Shays’ Rebellion

On August 29, 1786, more than 500 armed farmers and Revolutionary War veterans upset at the state government’s failure to provide debt relief block access to a county court in Northampton, Massachusetts. The populist uprising marks the start of Shays’ Rebellion, a series of attacks on Massachusetts courthouses and government facilities that exposes the new federal government’s weakness and propels the creation of the Constitutional Convention to form a stronger national government.

Three years after the American Revolution’s official end, thousands of farmers in western and central Massachusetts—particularly Continental Army and militia veterans who had received little or no pay for their military service—struggled to pay their debts amid a severe economic recession. As debt collectors made arrests, seized possessions and foreclosed properties for unpaid debts and delinquent taxes, the state legislature in 1786 not only took no debt-relief action, it actually raised taxes on the populace.

Weeks after participating in the insurrection at the Northampton courthouse, former Continental Army captain Daniel Shays led hundreds of protestors in Springfield who forced the supreme judicial court to adjourn. The movement grew as rebels prevented courts across Massachusetts from sitting and enforcing further property seizures, debt collections and foreclosures.

Although his leadership role in the rebellion is often overstated, Shays did direct 1,500 armed rebels on January 25, 1787, in an attempted raid on the federal weapons armory in Springfield. An encounter with the 1,200-man state militia, led by General Benjamin Lincoln and funded by private merchants, left four insurgents dead and 20 wounded. A week later, Lincoln’s men ambushed Shays and his forces in Petersham and extinguished the rebellion.

Most participants, including Shays, eventually received amnesty from newly elected governor John Hancock, but the inability of the federal government to quell the uprising reinforced concerns about its impotence under the Articles of Confederation and raised alarm among some Founding Fathers. “If three years ago any person had told me that at this day, I should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of our own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite—a fit subject for a mad house,” wrote George Washington. Shays’ Rebellion accelerated calls for a Constitutional Convention to assemble in 1787 and adopt a new federal government framework.