The Tree of Liberty

...Like London, Boston sent an army into the "disaffected" back country and, succeeding where the Crown had failed, dispersed the rebels with minimum casualties...

...The rights of property were protected by raising property qualifications for voting for Senator, town representatives and Governor 50 per cent higher than they had been under the colonial charter...

...Offspring five or six months after marriage were not without precedent in the century of "the Enlightenment," though Danny Jr...

...Reviewed by Walter Ludwig Teacher of history, Mamaroneck Senior High School Turning from the ways of the Devil in Massachusetts, Marion Starkey has been rooting for two years among the economic and political sources of post-Revolutionary evils in that commonwealth...

...Rank-and-file insurgents who took the oath of allegiance and promised good behavior were sent home minus civil rights for three years...

...The author has a quick eye for the "uninhibited" among her characters...

...Miss Starkey would not have digressed too widely had she reminded her readers that, thanks to Sam Adams and his cousin John, the yeomanry had little part in the government of postwar Massachusetts...

...One wishes she had used her materials more critically...

...She makes us want to read further in the Royall Tyler Collection but has herself perhaps read too much into the autobiographical conquests of that rogue Stephen Burroughs...

...It is its natural manure...

...Miss Starkey explains this singular behavior by a story of dubious authenticity about Shays's resentment when criticized by his fellow officers for selling a sword given him by Lafayette...

...Miss Starkey picks up the trail of Shays, the father, in western New York but seems not to have known about the post-rebellion decade he spent by Catskill Greek in Albany County on properties one of which David Williams, captor of Major Andre, once owned...

...When he learned of Shays's revolt, Jefferson wrote: "...a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical....The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants...

...was either kept in the dark about his birth date or wished to suppress the fact...

...A debatable report by Shays's former field commander, General Rufus Putnam, of a conversation between himself and Shays is accepted at face value and expanded into three pages...

...Protests by soldiers, who thought they had been fighting the British for a bit of representation, were made in vain...

...While the boys were at the front, this "brace of Adamses" had between them written the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 compelling all sectarians to pay taxes to their own churches, with non-churchgoers and assorted unbelievers paying for the support of the Congregational Church...

...When pleas and petitions to the General Court in Boston failed, they adopted the extra-legal apparatus which Boston had contrived in dealing with London a decade earlier: county conventions, inter-town committees of correspondence, stopping sheriffs' sales, preventing judges from holding court, seizure of military stores, drilling of men at arms...

...His gravestone in the cemetery at Preston Hollow, N. Y. merely records "Died April 23, Age 40 years," thus reducing his already short life span by four to fourteen months...

...They were married not "after the call to Lexington" but in July or August 1772, and moved to a tenant's farm in Shutesbury (Pelham's East Hill came later), where on January 31, 1773 their oldest child, Daniel Shays Jr., was born...

...Grumbled Adams: "In monarchy, the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death...

...To the disgust of Samuel Adams, they were granted last-minute reprieves and eventually pardoned...

...The explanation may as likely have been disillusionment with a revolution that had been sold down the river by reactionaries back home...

...Failing to capture "the celebrated Captain Shays" and his three principal aides, the Government placed a price on their heads and sentenced six minor characters to the gallows by way of substitutionary punishment and public example...

...In October 1780, Dan Shays resigned a captain's commission, which he had fought hard to get, and went back to his Hampshire County farm...

...And she missed a good story in failing to round out the romance of Shays and Abigail Gilbert...

...Researches made possible by a Guggenheim fellowship have enabled Miss Starkey to quote extensively from documents of the period...

...For all of its romping through the sources, A Little Rebellion offers the most authentic and readable account available of direct action coming home to roost on the doorstep of riotous Boston...

...He might have added that its fruit is often bitter and sets the children's teeth on edge...

...The story she now tells is about "a little rebellion" (the title is Thomas Jefferson's) attempted in the 1780s by debt-ridden farmers and returned soldiers...