In 1786, Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays of Pelham, Massachusetts, led an uprising to protest seemingly unfair land taxes and an unresponsive government. He marched with western Massachusetts farmers to local debtors’ courts, forcing them to postpone business.
Easthampton author Daniel Bullen offers a "new take," looking at the story of the rebellion from a different angle. His new book is called "Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion."
Daniel Bullen, author: All the facts have been in plain sight all this time. I didn't do archival research for this book. The experiences that people had on the ground as these events were unfolding were just left out [previously]. It's surprising to me that I'm the one who picked the story up and dusted it off this way. But what I found was this really compelling narrative of troubles that just kept deepening and deepening under these people's feet.
These protests were happening in other states, and in other states, government took action and fixed the problems. But it was only in Massachusetts that the government pushed things to the point of nonviolent direct action, which is really what happened.
Even Michael Steele, the former head of the [Republican National Committee], has a piece up at MSNBC where he calls Shays' rebellion an attempt "to overthrow the government," which it absolutely was not, and the people disavowed their desire to do any such thing in petition after petition and editorial after editorial. But it's still remembered as this violent armed insurrection where that was one of the dangers.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: You know, the media actually played a role in Shays' rebellion and not just after the fact, but in the run-up to the confrontation at the Springfield Arsenal on January 25, 1787. So how did each side use the media?
Sure. And our local newspaper, The Hampshire Gazette, was founded in September of 1786 to give merchants a platform for calling the people lazy moochers who didn't want to work, who just wanted things for free, who were being turned against the state by foreign agents. They were basically fear mongering with the fear that these protests — these nonviolent, dignified protests — were going to be [like] January 6 [2021], right? And that was the big fear.
The reality that I found when I started looking into these things was that they were nonviolent, start to finish, for five months. There was no violence. They never even threw a stone through a courthouse window. They had a tradition of nonviolent, theatrical street protest, and they were coming in those lines with their guns and uniforms to show explicitly, We're not that democratic mob you've been told to fear. We're the dignified, proud veterans who fought for this country. We made our sacrifices for it, and we're not being treated well and look at how many of us there are.
With some of the planning behind these actions, the men were actually, you write, just trying to hold out until the next election. And they had a plan to win reforms and to do that without fighting. How much does this watershed moment for democracy really compare to the recent insurgent action of January 6, 2021, for you?
You know, this is the part of what's called Shays Rebellion, that story does not end with the people winning all the reforms and pardons and ultimately nobody being hung. There were two men hung in Berkshire County for looting. But Daniel Shays and all of the other men who are leaders of this, were never brought to trial. They were never...nobody was ever put in jail for this. A few people were made to pay fines or to stand on the gallows with the noose around their neck for an hour. That was one of the popular punishments.
But this was a victory for the people. I mean, they scattered when they were confronted with an organized army. They took off. They waited the two months, and when April 1 came around, they won a landslide election. So this looks a lot more to me, like some of the civil rights action that was taken in the [1960s]. That said, you know, Shays Rebellion is also kind of popular among Three Percenters.
Daniel Shays is this kind of flexible character who can be claimed by a lot of different people. So a lot of this really hinges on how you see that January 25 [1787] confrontation at the Springfield Arsenal, where Daniel Shays marched in with 1,200 men. Four o'clock in the afternoon, they approached the arsenal in lines, eight abreast. Took two warning shots over their head from the cannon. They continued to advance. They just literally marched up to demand barracks and stores. And after those two first warning shots, General William Shepherd from Westfield told his gunners to lower their aim to waistband height. They fired grape shot and the first three lines of that column were decimated. Four men were killed — three instantly, one died later — and 20 lay wounded. And the farmers at that point, they just retreated because they were in that martyrdom position.
But I think you can see a lot in the civil rights history where they decide who gets to wave the bloody shirt and say, "We're the victims here," they're the ones who win public sympathy. I think these protests are fundamentally different from the January 6 protests, where protesters were told by their leaders to fight like hell. They went to the Capitol building, broke in and tried to interrupt the peaceful transition of power, which had been, you know, authorized at every level, and no courts had ever found real opposition to it.