SHATTERING THE VETERANS' DEMOCRATIC DREAM

...Inland, on the farms, a deal of direct destruction had been done by war, but to the farmers it was the mysterious disappearance of hard money that was the most devastating blow of all...

...There was a sudden and mighty revulsion of feeling...

...He had never worn spectacles in public," Fiske tells us, "he said, in his simple manner, and with his pleasant smile, 'I have grown gray in your service, and now find myself growing blind...

...a crowd of rebels wearing sprigs of hemlock in their hats as the badge of revolt, stopped the court from sitting at Worcester, though one of the judges, the high-tempered Gen...

...Though Pitt in 1783 introduced into Parliament a bill which would have permitted free trade between the two countries, the measure was killed and in July 1783 an order-in-council proclaimed that all trade between the British West Indies and the United States must be carried on in British ships...

...There was a vast outcry against the Cincinnati, who had made Washington their first President, and it was not until the General persuaded the Cincinnati to abandon all pretense to aristocratic folderols that the criticism died down...

...Though only one man in eight eligible for military service in the colonies had taken up arms—the great majority of the population of two and a half million going about their business—so that at the peak, no more than 90,000 Colonials fought under Washington, war demands had drained the country pretty white...

...Under the Constitution the power of the Senate was enhanced, and all through the document there breathed an air of anything but democratic philosophy...

...Forces, however, against which no bayonets could prevail, were moving to make those promises vain...

...Then they would marry Abigail, or Priscilla, or Prudence and buy that woodlot and perhaps start a saw-mill, or maybe get them a share in that fishing schooner they had seen tied up to the long wharf in Boston years, or was it aeons ago...

...She believed that "there was a formidable body ready to bow to the sceptre of a king, provided they may be the lord-lings who in splendid idleness may riot on the hard earnings of the peasant and mechanic...

...In this instance the General showed himself to be as good a political tactician as he was a military one...

...There was a tense moment as High Sheriff Israel Dickinson, holding his wand of office, marched straight toward the crowd at the entrance to the court, shouting: "Make way for the honorable justices of the Court of Common Pleas of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts...

...Under such circumstances," writes Fiske, "the payment of debts and taxes was out of the question...

...On the other hand the Massachusets legislature, dominated now by the wealthier merchants, took no steps whatever to relieve the distress of the farmers...

...Coleman's forthcoming book, So Many of Us, will appear in The Progressive next week...

...In Stockbridge, Egremont, Sheffield, Sandisfield, and Great Barrington very little work was done following the court-closings...

...They were there to stop the court from sitting, and stop it they did...

...But in this spotty prosperity, mainly centering in the seaboard cities, there was no genuine element of stability...

...In the meantime coins of all sorts, English, French, Spanish, German, were exchanging hands...

...They would go home free men, taking no orders from king or parliament, sending their own representatives to their own congress...

...THE inevitable revolt started in the Western part of the State, in the sultry summer of '86...

...Some large-scale farmers who had stayed home and sold their crops at war-inflated prices had likewise fared well...

...No sheriff dared show his face, let alone make arrests, and the tax-collectors went into hiding...

...At the same time a "forcing act" was passed, aiming to compel the merchants to accept the farmers' scrip at face value...

...There seemed to be no leaders...

...Counter-Revolution: A Dramatic Episode In American History Shattering The Veterans' Democratic Dream By McALISTER COLEMAN Introduction DESPITE all our brave talk about the glorious contributions made by the plain people on farms and factories and battlefields, we have an inglorious record of forgetting the common man once the peace treaties are signed...

...Despite the Revolution, the new United States still had to look to England for the manufactured goods needed so desperately in this country...

...Paper money issued by the Confederation had so little behind it, (at one time in 1782 there was literally not a single dollar in the national Treasury) that the entire project was abandoned, and now the farmers were putting pressure upon the state legislatures to issue paper money of their own, thus adding to the chaotic condition of the entire economy...

...Appeal from the justice to the fears of government, and suspect the man who would advise to longer forbearance...

...Veterans shouted orders down the line...

...Early in the morning of that day a company of some 600 men wearing the rebel green marched smartly into the city...

...This was a time of mutinies, notably that of the Pennsylvania volunteers in January 1781, of wholesale desertion's, of the formation of bands of night-riders led by ex-servicemen, of pilfering and pillaging, a time so close to anarchy, as far as the Army was concerned, as to cause the leaders of the Revolution to wonder how well they had builded...

...Fiske estimates that private debts in Massachusetts in 1786 amounted to some seven million dollars and that the state owed the Federal Government an equal sum...

...No national coinage was to be issued until 1793...

...It was a place of horror...

...Homesteads were sold for the payment of foreclosed mortgages, cattle were seized in distrainer, and the farmer himself was sent to jail...

...At one part of his speech the General started to read a communication from Congress...

...Veterans of the Stamp Act agitation revived the song that the people had sung in the dawn days of the Revolution: "With the beasts of the wood, we will ramble for food...

...When a messenger from Northampton pulled up his sweating horse at the tavern at Stockbridge in Berkshire County with the news, the men of Stockbridge and the surrounding towns marched upon Great Bar-rington to be joined there by the town's workingmen so that a crowd of some 800 were drawn up before the court when the justices and the sheriff attempted to enter...

...MORE serious than any of these sporadic attempts to set up a military dictatorship was the tragic economic situation in which the Confederation depending so largely upon its agriculture and fisheries found itself after the war...

...The Newburgh incident received wide publicity and added nothing to the popularity of the Army...

...Thereupon the city merchants went on strike, closing up their shops rather than accept the "rag money," so that the principal business in Newport and Providence that summer was, as Fiske remarks, done in bar-rooms...

...These men needed no orders...

...This was a request that could not well be ignored...

...A third source of civilian irritation was the organization of the Order of the Cincinnati, instituted by the Army officers, which was to be a sort of benevolent society for the benefit of officers' dependents, but which had in it, according to its critics, the making of an elite guard...

...Domestic war debts, including the redemption of Congress' pledge, after the Newburgh affair, to give officers, and officers only, a lump sum of five years' full pay, played a large part in the sum total of the tax burden...

...On the appointed day," says John Fiske in his The Critical Period in American History, "he" (Washington) "suddenly came into the meeting and amid pro-foundest silence broke forth in a most eloquent and touching speech...

...If the following chapter from a book which I now have in preparation, shows how from the very start of our nation, sinister forces moved against the democratic dream of the returning veterans, we may be better prepared, in the light of this tragic chapter in our history, to do battle with these same forces which are still on the move in our America of 19!t5, not by resort to arms as was the case with the desperate men under Shays after the Revolutionary War, but by peaceful appeal to reason and good will...

...He found that he could not see the script clearly so he put on a pair of spectacles that had been given him by the astronomer, David RittenhouSe...

...A TEST of strength came on September 26th when the Supreme Court was scheduled to meet at Springfield...

...The bulk of the crowd were farmers and farm laborers with a sprinkling of foundry workers and small town mechanics and blacksmiths...

...Marching behind their drummer, they threw a picket line round the place and kept the members of the Court of Common Pleas from entering the building to issue writs against debtors...

...Further, in trading directly with England American ships were allowed to bring in only such articles as were produced in the particular states of which their owners were citizens, an obvious dig at the lack of unity among the states...

...EDITOR'S NOTE: The concluding installment of this timely chapter from Mr...

...And lodge in wild deserts and caves, And live as poor Job on the skirts of the globe, Before we'll submit to be slaves, brave boys, Before we'll submit to be slaves...

...The forcing act was soon repealed, the fisheries began to pick up and Rhode Island slowly got back to her feet...

...Old revolutionists, it seemed, once their goal of independence was achieved, were animated by no levelling propensities...

...Someone remarked that the symbol of the State should be changed from that of the cod to the snail...

...Soon thereafter a group of drunken soldiers rioting outside the State House in Philadelphia where Congress was assembled so alarmed the legislators that they fled to Princeton on June 21, 1783, further arousing the wrath of people in all walks of life against the arrogance of the veterans...

...The mutinous officers had arranged to call a meeting on the day after the circulars had appeared in the camps...

...At Northampton a crowd of 1500 men armed with cudgels and muskets, suddenly appeared before the court-house...

...Matters came to a head among the disaffected officers stationed at Newburgh, N. Y. Washington had his Army deployed along the Hudson and in various parts of New York State awaiting the evacuation of New York City by the British...

...Daniel Shays...

...At all events, after all this shooting and marching and bloodshed and sheer boredom of war, the winds would be blowing fair for the plain people who had fought the troops of the greatest empire on earth and beaten them soundly...

...The meeting unanimously asserted its loyalty to the Congress and its disavowal of the mutinous circular, with the abashed Gates joining in the vote...

...But with the draining off of specie to pay for imports at the seaboard, the plain people of the interior saw so little real money that there began the rural agitation for soft money which has stirred the grass-roots up to yesterday...

...He had had trouble enough with autocratically-minded officers during the war to warn him not to trust them with the fate of the Republic for which he had struggled...

...and as the same state of things made creditors clamorous and ugly, the courts were crowded with lawsuits...

...C. THE bands played The World Turned Upside Down, when finally Cornwallis, cut off from relief by sea by the French fleet, raked by Washington's cannon by land, ordered the white flag run up over Yorktown...

...That laugh broke the spell and with howls of derision from the mob the 'sheriff and the justices beat an ignominious retreat to their lodgings amidst a shower of stones and rotten eggs...

...There was nothing but a vague promise back of a man's paper money in his safe or in his pocket...

...Merchants immediately refused to accept this paper from the hard-ridden farmers...

...They would be heroes in the taverns telling the stories of the agonized retreats across Long Island, through New York, over New Jersey, of the tragic winter at Valley Forge, the taking of Trenton, the bayonet charges at Cowpens and the rest...

...TAXATION, however, was the chief grievance...

...Each State was busied making its own laws, and in the majority of instances the laws favored property over human interests...

...The indignant manner in which The General repudiated all such proposals remains a high tribute to his Republican principles...

...When word of the shocking conditions in the Great Barrington jail got round the county, all Berkshire_blazed up...

...The hateful squire would be gone, fled with his harassed Tory friends into Canada...

...Both these maritime states had been hard hit by the navigation restrictions...

...Ironically enough, Massachusetts was being governed by a Constitution written by John Adams which, it is reckoned, required 50 per cent more property qualifications for the suffrage than did the old charter...

...Liberty poles began to go up again...

...The homes of the wealthy squires were surrounded by threatening mobs and their occupants terrified by serenades played on shrieking horse fiddles...

...Artemas Ward, swore heartily at the crowd from the court-house steps...

...In retaliation, the Rhode Island farmers shipped their produce to other states only to find the merchants of New York and Connecticut joining with the Rhode Island merchants in a sympathy strike...

...This was in an ell of the Barrington tavern...

...Massachusetts had sent more of her men into the Army than had any other state...

...Many of the debtor-prisoners had been so weakened by their long confinement and their indecent treatment that they had to be carried from the jail and put on farm wagons which took them to their homes...

...Washington immediately asked that the' meeting be postponed, that Gates preside-at it, and that it be addressed by the Commander-in-Chief...

...Workers in the small plants in the towns went on strike, and the laborers for the wealthier farmers rode to town to watch the drilling of the rebels on the green...

...At their head rode Capt...

...From the days of Shays' Rebellion to the sabering of veterans in the Bonus Army at Anacostia Flats, after World War I, the Republic has shown a tragically short memory, so far as returning veterans are concerned...

...Together with the bounties due the soldiers and the cost of state and local governments, the average tax burden on the head of every family in Massachusetts was around $200 a year, and this at a time when a hardworking farmer was lucky to have $50 in specie, in which the tax had to be paid, at the end of a year...

...While the British held most of Rhode Island during the war, her fisheries had vanished...

...In the same week as the jail release at Barrington...

...Whereas the only thought in the mind of the enlisted man was to get back home as quickly as possible, it was the reverse with many of the officers...

...There seemed to have been more to this new display of what Veblen would have called "conspicuous waste" than just turtle dinners, and all night drinking bouts...

...In the meantime another group had forced an entry into the jail...

...This was no mob of cudgel-waving plowboys...

...The lawyers usually contrived to get their money by exacting retainers in advance...

...Horatio Gates, a man of great personal charm, but with a fatal predilection for conspiratorial undertakings, notably in the Conway Cabal of 1777 which tried to supersede Washington as Commander-in-Chief, had come out of retirement and was now the senior major general in New York State...

...THIS last was evidently a direct thrust at Washington...

...Some died soon after their liberation...

...And for those in control of these forces no world was to be turned upside down...

...THEN there was the dangerous interlude between the surrender at Yorktown in 1781 and the diplomatic steps leading to a formal peace in 1783...

...America was promises," as Archibald MacLeish wrote, and the rank and file of the colonial troops were resolved that those promises should not be broken...

...Though England needed spermaceti or whole oil badly for the lighting of homes and city streets, the British made every attempt to cut down on America's participation in whaling so that the dockyards of such a center as Nantucket, where before the war 200 keels a year had been laid down, were left to rot for some years before whaling and fisheries again revived...

...Sympathizing keenly with the sufferings of his hearers, and fully admitting their claims, he appealed to their better feelings, and reminded them of the terrible difficulties under which Congress laboured, and of the folly in putting themselves in the wrong...

...In the South a sort of forerunner to the old Ku Klux Klan known as the "Hint Club" was organized among the farmers, with its members "hinting" to rich planters and merchants that they had better take the paper at its face value or else— It was in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, however, that the agitation for relief was loudest...

...These, finding the profession of arms to their liking and with doubts as to their position in civil life, began agitation for a large standing army and in some instances formed cliques and cabals looking to a sort of military dictator-ship with George Washington as its head...

...Then someone laughed at the absurd sight of the justices "their chests well thrown out, their chins held high in air, their lips judiciously pursed, and their eyes contemplatively fixed on vacancy" stopped in all their regalia from entering their own court by a group of determined farmers...

...While men were being dragged off to small town jails for debts of no more than a few dollars, a sudden splurge of spending was so painfully evident in the state capital as to set Sam Adams storming against such "riotous organizations" as the Sans Souci club where the young folks danced the dawn in, and the gay blades of the "mushroom gentry" laughed at the straight-lacedness of the old revolutionaries...

...For the boys who had gone out to shoot at the redcoats, fleeing along the bloody road from Concord back to Boston, boys who were men now, hardened veterans of all the long and desperate fighting of the Revolution, their world did indeed seem turned upside down...

...Whig merchants, to be sure, who had taken over the enterprises of the ousted Tories had done well for themselves...

...With desperate farmers milling outside the State House, Rhode Island legislators early in 1786 ordered the emission of half a million dollars in scrip, with farm mortgages to be given as security for loans of paper money...

...Membership in this was to be heredity and its members sported elaborate insignia...

...Gates and some of his officer friends circulated an appeal among the troops, setting forth their grievances and ending: "If the present moment be lost, your threats thereafter will be as empty as your entreaties now...

...These were of various values in various localities...

...Fiske reckons the cost of the war to have been $170,-000,000, a staggering sum for that time, and that the total amount to meet it raised by the various states was no more than $30,000,000...

...Mercy Warren, James Otis' sister, a good patriot and a shrewd reporter of the current scene, wrote that she had learned that many youths, "particularly students at law and youth of fortune and pleasure," were plotting to set up a monarchy with a strong standing army...

...An interlude that gave plenty of time for the largely idle service man, confined in windswept barracks, to contemplate the pretentious living of the new rich in the nearby cities or to look with justified apprehension on his chances of making a decent living on his return...

...Cautious men carried scales with them when they dealt in guineas, doubloons, moideres, and pistoles in the counting-houses of the speculators in the cities...

...Debtors had been thrown into filthy and unlighted cells along with criminals and the insane, and left to rot there until their relatives, coming to rescue them, could hardly recognize sons or fathers...

...These men were disciplined, well-armed...