VETERANS ON THE MARCH IN YOUNG AMERICA
Coleman, Mcalister
Veterans On The March In Young America By McALISTER COLEMAN EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second of two articles by Mr. Coleman chronicling a significant chapter of American history which is...
...He even condemned the calling of the county conventions from which the Shaysites derived such shadowy authority as they had—this old revolutionist who had called rank and file, extra-legal gatherings since 1764...
...Shepard ordered his men to take good aim and fire into the steadily oncoming ranks of the Shaysites...
...The court met under the protecting muskets of the militia, decided that this was too risky a business, dismissed the jurors it had called in, and dissolved...
...All that remained was a mopping up process on the part of Lincoln's troops...
...At all events, no sooner had the legislature adjourned on Nov...
...The day had been fair, but towards evening of Feb...
...He wanted the whole world to realize that the rule of a republic is a rule of law and order, and that liberty does not mean license...
...Further, the conservatives insisted that the whole rebellion was originally set in motion by Tories, that it was all a British plot to destroy the Confederation at its source...
...Many of them had proved their valor in desperate combat at Bennington and Trenton and Saratoga and the other famous battlegrounds of the Revolution...
...Capt...
...When Shays rode into Springfield on that September morning, he found 600 militiamen under Gen...
...Lincoln's men coming from Roxbury met Day's forces hurrying to the relief of Shays and cut them to pieces...
...These high-spirited youngsters, "dressed as for the hunt," went out into the country confident that they would have the rebel bumpkins on the run in no time...
...It was not until Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward, published his historical novel The Duke of Stockbridge in serial form in a Great Barrington newspaper in 1879, that any objective account of Shays' Rebellion was available...
...Men in the opposing ranks had stood shoulder to shoulder against the redcoats in the seven bloody years of the late war and the thought of internecine warfare was repugnant...
...The source of most of these unfriendly gibes was George Minot's History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts in 1786, published in Boston in 1810...
...He was cited for gallantry at Bunker Hill, saw action at Ticon-deroga and Stony Point...
...There Gen...
...Lincoln, picking his veterans carefully, started after Shays in a night march that has become historic...
...By this time, however, so great was the mutual distrust, Shays decided that he was being duped and -slipped away at the head of his men to Petersham...
...Shepard, Shays led his rebels to West Springfield where Capt...
...WHEN the Congress was called on to help the New England states put down the scattered revolts in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island as well as Massachusetts, it asked the states for a continental army not for the express purpose of destroying the Shaysites, but for the object as stated, of war against the Northwest Indians...
...James Bpwdoin, successor to John Hancock, who had run successfully against Sam Adams in 1785, and indulged in long and fruitless debate...
...After presenting the ultimatum to Gen...
...It was the end of Shays' Rebellion...
...Shays and Day were drilling their men in desperate haste...
...Whether or not his early successes had gone to his head, or his leadership was insecure, we have no way of knowing...
...Throughout the rest of the Fall, recruits swelled Shays' ranks and a great drilling went on even in Concord where the rebels, led by the veteran Jacob Shattuck from Groton, forced the judges and other officials to hurry into hiding...
...Hamlin, at the head of several hundred rebels, raided Stockbridge on Feb...
...THERE now arose the embarrassing question as to how such a considerable body of troops would be paid...
...When the call came for the Minute Men at Lexington, he answered it on the run...
...The political effects of the uprising were felt for years not only in Massachusetts, but also throughout the entire 13 states...
...25, 1787, he moved his 1,100 men across a snow-covered countryside into the city...
...4 while the hemlock men were preparing breakfast at Petersham there was a sudden cry that the militia were coming...
...There was a brief battle in which Hamlin was killed and some 30 of his men either killed or wounded...
...The House finally concurred in the suspension of habeas corpus for eight months, the offer of a pardon to all rebels who would take the oath of allegiance, the temporary discontinuance of the Court of Common Pleas, the lessening of expenses of lawsuits, and the passage of a temporary Legal Tender Act...
...Coleman chronicling a significant chapter of American history which is especially timely as the veterans of World War II return...
...ON the wind-swept Sunday morning of Feb...
...The militia consisted of a mixture of veterans and such young aristocrats, many of them Harvard men, as Fisher Ames, who, however, did not leave Boston...
...On second thought, Adams' stand was consistent with his radical principles...
...It was the lower House of the legislature, which for a long time held for leniency towards the rebels, that kept the Governor from any effective action...
...Day had been drilling raw recruits...
...Many of the recruits were armed only with wooden muskets or cudgels, and the ammunition was running out fast...
...In 1772 he married...
...An appeal was made to the Boston merchants and eventually these subscribed $20,000 for the maintenance of the army...
...He granted a reprieve and was defeated by Hancock at the April election...
...they wanted an equitable system of fees for sheriffs, lawyers, and tax commissioners...
...Furthermore they had a program other than that of barn-burning and general hell-raising...
...Among the movements of protest which sprang up over the land by veterans who thought they had won freedom was that of Daniel Shays...
...The roads over the ridges of Shutesbury and New Salem were soon choked...
...Shepard at the head of 1200 militiamen , was awaiting him...
...3 the thermometer dropped below zero and a heavy snow commenced falling...
...significantly enough too they wanted the legislature removed from Boston, and what they rightly took to be the malign influence of fee-hungry lawyers and lobbying speculators...
...Evidently the loose-knit confederation of states, each stoutly maintaining its own sovereignty, with its own set of rulers, acting independently could no longer function...
...The college lads had their promised hunt, chasing panic-stricken farmers across the snow and sabering them at their ease...
...The first, which appeared last week, presented the domestic scene in 19th Century America as the boys came marching home from the Revolutionary War...
...But behind them the raw recruits, smelling powder for the first time, seeing blood on the snow, broke and ran...
...When Shays' ringleaders were brought to trial in 1787, 14 of them were convicted of treason and sentenced to death...
...This bloodless but outstanding victory enormously enhanced the rebel cause...
...In a derisive sketch of his life, printed in various papers during the rebellion, mention was made of a sword presented to him by Lafayette which 'he was mean enough to dispose of for a trifling consideration.' That selling it might be proof of desperate poverty was not considered...
...Shays had his eye on the several thousand muskets and the large powder supply stored in the Springfield arsenal...
...The name of Shays was used to frighten small conservatives in their cradles and big ones in their counting-houses...
...Such was the program over which the squirearchy displayed so much alarm...
...The end, that is, so far as military activities went...
...They wanted the ending of jailing for debt...
...At this time Sam Adams and Hancock were having one of their perennial squabbles and Sam as President of the Senate strongly opposed the pardons, saying: "In monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished...
...HERE we find Sam Adams in what at first seems to be the strange role of advocating, with the conservatives, the use of force against the rebels...
...On Jan...
...He was wounded, and when he recovered, he was commissioned captain in the Fifth Massachusetts, proving himself an efficient, brave, and popular officer...
...The whole attack broke up and a retreat began through Ludlow and Amherst to Pelham...
...Though the cruel business of imprisonment for debt was not abolished in Massachusetts for some years after the rebellion, the wings of the lawyers and tax collectors were clipped, and the powers that were began to remember that it was from the plain people that their powers derived...
...Of fighting Irish stock, he was born in Hopkinton, Mass., and worked as a laborer for a Fram-ingham farmer...
...but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death...
...Another hostile writer called Shays, "a bankrupt in fortune like nearly all of the officers who had been in service . . . ready to embark in any congenial enterprise for retrieving his fortunes...
...He growled at the rebels as fiercely as did Fisher Ames, only unlike Ames he did not hold their poverty against them...
...Benjamin Lincoln who had been picked by Washington to receive Cornwallis' sword at Yorktown...
...Lincoln and Shepard at Springfield were making their preparations for the expected attack by the rebels on the arsenal there, these college lads were being lavishly entertained at the big country houses of the squires...
...While Gens...
...Bowdoin's term of office was coming to an end...
...Whatever else the rising of the farmers and workers under Shays had accomplished, it had thrown the fear of God, and the realization of the need for a strong central government into the hearts of every intelligent person...
...However, Gov...
...There were sleigh-rides and skating parties, and apparently a good deal more rapine, even if by consent, than the rebels ever accomplished...
...The veteran rebels up in front took and returned the first fire, and kept on coming...
...He left the service in 1780, and settled at Pelham, Mass...
...At Sheffield the militia caught up with the rebels who were attempting to cross the border to New York...
...Perez Hamlin, Bellamy's "Duke of Stockbridge," who led the crowd at the Great Barrington jail release, returned from the war in poverty to find his brother in jail and his mother threatened with eviction from the Hamlin farm outside of Stockbridge...
...Still Shays and his men were insistent that no court should sit in Springfield...
...the emission of paper money and the legal payment of taxes with such money...
...Lincoln, following Shays as far as Hadley, called for a parley in that town...
...At first the rebel leader seemed to yield...
...18, than violence broke out at Worcester and Springfield, which justified the Governor in calling out the entire militia of the State, some 4,400 troops under Gen...
...Members of the House, many of whom came from overwhelmingly rebel districts, had no stomach for such measures as the suspension of the habeas corpus which the Governor and Senate recommended...
...He had practically no schooling...
...He" (Shays) "was a 'deranged' officer, that is, one forced out of service by the merger of several thinned regiments into one...
...Adams was shocked to think that all the blood, sweat and tears of the Revolution should be now sacrificed to a civil war over issues which could be peacefully composed in a republican form of government...
...The rebel spirit had spread to other states than Massachusetts, though it was in Massachusetts that it was estimated that one-third of the people were behind Shays...
...Hancock promptly pardoned all the rebels, Shays among them...
...Fiske says of him that "he was a poor creature, wanting alike in courage and good faith...
...During the long debates, however, the most alarming stories, many of them evidently inspired, reached Boston, stories of rapine and pillage, of drunken rebel bands burning down whole villages, confiscating property etc...
...This was Adams' sensitive point," says Fiske in his The Critical Period...
...A broader-visioned man than Shays would have accepted these conciliatory terms and sat down for further negotiations for relief measures, with the friendly legislators...
...Shays was 39 years old in 1786 when the rank and file of the Western county conventions chose him to be their leader...
...Bellamy's "Duke of Stock-bridge," Capt...
...SHAYS' aide was Luke Day of West Sprinfield, a Revolutionary captain who had served with honor for seven embattled years and come home a bankrupt...
...Taken completely by surprise, the Shaysites fled, without making a stand...
...The legislature was broke...
...In the meantime, the Massachusetts legislature met in special session, received a report from Gov...
...William Shepard, another Revolutionary veteran, lined up to guard the court-house...
...They served an excellent purpose, and were highly necessary when they were set up, and I shall not repent the small share which I then took in them...
...The plight of these dispossessed officers, turned off without pension or cash—often obliged to sell their uniforms to pay debts and even beg for bread on the road home—had been talked about in Congress in the debate over half pay...
...Far from making the rebels the skulking malcontents which Fiske and others picture them, Bellamy, who had done extensive research in original records, shows them to be brave men, for the most part, exploited beyond any further power of endurance...
...Nevertheless the veterans went on, covering 30 miles in 13 hours, suffering severely towards the end...
...THE rebel leader, Daniel Shays, has been maligned by practically every conservative historian of the Rebellion which took its name from him...
...On neither side was there any desire to start shooting...
...26 and carried off the leading men of the town as hostages...
...He argued that "Now we have regular and constitutional governments, popular committees and county conventions are not only useless, but dangerous...
...This time there was no question of parleying...
...Their demands were no levellers' manifestoes...
...Shays tried to rally them in vain...
...Let them put down their arms and bargain with their elected representatives and they would be pardoned, but in the future all such insurrections would be treated as high treason—this was the course he suggested to both Shays and Bowdoin...
...Shays escaped to Vermont, others beat their way across the border to New Hampshire, others to New York...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 40
