their family names ever appeared on a town list. If they lived in Pelham, they did so only briefly, and I suspect their identification with Pelham in 1787 was probably a matter of administrative convenience or confusion. The remaining 88 Shay sites who did have some definite connection with the town can be joined with Daniel Shays and Henry McCulloch—two Pelham insurgents who did not take the loyalty oath in 1787—to make a total of 90. They represent 41.5% of the 217 polls on the 1784 valuation.
6. Pelham’s state tax for 1786 was £605.12.6, and the town’s place among other county towns is shown in the following table.
State Tax, Hampshire County Towns, 1786
Tax No. of towns in range (N = 58)
Over £1, 000
6
£710–1, 000
10
£401–700
20
£100–400
22
Mean tax = £564
Median tax = £529
Source: Joseph Barlow Felt, Collections of the American Statistical Association 1 (1847): 458–60.
The population estimate for Pelham is based on multiplying the number of polls in the 1784 valuation, 217, by four, which yields a total of 868. (The use of the multiplier of four is suggested by Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal Census of 1790 [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932], xxiii.) The 1790 census lists 246 polls for Pelham and a total population of 1, 040, which reflects about the same 1:4 ratio. The median number of polls per town in Hampshire County in 1784 was 183, and the median population in 1790 was 873. Population figures are taken from Felt, Collections 1:167, 564–66.
7. A brief discussion of the Pelham settlers’ previous experience in Worcester is in William Lincoln, History of Worcester, Massachusetts, from Its Earliest Settlement to September, 1836 (Worcester: C. Hersey, 1837), 47–48.
8. For the history of Pelham’s settlement, see Parmenter, History of Pelham, 7–37.
9. Gregory H. Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1740–1775 (New York and London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 195–96.
10. For an overview of backcountry protest, see James A. Henretta and Gregory H. Nobles, Evolution and Revolution: American Society, 1600–1820 (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1987), 118–21.
11. Sylvester Judd Manuscript, “Northampton Vol. 1,” 482–83, Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass.
12. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara M. Solomon, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 1:238–39.
13. Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), chaps. 3 and 4.
14. Ibid., 98–103, 172–73. See also Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), chap. 4.
15. See the 1745 tax list in Pelham Town Record, 1743–79, Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst Library, microfilm.
16. Grant, Kent, 34–39. There is a more refined version of Grant’s estimate in his doctoral dissertation, “A History of Kent, 1738–1796: Democracy on Connecticut’s Frontier” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 1957), app. 3:323–31. See also Gross, Minutemen, 213–14n, for a similar estimate of the amount of land needed for “a middle class standard of living.”
17. The figures for 1746 are in the 1746 tax list in Pelham Town Record, 1743–79. For later population growth in Pelham and other towns in the region, see Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole, 195–96.
18. The economic development of Pelham is discussed in Gregory H. Nobles, “Hardship in the Hilltowns: Agricultural Development and Economic Conditions in Pelham, Massachusetts, 1740–1790,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, 1980.
19. Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” WMQ, 3d ser., 41 (1984): 354.
20. For a general discussion of early economic conditions in the western Massachusetts hill towns, see Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole, 119–20. For information on grain and cattle production, see Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency,” 357–61. For a detailed discussion of the role of cattle production, see J. Ritchie Garrison, “Farm Dynamics and Regional Exchange: Connecticut Valley Beef Trade, 1670–1850,” Agricultural History 61 (1987): 1–17. It should be noted that in the early part of the nineteenth century, Pelham farmers did discover a marketable surplus commodity—the soil itself. Housekeepers in Northampton and other valley towns used sand to clean their floors, and Pelham’s fields provided more than an adequate supply to meet the demand of the whole region. See Christopher Clark, “Household, Market, and Capital: The Process of Economic Change in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1981).
21. Nobles, “Hardship in the Hilltowns.”
22. Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 73. For a similar categorization compared to Massachusetts towns in general, see Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, “Agriculture and Society in the Towns of Massachusetts, 1771: A Statistical Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., Boston Univ., 1981).
23. Szatmary, chap. 2. The Conway petition is quoted on pp. 33–34.
24. Of thirty-one insurgents for whom some birth information is known, sixteen (51%) were born between 1752 and 1762, inclusive, which would make them between twenty-five and thirty-five at the time of the rebellion. Another four (13%) were born between 1763 and 1767, inclusive, and were therefore at least in their twenties. Five Shaysites (16%) were younger than twenty, and the remaining six—including Daniel Shays—were over thirty-five. Still, the paucity of the evidence makes any conclusions based on birth information alone only tentative at best. I have also consulted the Vital Records of Pelham, Massachusetts, to the Year 1830 (Boston: New-England Historic Genealogical Society, 1902) in order to find the Shaysites listed either as new husbands in the marriage records or as new fathers in the birth records; in the latter case I have assumed that most men married within two years before the birth of their first child.
I have consulted Massachusetts, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, 17 vols. (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1896–1908), and the Revolutionary War Pension Records in the National Archives, Washington, D.C., to determine the military service of Pelham’s ninety Shaysites. Thirty-nine (43%) were listed in one source or the other.
Daniel Shelton, in “‘Elementary Feelings’: Pelham Massachusetts, in Rebellion” (Honors thesis, Amherst College, 1981), 119–20, has counted some seventy-two debt cases in the Hampshire County Court of Common Pleas between 1782 and 1786 that involved Pelham men. In thirty of those cases, however, Pelham men were plaintiffs, and in only forty-two were they defendants; more important, only three future insurgents were sued for debt. My own examination of the court records has yielded similar results. Between 1781 and 1784 the county court records contain warrants for twenty-seven executions for debt—that is, the confiscation of property or imprisonment of debtors—but none involved Pelham residents. See Hampshire County Court of Common Pleas, vol. A/20 (1715–90), 54–80, Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass., microfilm.
25. Szatmary, 60. In describing Brookfield as a “market town,” Szatmary overstates the town’s economic development. For a detailed economic analysis of Brookfield, see Susan Geib, “Changing Works: Agriculture and Society in Brookfield, Massachusetts, 1785–1820” (Ph.D. diss., Boston Univ., 1981).
26. Parmenter, History of Pelham, 410–12.
27. James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from Its First Settlement in 1654, 2 vols. (Northampton: Press of Gazette Printing Co., 1898–1902), 2:373–74.
28. Ibid.
29. Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs (1798; rept. New York: Cornish, Lamport, 1851), 53–54. For a discussion of the religious context of Pelham, see chapter 10 below, by Stephen A. Marini.
30. The term “generalissimo” comes from the “Black List” in the Robert Treat Paine Papers, MHS.
31. Edward W. Carpenter and Charles Frederick Morehouse, The History of the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts . . . (Amherst: Carpenter and More-house, 1896), 124.
32. Minot, passim.
33. Mason A. Green, Springfield, 1636–1886: History of Town and City (Springfield, Mass.: C. A. Nichols, 1888); Carpenter and Morehouse, History of Amherst, 135–36.
34. Gregory H. Nobles, “The Politics of Patriarchy in Shays’s Rebellion: The Case of Henry McCulloch,” in Peter Benes, ed., Families and Children, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1985 (Boston: Boston Univ., 1987), 37–47.
35. For a brief biographical sketch of Shays, see Parmenter, History of Pelham, 391–402.
36. Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1954), 156–58.
37. For overviews of political behavior in western Massachusetts in the early stages of the American Revolution, see ibid., chaps. 4 and 5, and Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole, chap. 7.
38. For a discussion of local politics in the western counties in the Revolutionary era, especially the rise of the Berkshire Constitutionalists and the responses to the 1778 constitution, see Taylor, Western Massachusetts, chap. 5; Ronald Peters, The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: A Social Compact (Amherst: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1978), 18–23; Stephen E. Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 204–8; Theodore M. Hammett, “Revolutionary Ideology in Massachusetts: Thomas Allen’s ‘Vindication’ of the Berkshire Constitutionalists,” WMQ, 3d ser., 33 (1976): 514–27; John L. Brooke, “To the Quiet of the People: Revolutionary Settlements and Civil Unrest in Western Massachusetts, 1774–1789,” ibid., 46 (1989): 425–62.
39. For the returns of Pelham and Greenwich, see Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, eds., The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), 212–13, 321–22.
40. For a discussion of the Ely riots and other local disturbances, see Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 111–27.
41. Trumbull, History of Northampton, 2:346–48.
42. Justus Forward Diary, Sept. 28, 1786, AAS.
43. Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 158–67; Szatmary, chap. 6.
44. Nobles, “Politics of Patriarchy,” 45.
45. For a discussion of the political identification of former Shaysites after 1790, see Richard D. Brown, Massachusetts: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1978), 125; and Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790S–1840S (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 167.

9. A Deacon’s Orthodoxy: Religion, Class, and the Moral Economy of Shays’s Rebellion

Portions of this chapter have appeared in John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and are reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
1. Shays’s Rebellion Collection, 1786–87, folder 5, AAS.
2. Witness list, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23 (box on Shays’s Rebellion), MHS. On Caleb Curtis, see Anson Titus, Jr., Charlton, Historical Sketches (Southbridge, Mass.: G. M. Whitaker, 1877), 14; L. Kinvin Wroth et al., eds., Province in Rebellion: A Documentary History of the Founding of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1774–1773 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 2821–23n.
3. Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1954); Feer; Hall. The most important discussions of the relationship between the Great Awakening and eighteenth-century politics include Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966); Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977); Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979); Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” WMQ, 3d ser., 34 (1977): 519–41. For critiques of this literature, see Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” Journal of American History 69 (1982): 305–35; John M. Murrin, “No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations,” Reviews in American History 11 (1983): 161–71.
4. William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), 2:777–78; Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 34–39.
5. Szatmary, 60–61; Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 111.
6. For ministerial support for the government, see Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 147–48; Szatmary, 89 n.164; Emory Washburn, Historical Sketches of the Town of Leicester, during the First Century from Its Settlement (Boston: John Wilson and Son, 1860), 331; David D. Field and Chester Dewey, eds., A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts (Pittsfield, Mass.: S. W. Bush, 1829), 216–17, 237, 301; Anson E. Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Univ. Library, 1909), 219.
7. Williston Walker, ed., The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (1893; rept. Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1960), 22, 212–14, 221; William E. Barton, The Law of Congregational Usage (Chicago: Puritan Press, 1916), 173–75; William T. Youngs, God’s Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700–1750 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 96–97, 160 n.14.
8. The economic causes of the Regulation have been treated in detail in Taylor, Western Massachusetts; Hall; Szatmary; and E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961). I use the term “moral economy” in broadly the same spirit as it was originally defined by Edward P. Thompson, in “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136, of corporate tradition of interference with private property and contract in times of economic crisis. For a parallel analysis of orthodoxy and dissent in this region, see John L. Brooke, “For Civil Worship to Any Worthy Person: Burial, Baptism, and Community on the Massachusetts Near Frontier, 1730–1790,” in Robert B. St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600–1860 (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988), 463–85; also published as “Enterrement, Bapteme et Communaute en Nouvelle-Angleterre (1730–1790),” Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 42 (1987): 653–86.
9. See, for example, Joseph S. Clark, A Historical Sketch of the Congregational Churches in Massachusetts, from 1620 to 1838 (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1858), 217–20. The rise and fall of Congregational revivalism between 1774 and the late 1770s is discussed in Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth, 151–52, 177.
10. Figures based on an analysis of the presence of orthodox ministers listed in Fleeming’s Register for New England and Nova Scotia . . . 1773 (Boston: Fleeming, 1773), 69–72; Pocket Almanack for 1787 . . . Massachusetts Register (Boston: Fleets, 1786), 57–60. More generally, see Taylor, Western Massachusetts, 68; Paul R. Lucas, The Valley of Discord: Church and Society along the Connecticut River, 1636–1723 (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1976); Gregory H. Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1740–1773 (New York and London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Masonic affiliations for Daniel Shays, Luke Day, and Elijah Day from William R. Denslow, 10, 000 Famous Freemasons, 4 vols. (Independence: Missouri Lodge of Research, 1957–61), 4:127; for Daniel Shays, see also Rebecca D. Symmes, ed., A Citizen-Soldier in the American Revolution: The Diary of Benjamin Gilbert in Massachusetts and New York (Cooperstown: New York State Historical Association, 1980), 22–23, 27–29.
11. Marini, Radical Sects, 44ff.; see also Douglas H. Sweet, “Church Vitality and the American Revolution: Historiographical Consensus and Thoughts toward a New Perspective,” Church History 45 (1976): 341–57. For the expansion of Baptist churches during this revival, compare the lists in Minutes of the Warren [Baptist] Association, in Their Meeting at Middleborough, Sept. g, & 10, 1777 (Boston: E. Draper, 1777), 1–2, and Minutes of the Warren [Baptist] Association, Convened at Providence, the 10th of Sept. 1782 (Providence: Carter, [1782]), 1–3. The role of the Baptists in the constitution-making process is discussed in Elisha P. Douglas, Rebels and Democrats: The Struggle for Equal Rights and Majority Rule during the Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955), 138–41, 192–94, and in Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth, 158–88.
12. Marini, Radical Sects, 40–54, 63–101, and passim.
13. Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of New Hampshire (1798; rept. New York: Dial Press, 1924), 52–53.
14. Charles Tilly, The Vendee, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), 323ff.
15. For sources, see Appendix B to this chapter.
16. On the hierarchy of towns, see Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976); Hall, 3–22. The cultural and economic geography of this region is described in detail in Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth. The estimate that 23.5% of the population of these towns was affiliated with dissenting societies is based on an analysis of church records and tax valuations. It assumes that the proportion of the top quintile of the valuation affiliated with dissenting societies was typical of the entire population.
17. Hall, 195; Szatmary, 29.
18. On deference in the Federalist era, see James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York: Knopf, 1970); David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 211ff.; and esp. Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 128ff.
19. James Draper, History of Spencer, Massachusetts . . . (Worcester: H.J. Howland, 1860), 62; Oakham Evidence, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23; MA, 190:107, 165–66; Henry B. Wright and Edwin D. Harvey, The Settlement and History of Oakham, Massachusetts (New Haven: n.p., 1947), 285. The debt cases are from Suffolk Files Collection, files no. 155016, 155133, 155148, and Worcester County Court of Common Pleas Record Book, 13 (1785–86): 62, 67, 76, 127, 175, 191, 200, 217, 223, 240, 259, 268, 273 (both sources in the Judicial Archives, located at the Massachusetts State Archives building, Columbia Point, Boston).
20. Jail Committee Report, Dec. 1785, Worcester County Papers, box 2, folder 2, A AS. I am indebted to Lou Mazur for this reference.
21. An episode involving Justice Percival Hall of New Braintree provides a further perspective on the sympathies of some of the lesser gentry for the Regulators. Justice Hall, accused of aiding the insurgents, printed a spirited defense in the Worcester Magazine 2 (1787): 587ff. Hall admitted to having attended “a meeting of the principal officers of the insurgents . . . to dissuade [them] from their purposes of taking up arms and rising against the government” and defended his transcribing a petition at this meeting by noting that he “could write faster than others there.” Hall also defended his allowing a Regulator company to be quartered in his household, declaring that he was “possessed with too tender feelings of humanity to drive them from shelter in such a cold and bitter season.” Declaring himself “a firm supporter of the laws and government of the land,” Justice Hall counterbalanced his sympathy for the Regulators by sending his son to serve with the government militia. Such men could hold firmly patriarchal assumptions. Worrying that his son might join the government militia, Major Francis Willson of Holden swore that “he should have not marched alive,” and that “the Elderly people ought to take the matter up & not the youth.” His fears were ultimately unwarranted, as his son would be taunted as a “Mob boy” as he was a “Mob man.” Overall, in these six towns, thirty-five Regulators were the sons of other Regulators, and in only two instances were fathers and sons on the opposition side of the confrontation. Testimony taken from Sturbridge laborers in 1787 indicates that their masters had supplied them with arms and provisions to join the Regulators (testimony of John Dodd and Ann Webb against Francis Willson of Holden, Shays’s Rebellion Collection, folder 5, AAS; Sturbridge evidence, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23). On the basis of this evidence I have assumed that men in the propertyless 9th and 10th deciles of the 1783 valuation were acting as members of other men’s households, and I have arbitarily assigned them to their fathers’ wealth quintile. See table 9.2.
22. The oaths of allegiance were overwhelmingly administered by justices who had some involvement in the economic politics of the 1780s.
Justices and oaths of allegiance in southwest Worcester County (sixteen towns total)
justices Justices administering oaths Total oaths administered
Friend of Government
9
2
5
Position unknown
9
3
76*
Regulator sympathies†
8
8
400
* Sixty of these 76 oaths were administered by Justice Paul Mandell of Hardwick.
† Justice of the peace was a convention leader, voted against consolidation in January 1781, was a brother of a Regulator, or represented debtors in the Court of Common Pleas between December 1783 and July 1786.
23. Investigations of the religious affiliations of Regulators in the Berkshire towns of Pittsfield and West Stockbridge and the Hampshire towns of Ashfield, Conway, Colerain, and Pelham also indicate that dissenters were less likely to be drawn into the insurgency. On wealth stratification and town officeholding, see Cook, The Fathers of the Towns, 80–84.
24. Stephen Burroughs’s description of the electioneering by Israel Waters of Charlton is particularly revealing (Burroughs, Memoirs, 192–93). Several of the Charlton dissenters who served with the government light horse married into orthodox gentry families in the 1790s, and several were awarded judicial placeholdings, steps on the path toward a dissenting gentry.
25. The dissenter Regulators had, on average, almost twice the debt load as the nominally-orthodox Regulators from Oakham and Spencer, but the dissenter Friends of Government, with obligations to coastal merchants, owed the greatest amount of money.
Levels of indebtedness: dissenters from the six towns vs. the nominally orthodox in Spencer and Oakham
Regulator No evidence Friend of Govt. Total
Oakham/Spencer
(All nondissenters)*
Debtors
23
H
0
37
% in wealthiest quintile
39.1
28.6
35.1
Mean debt
£22.9
£23.7
£22.8
Mean indebtedness
£29.9
£36
£31.4
Dissenters
Debtors
7
16
6
29
% in wealthiest quintile
0
41.1
50
34.5
Mean debt
£20
£42.9
£59
£34.6
Mean indebtedness
£51
£48.9
£73–7
£47.7
Sources: 1783 valuations, and material cited in Appendix B.
*There were no dissenting societies in these two towns, but there were a number of dissenters living in Spencer affiliated with societies in Charlton and Leicester. They are included in the “Dissenter” category.
26. Dudley and Charlton testimony, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23. None of the testimony against the Leicester, Charlton, or Sturbridge Regulators indicates that they were active before the December court closings. Four of the six dissenting creditors who sided with the Regulators were among the group mobilized by Caleb Curtis in Charlton, including David Dresser’s cousin Richard Dresser, Jr.
27. Testimony against Asa Sprague, folder 5, Shays’s Rebellion Collection; New Braintree evidence, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23; John Noble, A Few Notes on Shays Rebellion (Worcester, Mass.: Charles Hamilton, 1903), 16–25; Leicester Articles of Agreement, MA, 318:20 (152 in light pencil).
28. Among sixty some rioters from Worcester County towns for which evidence for religion is available, fully one-half were affiliated with Baptist meetings or would join a Universalist society in 1785. This Universalist connection was very extensive, involving rioters from seven different towns, and at least two Universalist notables provided sureties for rioters. Of these sixty rioters, five can be connected to the Regulation, and six to the government militia. More impressionistic evidence suggests that such small riots in Hampshire and Berkshire counties were similarly situated in the Baptist neighborhoods. Rioters in all three western counties are listed in Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Docket Books, 1783: 212–20, 232, 239–41, 1784: 265, 1785: 177, Judicial Archives; see also Dudley Riot evidence, Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23. Universalists in southwest Worcester are listed in The Second Religious Society in Oxford and Adjacent Towns (Called Universalist), Record Book, 1785–1845, Andover Harvard Theological Library; Mabel C. Coolidge, The History of Petersham, Massachusetts (Petersham: Petersham Historical Society, 1948), 56–57, 234. Sources for Berkshire County include J. E. A. Smith, History of Pittsfield, Massachusetts . . . (Boston: Lee and Shepherd, 1969), 459–60; Rollin C. Cooke, transcriber, “Pittsfield, Mass., Church and Other Records,” 2 vols., 1:310–13, typescript, Berkshire Athenaeum. On the distinction between the tax riots and the court closings, see Hall, 184ff.
29. On the distinction between private and public mobs, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 320–21.
30. Greenville (Leicester, Mass.) Baptist Church Records, vol. 1, minutes, 17–31, letters, 9–27, Andover-Newton Theological School, Newton, Mass. See Bealls to Backus, Sept. 4, 1787, Isaac Backus Papers, Andover-Newton Theological School, quoted in McLoughlin, New England Dissent 1:778.
31. First Congregational Church of Spencer Records, A:30–32 (MSS, church vault); Arthur Chase, History of Ware, Mass. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1911), 95–96.
32. For Wheeler’s statement, see Shays’s Rebellion Collection, folder 1; for biography of Wheeler, see John M. Stowe, The History of Hubbardston, Worcester County, Mass. (Hubbardston: Charles Hamilton, 1881), 57–60, 87, 209, 213, 367–68.

10. The Religious World of Daniel Shays

1. Minot; Starkey; William G. McLoughlin, “The Role of Religion in the American Revolution,” in Stephen Kurtz and James Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 206.
2. Szatmary, 60–61.
3. John L. Brooke, “Society, Revolution, and the Symbolic Uses of the Dead: An Historical Ethnography of the Massachusetts Near Frontier, 1730–1820” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1982).
4. See William G. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), and New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).
5. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), 365–66.
6. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); McLoughlin, New England Dissent 2:751–53.
7. Second Parish-Pelham and Prescott, Mass., Congregational Church Records, 1786–1851, Quabbin Towns Collection, box 3, 3:1, A AS.
8. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, The Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1801), 1:19–20.
9. Robert Ellis Thompson, A History of the Presbyterian Churches in the United States, American Church History Series, 6 (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1895), 22–23.
10. Robert L. Merriam, “The Reverend Robert A. Abercrombie,” 21, typescript, 1964, AAS.
11. C. O. Parmenter, History of Pelham, Mass., from 1738 to 1898, Including the Early History of Prescott . . . (Amherst: Carpenter and Morehouse, 1898), 297–300.
12. See Robert Abercrombie, An Account of the Proceedings of the Presbytery . . . against the Rev. Mr. Robert Abercrombie (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1754).
13. Parmenter, History of Pelham, 309–10, 312–17.
14. Ibid., 261–63.
15. Ibid., 317–20.
16. Prescott, Mass., Congregational Church Records, 1823–54, and Pelham, Mass., East Church Records, 1786–98, Quabbin Towns Collection, box 3, vol. 2.
17. Second Parish-Pelham and Prescott, Mass., Congregational Church Records, 1786–1851, Quabbin Towns Collection, box 3, 3:1.
18. Ibid., 8.
19. D. Hamilton Hurd, comp., History of Worcester County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1899), 1:473.
20. Shakers, The Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee, and the Elders with Her (Hancock, Mass.: J. Tallcott and J. Deming, Jr., 1816), 93–98.
21. Dana, Mass., Baptist Church Records, 1786–1882, folder 1, AAS.
22. Shakers, Testimonies of . . . Mother Ann Lee, 155–58.
23. Dana, Mass., Baptist Church Records, 1768–1821, folder 1, A AS.
24. Hurd, History of Worcester County 2:1130–31.
25. See chapter 9 above, by John Brooke.
26. Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 2:412.
27. Nathaniel B. Sylvester, ed., The History of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1879), 1:256.
28. Ibid.
29. Alice Mary Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1928), 158–59; Caleb Butler, History of the Town of Groton, Mass., including Pepperell and Shirley (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1848), 184; Francis Everett Blake, History of the Town of Princeton, Massachusetts (Princeton, Mass.: Published by the town, 1915), 1:148–50; Hurd, History of Worcester County 1:473, 522.
30. Blake, History of Princeton 1:145–57.
31. Stephen A. Marini, “Rehearsal for Revival: Sacred Singing and the Great Awakening in America,” in Joyce Irwin, ed., Sacred Sound: Music and Religion in Theory and Practice (Chico, Calif: Scholars Press, 1983), 73.
32. On the psalmody question, see ibid., and Isaac Watts, “A Short Essay toward the Improvement of Psalmody,” The Work of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D., 9 vols. (Leeds: Edward Baines, 1813), 9:1–26.
33. On late eighteenth-century New England Calvinism, see Frank Hugh Foster, A Genetic History of the New England Theology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1907), 107–272; Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York: Henry Holt, 1932).
34. Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955), 288–91.
35. The best treatment of New England Arminianism is ibid. Ministerial data are taken from ibid., 281–88.
36. On the Separates and Separate Baptists, see C.C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962); McLoughlin, New England Dissent.
37. Isaac Backus, A Church History of New England . . . with a Particular History of the Baptist Churches (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1796), 3:190–96. On the Shaftesbury Association, see Stephen Wright, History of the Shaftesbury Baptist Association (Troy, N.Y.: A. G. Johnson, 1823), 1–23.
38. Backus, Church History 3:93–96; Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 40–62.
39. Backus, Church History 3:93–96; Joseph S. Clark, A Historical Sketch of the Congregational Churches in Massachusetts, from 1620 to 1858 (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1858), 215–23.
40. Samuel Stillman, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council (Boston: Fleets and Gill, 1779).
41. Backus, Church History 3:186–89.
42. Minutes of the Warren (Baptist) Association, at Their Annual Convention, Held at Mr. Blood’s Meetinghouse in Newton, 1786 (Charlestown, Mass.: John W. Allen, 1786).
43. McLoughlin, New England Dissent 1:501–2, 2:1114–15.
44. See Thomas Baldwin, Open Communion Examined (Windsor, Vt.: Spooner, 1789) and A Brief Vindication of . . . Particular Communion (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1794).
45. Hurd, History of Worcester County 1:164.
46. Thompson, History of the Presbyterian Churches, 10.
47. See John Murray, The Life of John Murray, Written by Himself (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1816).
48. Marini, Radical Sects, 68–69, 72–75.
49. Ibid., 75–80, 88–94, 127–32.
50. Ibid., 127–35.
51. On covenantalism, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939).
52. William G. McLoughlin, ed., Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 443–44.
53. Simeon Howard, A Sermon Preached before the Honorable Council (Boston: Gill, 1780); Henry Cumings, A Sermon Preached before His Honor Thomas Cushing (Boston: Fleets, 1783); William Symmes, A Sermon Preached before His Honor Thomas Cushing (Boston: Adams and Nourse, 1785); Moses Hemmenway, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency John Hancock (Boston: Edes, 1784).
54. Joseph Lyman, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency James Bowdoin (Boston: Adams and Nourse, 1786), 25.
55. Ibid., 36.
56. Ibid., 38.
57. On Samuel Ely, see Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, 6 vols. (New York: Holt, 1885–1912), 3:67–69; Robert E. Moody, “Samuel Ely: Forerunner of Shays,” New England Quarterly 5 (1932): 105–34.
58. Samuel Ely, Two Sermons Preached at Somers, March 18, 1770, When the Church and People Were under Peculiar Trials (Hartford: Ebenezer Watson, 1771), iii, 13.
59. Ibid., 62.
60. Samuel Ely, The Deformity of a Hideous Monster, Discovered in the Province of Maine (Boston: n.p., 1797), 13.
61. Szatmary, 61; William G. McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, 3 vols. (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1979), 2:1133.
62. Diary of Isaac Backus 2:1133.
63. McLoughlin, Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism, 443–44.
64. Ibid., 444.
65. Ibid., 445.
66. Shakers, The Testimonies of . . . Mother Ann Lee, 371–72.
67. Christopher Babbitt, To His Excellency John Hancock (n.p., 1787).

11. In Shays’s Shadow: Separation and Ratification of the Constitution in Maine

68. William Widgery to George Thatcher, Boston, Feb. 8, 1788, William Goodwin, ed., “Thatcher Papers,” Historical Magazine, 2d ser., 6 (1869): 270–71.
69. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 2d ed., rev., 5 vols. (1888; rept. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 2:182.
70. Samuel P. Savage to George Thatcher, Weston, Feb. 17, 1788, “Thatcher Papers,” 338.
71. David Sewall to George Thatcher, York, Feb. 11, 1788, ibid., 271.
72. Jeremiah Hill to George Thatcher, Biddeford, Feb. 28, 1788, ibid., 342.
73. Thomas B. Wait to George Thatcher, Portland, Feb. 29, 1788, ibid., 343.
74. For background on Samuel Thompson, see Nathan Goold, “General Samuel Thompson of Brunswick and Topsham, Maine,” Maine Historical Society Collections, 3d ser., 1 (1904): 423–58; George A. and Henry W. Wheeler, History of Brunswick, Topsham, and Harpswell, Maine (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1878), 811–16.
75. Charles E. Allen, History of Dresden, Maine (Augusta, Me.: Kennebec Journal, 1931), 290–93; James H. Maguire, ed., “A Critical Edition of Edward Parry’s Journal, Mar. 28, 1775, to Aug. 23, 1777” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ. at Bloomington, 1970).
76. Donald Yerxa, “Admiral Samuel Graves and the Falmouth Affair: A Case Study in British Imperial Pacification, 1775” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Maine at Orono, 1974). For a much shorter version, see Donald Yerxa, “The Burning of Falmouth, 1775: A Case Study in British Imperial Pacification,” Maine Historical Society Quarterly 14 (Winter 1975): 119–61. For the Whig sack of Falmouth, see “Letter from Rev. Jacob Bailey in 1775, Describing the Destruction of Falmouth, Maine,” Maine Historical Society Collections, 1st ser., 5 (1857): 449; also Gorham Town Records, Oct. 28, 30, 1775, Maine State Archives, Augusta.
77. Compare Cumberland County Convention to the General Court, Falmouth, Sept. 17, 1779, and Representation of the Committees of Cumberland County, Cumberland, Oct. 21, 1779, James P. Baxter, ed., Documentary History of the State of Maine, 24 vols. (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1913), 17:143–46, 401–2 (hereafter cited as Doc. Hist. Me.).
78. Goold, “Samuel Thompson,” 456–57.
79. Jonas Clark[, Jr.,] to Jonas Clark[, Sr.], Falmouth, Oct. 17, 1785, Jonas Clark Papers, MS Division, Library of Congress; [Daniel Davis], “The Proceedings of Two Conventions, Held at Portland, to Consider the Expedience of a Separate Government in the District of Maine,” MHS Collections 4 (1795): 25.
80. Ronald F. Banks, Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785–1820 (1970; rpt. Middletown, Conn.: Wesley an Univ. Press, 1970), 5.
81. William Willis, ed., Journals of the Rev. Thomas Smith and the Rev. Samuel Deane (Portland, Me.: Joseph S. Bailey, 1849), 252–54.
82. Falmouth Gazette, Feb. 5, 1785 (name changes to Cumberland Gazette).
83. Ibid., Dec. 10, 1785.
84. Cumberland Gazette, Aug. 31, 1786.
85. Doc. Hist. Me. 21:49–50.
86. Falmouth Gazette, Dec. 17, 1785.
87. Ibid., July 9, 1785.
88. Ibid., Sept. 3, 1785. The Cumberland Gazette, Apr. 18, 1788, carried an article reprinted from a Worcester paper with the news that if Maine’s separation movement was successful the new state would be named “Columbia” in honor of Christopher Columbus, after whom the continent should have been named, rather than “Americanus”—a mere “adventurer after riches.”
89. Cumberland Gazette, Sept. 28, 1786.
90. Ibid., Sept. 14, 1786.
91. Ibid., Sept. 21, Nov. 24, 1786.
92. Ibid., Nov. 1786–Mar. 1787 passim.
93. [Davis], “Proceedings of Two Conventions,” 28.
94. Ibid.
95. Gordon Kershaw, The Kennebec Proprietors, 1749–1775: “Gentlemen of Large Property and Judicious Men” (Somersworth, N.H.: New Hampshire Publishing Co., 1975), 290–93; Alan Taylor, “Liberty-Men and White Indians: Frontier Migration, Popular Protest, and Pursuit of Property in the Wake of the American Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis Univ., 1986), chap. 4.
96. [Davis], “Proceedings of Two Conventions,” 33.
97. Ibid., 29.
98. Ibid., 39.
99. Ibid., 36–37.
100. Ibid., 40.
101. Ibid., 32–33.
102. Cumberland Gazette, Feb. 9, 1787.
103. [Davis], “Proceedings of Two Conventions,” 33.
104. Ibid.
105. Cumberland Gazette, Mar. 23, 1787.
106. Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (1961; rept. Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1964), 207 n.56.
107. Christopher Gore to George Thatcher, Boston, Jan. 9, 1788, “Thatcher Papers,” 263.
108. Cumberland Gazette, Sept. 13, 1787.
109. Thomas B. Wait to George Thatcher, Portland, Feb. 29, 1788, “Thatcher Papers,” 342–43; see also Falmouth Gazette, May 14, 1785.
110. Silas Lee to George Thatcher, Biddeford, Jan. 23, 1788, “Thatcher Papers,” 267.
111. Hall, 178 n.26.
112. [Davis], “The Proceedings of Two Conventions,” 33.
113. Jeremiah Hill to George Thatcher, Jan. 1, 1788, “Thatcher Papers,” 260–61.
114. David Sewall to George Thatcher, York, Feb. 11, 1788, ibid., 271.
115. Ibid.
116. Elliot, Debates 2:61, 80.
117. Ibid., 2:33–34.
118. Ibid., 2:35.
119. Ibid., 2:80.
120. Ibid., 2:15.
121. Ibid., 2:61, 80.
122. Ibid., 2:96.
123. Ibid., 2:107.
124. Ibid., 2:140.
125. Adele E. Plachta, “The Privileged and the Poor: A History of the District of Maine, 1771–1793” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Maine at Orono, 1975), 170–74; Main, The Anti-Federalist, 203–4.
126. Cumberland Gazette, Jan. 22, 29, 1789.
127. Ibid., Jan. 22, 1789.
128. Ibid., Jan. 29, 1789.
129. Banks, Maine Becomes a State, 24.
130. Goold, “Samuel Thompson,” 456. Thompson is listed as part owner of a vessel in William A. Baker, A Maritime History of Bath, Maine and the Kennebec River Region (Bath: Maine Research Society of Bath, 1973), 1:121, and among the incorporators of a canal linking the New Meadows River to Merry Meeting Bay (Doc. Hist. Me., 22:339).
131. Banks, Maine Becomes a State, chap. 2.

12. The Confidence Man and the Preacher: The Cultural Politics of Shays’s Rebellion

1. Szatmary, 67; Robert E. Moody, “Samuel Ely: Forerunner of Shays,” New England Quarterly 5 (1932): 109; David Humphreys et al., The Anarchiad, in Vernon L. Parrington, ed., The Connecticut Wits (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926); Massachusetts General Court, Proclamation, “A Horrid and Unnatural Rebellion Exists within This Commonwealth,” Feb. 4, 1787, in Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . . , 13 vols., (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1890–94), 4:424–26; Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, Feb. 22, 1787, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 23 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1950–), 11:174.
2. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Docket Book, 1781–82: 179–81, Case of Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Samuel Ely, Apr. 1782, Northampton Session, Judicial Archives, at Massachusetts State Archives building, Columbia Point, Boston; Moody, “Samuel Ely,” 108; “Some particulars of the proceedings of the Mob, at Concord,” Massachusetts Centinel, Sept. 1786; Hampshire Gazette, Sept. 27, 1786; “Hampshire County Black List,” Robert Treat Paine Papers, box 23, MHS; General Rufus Putnam to Governor James Bowdoin, Jan. 8, 1787, in C. O. Parmenter, History of Pelham, Mass., from 1738 to 1898, Including the Early History of Prescott . . . (Amherst: Carpenter and Morehouse, 1898), 384–90, 397; “Miscellany,” Massachusetts Centinel, Jan. 17, 1787; Gregory H. Nobles, “The Politics of Patriarchy in Shays’s Rebellion: The Case of Henry McCulloch,” in Peter Benes, ed., Families and Children, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1985 (Boston: Boston Univ., 1987), 37–47.
3. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 3–32; Douglas C Wilson, “Goffe, Whalley, and the Legend of Hadley,” New England Quarterly 60 (1987): 515–18; “An Essay on the Difference of Manners in the Town and the Country,” Massachusetts Centinel, Mar. 24, 1784.
4. Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, 2 vols. (Hanover, N.H.: Benjamin True, 1798; rept. of 1924 ed., Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988, with a foreword by Philip F. Gura). For the publication history of Burroughs’s Memoirs, see the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints, briefly summarized in Gura’s foreword, xx-xxii. Burroughs went through several waves of popularity. First issued in 1798, his book was reprinted in some ten editions, both complete and abridged, around the War of 1812, when Burroughs, then a resident of Canada, gained notoriety as an enemy of his homeland. Putting his skill at counterfeiting into the service of the British government, Burroughs flooded the Northeast with bogus American money. His fame continued throughout the antebellum era. Boston publishers issued three editions from 1832 to 1840; another three came out in New York City during the decade before the Civil War. The Connecticut Valley remembered the scoundrel, too; an Amherst printer reprinted the book in 1858. Burroughs was then forgotten until the 1920s, when the poet Robert Frost, who knew a confidence man when he saw him, resuscitated the Memoirs, writing a preface to an edition issued by Dial Press in 1924. For brief studies of Burroughs, see Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 339–40; Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1730–1800 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 245–47; Daniel E. Williams, “Rogues, Rascals and Scoundrels: The Underworld Literature of Early America,” American Studies 24 (1983): 5–19. See also Gary H. Lind-berg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982).
5. G. Thomas Tanselle, Royall Tyler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 1–19; Marius B. Peladeau, ed., The Prose of Royall Tyler (Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 1972), 453.
6. Tanselle, Royall Tyler, 19–22; Royall Tyler to Major General Lincoln, Feb. 20, 1787, in “Bowdoin and Temple Papers,” MHS Collections, 7th ser., 6 (1907): 144; Royall Tyler to Major General Lincoln, Feb. 18, 1787, MA, 318:232 (I am grateful to Sidney Kaplan of Northampton, Mass., for loaning me his photostatic copies of Tyler’s letters); Michael Bellisles, “Shays in Exile,” paper given at the Amherst College-Historic Deerfield Conference on Shays’s Rebellion, Nov. 1986, 4.
7. Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1787), in Montrose J. Moses, ed., Representative Plays by American Dramatists, 3 vols. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918–25), 1:433–98; Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 114–24; Richard M. Dorson, “The Yankee on the Stage—A Folk Hero of American Drama,” New England Quarterly 13 (1940): 467–93.
8. Royall Tyler to the Governor and Council of Vermont, Feb. 17, 1787, Royall Tyler Collection, MSS 8–9787167, Vermont Historical Society.
9. “Charge of the Chief Justice [William Cushing] to the grand-jury of the County of Middlesex,” Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 29, 1786; Massachusetts General Court, Address From the General Court to the People of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, November 14, 1786 (Boston: Adams and Nourse, 1786); Szatmary, 57, 75; Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1773–1787 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 182–83; Joseph Parker Warren, “The Confederation and the Shays Rebellion,” American Historical Review 11 (1905): 42–67; General Rufus Putnam to Governor James Bowdoin, Jan. 8, 1787, in Parmenter, History of Pelham, 395–98. On the obsession of late eighteenth-century Americans with deceit and hypocrisy, see Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” WMQ, 3d ser., 39 (1982): 401–42.
10. Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 214–45; Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 68–108; Gregory H. Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole: Politics and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, 1740–1773 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982).
11. Burroughs, Memoirs, 45–50.
12. Parmenter, History of Pelham, 297–320; Burroughs, Memoirs, 52–54.
13. John L. Brooke, chapter 9 above, table 9.1; Stephen A. Marini, chapter 10 above; Marini, Radical Sects, 35–37; Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), 442–59.
14. Marini, Radical Sects, 11–24; Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole, 36–58, 75–106.
15. Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole, 54–56, 81–84; Marini, chapter 10 above; James W. Schmotter, “The Irony of Clerical Professionalism: New England’s Congregational Clergy and the Great Awakening,” American Quarterly 31 (1979): 148–68.
16. Marini, Radical Sects, 14–15; Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 26–28; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 190–91; William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit; or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergymen of Various Denominations, from the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty Five. With Historical Introduction, vols. 1–2, Trinitarian-Congregational (New York: R. Carter and Brothers, 1857), 2:73; William T. Youngs, God’s Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700–1730 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 57; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1979), 162–63.
17. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), 167–68; Nobles, Divisions throughout the Whole, 52–53.
18. Sprague, Annals 1:530–31.
19. Richard L. Bushman, “American High-Style and Vernacular Cultures,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays on the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), 345–83; Stephanie G. Wolf, “Rarer than Riches: Gentility in Eighteenth-Century America,” paper delivered at conference on “The Portrait in Eighteenth-Century America,” National Portrait Gallery, Oct. 16, 1987; Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1938); Richard B. Morris, The Forging of the Union, 1781–1789 (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 164–65; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 65–82, 393–403; Gordon S. Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 77–81.
20. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Y Crowell, 1976), 504–9; James Warren to John Adams, Boston, June 23, 1779, Worthington C. Ford, ed., Warren-Adams Letters. . . . John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 1743–1814, 2 vols., MHS Collections, 72–73 (Boston, 1917–25), 1:105; Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 64–65; “Anecdotes of Daniel Shaise, Leader of the Insurgents,” Massachusetts Centinel, Dec. 2, 1786; Robert A. Gross, “Daniel Shays and Lafayette’s Sword,” OAH Newsletter 15 (Nov. 1987): 8–9.
21. Elliott, Revolutionary Writers, 47–48, 64–65; “A Farmer,” “Cause of, and cure for, hard times,” American Museum 1 (1787): 11–13, rept. from Massachusetts Centinel, June 24, 1786; James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America,” WMQ, 3d ser., 35 (1978): 22–23; Carole Shammas, “How Self-Sufficient Was Early America?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982): 247–49.
22. Burroughs, Memoirs, 1; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, 6 vols. (New York: Holt, 1885–1912), 2:454–56; Frederick Chase, A History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire (Cambridge, Mass.: J. Wilson, 1891), 195–204; William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), 2:846–48.
23. Brooke, chapter 9 above; Dexter, Biographical Sketches 2:750–54; Sprague, Annals 1:602–6; Burroughs, Memoirs, 14.
24. Burroughs, Memoirs, 6, 24.
25. Ibid., xv, 1–2; Marini, Radical Sects.
26. Burroughs, Memoirs, 1, 3, 52–54, 58–60, 129; Daniel Shelton, “‘Elementary Feelings’: Pelham, Massachusetts, in Rebellion” (Honors thesis, Amherst College, 1981), 94–118.
27. Stephen Burroughs, Sermon, Delivered in Rutland, on a Hay Mow, to His Auditory the Pelhamites, at the Time When a Mob of Them . . . Shut Him into a Barn . . . When He Ascended a Hay Mow . . . and Delivered to Them the Following Sermon, appendix to his Memoirs (Hanover, N.H.: Benjamin True, 1798), rept. in Parmenter, History of Pelham, 336–40; Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T Barnum (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973). Although Burroughs operated on the rule that “there is a sucker born every minute,” he never received notice in P. T. Barnum’s compendium of first-class frauds, The Humbugs of the World. An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits, and Deceivers Generally. In All Ages (New York: Carleton, 1865).
28. Burroughs, Sermon, in Parmenter, History, 338–40. Later in the Memoirs, Burroughs printed a letter from “an old practitioner of the law” in Massachusetts, in support of the view that Burroughs’s trial in 1790 for attempted rape was a travesty of justice. According to Philip Gura, that lawyer was Robert Treat Paine, attorney general of the Commonwealth in 1787, who drew up the notorious “Black List” against the Shaysite leaders and spearheaded the prosecution of the rebels in the courts. Burroughs found his friends in the enemies of the backcountry (Burroughs, Memoirs, xvi).
29. Burroughs, Memoirs, 3–5, 30; Daniel E. Williams, “In Defense of Self: Author and Authority in the Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs,” Early American Literature 25 (1990): 96–122; Daniel A. Cohen, “Pillars of Salt: The Transformation of New England Crime Literature, 1674–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis Univ., 1988), 298–304; Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1350–1750 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 159–69; Daniel Stebbins Notebook, 44–45, Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass.; Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799).
30. Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York: Norton, 1979), 129–33; Silverman, Cultural History, 545–56.
31. James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from Its Settlement in 1634, 2 vols. (Northampton, Mass.: Press of Gazette Printing Co., 1898–1902), 1:479–82; Richard D. Birdsall, Berkshire County: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), 180–81; Silverman, Cultural History, 552–53.
32. Silverman, Cultural History, 555–57.
33. Tyler, The Contrast, 471; Silverman, Cultural History, 560–62; Michael T. Gilmore, “The Drama of the Early Republic,” in Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1 (forthcoming).
34. Tyler, The Contrast, 460, 462, 478–79, 496.
35. My interpretation differs from that of Richard S. Pressman, who views Tyler’s satire of Manly as a way of subordinating the rural patriot-gentleman to the sophisticated, urban, mercantile class that constitutes the audience for the play. See Pressman, “Class Positioning and Shays’ Rebellion: Resolving the Contradictions of The Contrast,” Early American Literature 21 (1986): 87–102. See also Silverman, Cultural History, 563.
36. Albert Mathews, “Brother Jonathan,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 7 (1901): in; Dorson, “Yankee on the Stage,” 478–80; Rourke, Roots of American Culture, 117–23; Tanselle, Royall Tyler, 71–72.
37. Tyler, The Contrast, 464–65, 472–75.
38. Ibid., 465.
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