Shays's Rebellion

Shays's Rebellion
Author: Leonard L. Richards
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2014-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812203194

During the bitter winter of 1786-87, Daniel Shays, a modest farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, and his compatriot Luke Day led an unsuccessful armed rebellion against the state of Massachusetts. Their desperate struggle was fueled by the injustice of a regressive tax system and a conservative state government that seemed no better than British colonial rule. But despite the immediate failure of this local call-to-arms in the Massachusetts countryside, the event fundamentally altered the course of American history. Shays and his army of four thousand rebels so shocked the young nation's governing elite—even drawing the retired General George Washington back into the service of his country—that ultimately the Articles of Confederation were discarded in favor of a new constitution, the very document that has guided the nation for more than two hundred years, and brought closure to the American Revolution. The importance of Shays's Rebellion has never been fully appreciated, chiefly because Shays and his followers have always been viewed as a small group of poor farmers and debtors protesting local civil authority. In Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle, Leonard Richards reveals that this perception is misleading, that the rebellion was much more widespread than previously thought, and that the participants and their supporters actually represented whole communities—the wealthy and the poor, the influential and the weak, even members of some of the best Massachusetts families. Through careful examination of contemporary records, including a long-neglected but invaluable list of the participants, Richards provides a clear picture of the insurgency, capturing the spirit of the rebellion, the reasons for the revolt, and its long-term impact on the participants, the state of Massachusetts, and the nation as a whole. Shays's Rebellion, though seemingly a local affair, was the revolution that gave rise to modern American democracy.

Shays' Rebellion

Shays' Rebellion
Author: David P. Szatmary
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1980
Genre: History
ISBN:

Shays' Rebellion is often dismissed in the history books as an isolated incident following the American Revolution. Sometimes, it's grudingly given credit for spurring the Constitution Convention. In this well-balanced book, David P. Szatmary devotes the time and study necessary to classify Shays' Rebellion as the historical watershed it truly is. Shays' Rebellion signified more than economically depressed New England farmers waging war on creditors; it marked the beginning of the end of the American subsistence farmer. This change in an accepted way of life was at least as painful as the birth of the new United States. Szatmary chronicles how international influences forced a change in how merchants, farmers and artisans interacted, and how the initial changes brought friction. The rebellion resulting from this friction in turn revealed how ineffective the Articles of Confederation were in dealing with a crisis that could destroy the country. Szatmary links the state's governments weakness to the Constitution by using newspaper and editorial accounts of the day to provide a well-rounded view of an overlooked milestone.

Shays's Rebellion

Shays's Rebellion
Author: Sean Condon
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2015-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421417421

A masterful telling of a complicated story, Shays's Rebellion is aimed at scholars and students of American history.

Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion

Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion
Author: Daniel Bullen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781594163654

On January 25, 1787, in Springfield, Massachusetts, militia Major General William Shepard ordered his cannon to fire grapeshot at a peaceful demonstration of 1,200 farmers approaching the federal arsenal. The shots killed four and wounded twenty, marking the climax of five months of civil disobedience in Massachusetts, where farmers challenged the state's authority to seize their farms for flagrantly unjust taxes. Government leaders and influential merchants painted these protests as a violent attempt to overthrow the state, in hopes of garnering support for strengthening the federal government in a Constitutional Convention. As a result, the protests have been hidden for more than two hundred years under the misleading title, "Shays's Rebellion, the armed uprising that led to the Constitution." But this widely accepted narrative is just a legend: the "rebellion" was almost entirely nonviolent, and retired Revolutionary War hero Daniel Shays was only one of many leaders. Daniel Shays's Honorable Rebellion: An American Story by Daniel Bullen tells the history of the crisis from the protesters' perspective. Through five months of nonviolent protests, the farmers kept courts throughout Massachusetts from hearing foreclosures, facing down threats from the government, which escalated to the point that Governor James Bowdoin ultimately sent an army to arrest them. Even so, the people won reforms in an electoral landslide. Thomas Jefferson called these protests an honorable rebellion, and hoped that Americans would never let twenty years pass without such a campaign, to rein in powerful interests. This riveting and meticulously researched narrative shows that Shays and his fellow protesters were hardly a dangerous rabble, but rather a proud people who banded together peaceably, risking their lives for justice in a quintessentially American story.

Shays' Rebellion

Shays' Rebellion
Author: Michael Burgan
Publisher: Capstone
Total Pages: 26
Release: 2008-09
Genre: Shays' Rebellion, 1786-1787
ISBN: 0756538505

Explores the circumstances in Massachusetts that led farmers to rebel against local and state governments soon after the Revolutionary War.

In Debt to Shays

In Debt to Shays
Author: Robert A. Gross
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813913544

In Debt to Shays takes a fresh perspective on the rebellion by challenging existing understandings of late eighteenth-century America and restoring the rebellion to its historical context

The Whiskey Rebellion

The Whiskey Rebellion
Author: Thomas P. Slaughter
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195051919

This book assesses the rebellion in relation to interregional tensions, international diplomacy, frontier expansion, republican ideology and the social and political conflict of the l780s -1790s.